I did not say something comes from nothing, I just said that some theories that explain how the universe works don't need a god at all. Some scientists are already working at ways to probe the irrelevance of a god (Stephen Hawkings) in the Universe as we know it.
At the smallest amount of time before the big-bang lets concede that a god decided to create the Universe (what reasons an all powerfull, perfect being all of the sudden needed to create a Universe is something I let to the reader as homework)
After that moment we don't need of any god to explain a good deal of many things, the more we learn about nature, the less we seem to need a god to explain anything. The more we study and scrutinize, the more a god seems like a pretty dumb assumption. We know that if you let a pen drop on Earth, it will drop, and no god will ever stop that. That is the whole point: natural processes are mindless, and many are predictable and measurable: no god needed.
That scares fundementalist religious people. They could be out of work if the trend continues because it is becoming more and more evident to more and more people that there is no god out there playing with us as little chess pieces gorging itself in our shortcommings. This is daunting: is then there no purpose to our existence? Perhaps no, and I say, so what? Can't you remember before you were alive? Well you will feel the same when the time comes. It did not hurt.
I am sure many philosophers and scientists have already written something like this in a better and coherent manner, I am no so stupid to claim the idea has no ocurred first to any other midly intelligent person.
Think about it: skills such as web design and system administration (the two big "janitorial" IT jobs) are very commonplace.
SysAdmin "janitorial". Yes, perhaps because we have to deal with all the crap that other IT people leave behind.
There are SysAdmins and then there are SysAdmins: the ones that create directories, user accounts, and so on are perhaps "janitorial". The ones that do enterprise wide planning, load measurements and infrastructure mainetenace and design are on other league.
If system administration was an elite skill, then companies would have a hard time hiring system administrators
In all the previous jobs as SysAdmin I have taken, the position has remained unfilled from anything between 3 and 6 months before I agrred to join (no.com bullshit jobs mind you, in areas completely unrelated to the.com madness).
Your perception of what a SysAdmin is seems to be uninformed.
Me: I mean is this the place where stupid, anticompetitive technologies like DVD are debunked in a daily basis and where the geekactivists assemble to suggest how to combat them with all their might?
/.er: N4h! It i5 411 p0stur1ng. H4v3 U g0t 50m3 pr0n in DVD btw?
One of the few Guatemalan democraticaly elected presidents was ousted by a military coup sponsored by the CIA, if I remember correctly a banana producer company did not like that the President was doing such pesky things as to trying to benefit the working conditions of Guatemalan workers of the company.
As an aside many Guatemalan people had to take asylum in Mexico and the US as a result of the messy 30 years of civil war that followed.
About Iran I dont know, I think the fundamentalists hate everybody, even themselves.
God created everything in 7 days. The big bang and evolution are probably some of the tools he used to accomplish that task. Between those two statements, there is no conflict.
The problem is that both evolution and big bang can exist quite happily without a god. Both of them are pretty good theories of how the universe works that don't require of a superior being to try to explain how things happen.
That is why religious extremists can't stomach these and other similar theories, in spite of the evidence screaming in their faces.
When animals hunt other animals, it's survival of the fittest, but when humans do it, it's mass extinction?
I find it funny when I hear about environmentalists who are vegetarian because they believe that animals should be held up to the same level as humans.
"The day a human goes to jail for killing an animal, that day we will become civilized" Leonardo Da Vinci, I think.
In case you don't feel rosy about animal rights, go and visit an intensive farming facility, and I dare you to eat meat of one of the animals slaughtered there.
Has it ever occurred to these people that animals (Surprise Surprise!) eat other animals? The only difference between what we do and what a wild cougar does is that we _debate_ whether we should do what we are doing. The most ironic part is that by debating, we prove our distinction, nay... superiority over the animal kingdom.
Have it ever occured to you that only people, surprise, surprise, kills animals in an unecessary manner, and the richer you are, the more you need to kill? (not that you would do it your self, mind you, but all those BicMacs were a cow before).
HUmans are the only animal that kills other animals when all the basic satisfactors the slaughtered beasts provide have been fully covered.
Don't believe me? A few example tokens:
-Do overweight people need to eat that much meat?
-DOes somebody that has already a leather jacket (that could be replaced by something else) need another leather jacket?
-Do people need to eat shark fin soup? (throwing away all the shark, after cutting away the fin, in the process).
-Do animals kill other animals as a sport or entertainment?
And so on and so forth. Carnivore animals in the other hand kill only what they need.
As you can see, the differences betweeen cougars and humans are pretty appreciable and go far beyond our ability to debate things, which is something also important.
We can value life, because we have culture and a brain, anybody with some degree of education understands that the uniqueness of every animal species is a rarity that ought to be disturbed as little as possible.
Yes, I know we shouldn't extinguish an entire species, but I can't wait to hear environmentalists use this news to try to prove the destructive nature of man.
Oh yes, I know, we are not destructive at all. All those rain forrests, jungles and more are tales that older people use to tell us to make us sleep.
There was never a rain forrest many times bigger than the current Amazonas in BRazil, and all those houses in Western Europe, where there is almost no wildlife left, were all the time there, God put them there the day he created the world.
To try to blame modern man for the actions of its ancestors is absurd.
And who is trying to do that? To say that our ancestors were very destructive of their surrounding environment will just show that there is trait in human behavior to use beyond our needs. But us being humans should learn from that.
This is almost as stupid a notion as Americans today being in any way responsible for their great, great grandparents owning slaves.
I don't see what one thing have to do with the other.
In such an small planet, in which distances are shortening, more people are working in a different country to their own, global commerce is a reality, and so on and so forth, what makes more sense: a global authority that coordinates the efforts of all the people in the planet or 200 national goverments that make a mess out of things that ought to be simple?
PS: I don't read "the other site". A friend told me about it, honest.
PS to PS: I hope the people of the other site reading this site realize how childish they look when they refer to this site as that other site. As far as we are concerned you can go back to that site and leave this site in peace.
I used to read Time magazine and Newsweek, but I got tired of the article that reads: "now I am visitng town and one can feel that progress is going on: Coke adds are everywhere, everybody listens to the latest hit of Maddona, and the latest Mcdondls join has just opened." Or the counterpart: "we are analyzing now the issues surrounding , we can see that all is in a stay of decay, the fashion shops we are so used to in the western world are nowhere to be seen and a surely pirated version of MS WIndows in used in every shop".
If "serious" reporters get confussed this bad, no wonder that a poor/.er can utter such nonsense here.
Mcdonalds as a mean to measure peace and stability. Gimme a blody break.
Most ball-sports are based on war. eg. baseball is based on sieging a castle, football is 2 armies trying to "take" the others castle (=score a goal).
Well, I still have to see the bodies of dead players. Although you could make a point about an alegory of war represented in sport games, by no means is an explicit association. In a video game the association is direct and explicit, too diferent in my opinion.
What about martial arts? They're definately violence based. but there is ONE big difference: the difference between violence and played violence.
You ignore the most important thing that makes martial arts acceptable for children : a context, even an educational context. Most reputable Martial Arts teachers will go to extreme pains to make you understand the discipline of the sport, and how you can hurt somebody with your skills. You know all the time you can hurt people and use of the art in an offensive rather than defensive fashion is dicouraged.
A game in the other hand happens out of context, you kill but nobody suffers, it reinforces a way of acting that can contribute to imbalance troubled minds.
Kids know the difference between playing and real.
Who is saying the contrary? What I say is that violent, descontextualized games promote an attitude towards finding violence fun. We adults know that descontextualized violence can be fun, either in a game, a film or a book, but most normal people understand that violence is not desirable.
Children, which in many ocassions are still finding a set of values, or that have none, can make more easily the wrong association and as we have seen, eventualy take that association to the real life. Not because they were playing games, but because many things around them (games included) coudl not convince them of the negative value of violence for violence sake in real life.
If violent games are outlawed there are a lot of things that shoulkd be outlawed:
-under 18, you cannot play a part in any play that contains violence/murder/whatever. (sorry kid, you can't be McBeth..)
-ballgames (most, not all. However I highly doubt kids will go: Yeah! Bowls! what a cool sport... ).
A play happens in a very specific context: a drama class, with peers from which you can receive input and a teacher that guides you and an audience that provides feedback. Unlike a game that usualy happens completely isolated and out of any context.
Ballgames have a disciplinary frame that makes very clear that violence will be punished (or at least is meant to be punished). A violent game is the exact opposite: violence will be rewarded and there are no rules. From a formative point of view I think there is no doubt what is more positive.
Different products for different needs.
on
Palm In Trouble?
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· Score: 2
I just don't understand what the holly war is all about, for me each device solves different needs.
A Palm based device is used to organize information quickly and eficently. Web pages, MP3 files or recorded voice are cumbersome to manage (otherwise we would not have things like the programs that do so), also Web browsing, MP3 playing and voice recording are very taxing activities for the battery. THen a device that needs to handle bunches of information (appointments, phone numbers, small notes) does not need to be bloathed for these tasks.
Yes, the battery. I can go for a month to the middle of the Namib dessert with two pairs of AAA batteris and will have no problems. You are more independent. With a WinCE (or whatever they are called today) I am virtualy glued to a power outlet.
The Windows based devices are aiming to do all what a normal Laptop computer can do, and since they are not that smaller than some Sony Laptops or even old Toshiba librettos, why should somebody buy a toy if one can have the real thing? They are trapped in a limbo between Laptops and Palms, and the force of gravity of both should reap this idea appart. I even have an Acer Laptop that is just sligthly bigger and bulkier than a A4 notebook. It plays MP3, can browse the Web and I can choose my Word processor and Spreadsheet (Lotus SmartSuite97, came free in a magazine's cover CD), my browser (Mozilla) and all this for lest than double the price of the Windows toys. All comfortably sitting in my Lap while riding the train. A coupke of Sony's laptops are even smaller.
The market share of Palm devices explains it all. They found a niche and are filling it nicely, MS panicked, convinced {forced?) some companies to support its efforts and got it wrong.The economic problems have hit everybody in the IT industry, including MS and ilustreous companies like CISCO, Oracle and many others. Why Palm should be immune to this?
What speaks is market share, people voting with their hard earned money. Palm is far from over, once the economic slowdown is over I'll upgrade my Palm III to something else (it is too scrached after 3 years of heavy use) as I am sure plenty of people will do as well. 3 years hardware upgrade cycle. That sounds about right to me.
Sorry people, but violence is not fun, and one precondition to understand this fact is to be adult (I know, there are 40 year old people out there that one can't consider adult, but a line has to be drawn somewhere).
I hear comming the crowd screaming "the Illiad, Shakespeare, read them, violence has always been with us", to what I say, no fscking way. Many of shoot-them-all games trivialize raw violence. Of course they don't make anybody a murderer, but what this enterteinment do is to associate violence and fun, which in my opinion can be only properly understood in all its implications by an adult, not a child.
If the COlumbine stuff showed something (yes, I know, here we go again) is that those youngsters found violence trivial. Games didn't make them what they were, but certainly violent games helped to reinforce their perception of a world in which violence is fun. For all the accounts we have of this an other massacres, the respective individuals were enjoying every moment of it. Tell me how it can be denied that a violent game does not reinforce this kind of perception.
Young people are denied many freedoms because they are not prepared to use that freedom in a responsible way. To put out of their reach entertainment that nobody can deny has such conflicting values is just common sense in my opinion.
If you like being a SysAdmin (you get to do many different things, unlike a programmer or a DBA) maybe you should consider changing industry.
Banks and the like: want you slaved to your pager but they pay good money for it. Stay away.
ISP: wnat you slaved to your pager and pay nothing. No comment.
Oil Industry, specialy services companies: they don't always require such hectic pace of activity, it is not unusual that they are strictly 9 to 5 and one rarely needs to carry a pager. There are some peaks of activity but most of the time tasks are mundane and you have time to either play Quake or read/. without feeling guilty.
Integrators: very hectic during projects, otherwise just phone support but it depends on clients and contracts.
Universities: you will be close to starvation, but will get some degree of sanity and if you choose correctly will have a lot of fun. If you can afford it why not to take a break working for one until you find the strength to start all over again?
The recent protests at a few multinational summits are a pleasant change of pace, but are the exception
And they achieved what?
It beats me, but, what they were protesting about?
think your answer, you'll be surprised.
The article makes mention that the public just aren't interested. That's untrue. There is a sizable minority of people who do care--even if it's only 1% of the public who cares at all, that's still 3 million Americans. That's a lot of people.
You kill your own argument: if 99% don't care. then people don't care. Democracies are based on the rule of the majority (under certain bounds that protects minorities). 1% of somehow interested peopl is not seizable, because the law has to please (or fool) the mejority, not the 1% that cares.
I agree with you about the awarness part./. editors are obviously in the know of when these things happen. Please guys: let people know in advance of this kind of stuff.
But, in about 3 years, Microsoft will stop supporting W2k. Any bug or hole that is found thereafter won't be patched. Thus, by then, you'll have two choices: live with a vulnerable OS, or switch to another OS, a newer version of windows most likely.
And here is MS mistake in my opinion: what thwy should be selling is services, not software: to keep supporting that old Win3.1 at a price. Patches for free? You must be joking!
The clients, not MS, should dictate what is obsolete and what is not, and MS, given that they designed the bloatware, could keep the revenue flowing in their bank by providing services associated to the software they sell.
What do you mean it won't work? This is just a formal proposal to do what they allready do. Every few years release a new version of Windows or Office, and encourage everyone to upgrade.
Last time I checked, to encourage was not sinonymous with to force.
As long as I want to run WordPerfect 1.0 on top of MSDOS 3.0 nobody, even MS and Corel, can come and order me to upgrade.
That is the difference with this derided idea (if it is treu or not it is unimportant, the idea is just stupid).
I really wish MS would do one of these dumb things (subscription, timed obsolescnece) they are saying they will do. That would force people to think their alternatives about the software they use.
I work in a bigcorp with commercial ties with MS beyond the software we use, and guess what, we use Office97 and have no plans AFAIK to upgrade. I would like to see MS trying to force our arm with one of their new ideas to increase their revenue without offering any tangible benefits to us.
I configured Samba in solaris 2.6 for a network with 200+ PC clients six months ago and I only need to do any support approx. once every 2 weeks for 5 minutes (usualy is a password realted problem, not even a Samba problem by itself).
Slashdot Mirror
I did not say something comes from nothing, I just said that some theories that explain how the universe works don't need a god at all. Some scientists are already working at ways to probe the irrelevance of a god (Stephen Hawkings) in the Universe as we know it.
At the smallest amount of time before the big-bang lets concede that a god decided to create the Universe (what reasons an all powerfull, perfect being all of the sudden needed to create a Universe is something I let to the reader as homework)
After that moment we don't need of any god to explain a good deal of many things, the more we learn about nature, the less we seem to need a god to explain anything. The more we study and scrutinize, the more a god seems like a pretty dumb assumption. We know that if you let a pen drop on Earth, it will drop, and no god will ever stop that. That is the whole point: natural processes are mindless, and many are predictable and measurable: no god needed.
That scares fundementalist religious people. They could be out of work if the trend continues because it is becoming more and more evident to more and more people that there is no god out there playing with us as little chess pieces gorging itself in our shortcommings. This is daunting: is then there no purpose to our existence? Perhaps no, and I say, so what? Can't you remember before you were alive? Well you will feel the same when the time comes. It did not hurt.
I am sure many philosophers and scientists have already written something like this in a better and coherent manner, I am no so stupid to claim the idea has no ocurred first to any other midly intelligent person.
Think about it: skills such as web design and system administration (the two big "janitorial" IT jobs) are very commonplace.
.com bullshit jobs mind you, in areas completely unrelated to the .com madness).
SysAdmin "janitorial". Yes, perhaps because we have to deal with all the crap that other IT people leave behind.
There are SysAdmins and then there are SysAdmins: the ones that create directories, user accounts, and so on are perhaps "janitorial". The ones that do enterprise wide planning, load measurements and infrastructure mainetenace and design are on other league.
If system administration was an elite skill, then companies would have a hard time hiring system administrators
In all the previous jobs as SysAdmin I have taken, the position has remained unfilled from anything between 3 and 6 months before I agrred to join (no
Your perception of what a SysAdmin is seems to be uninformed.
Knock, knock, knock.
/. ?
:-(
Me: Sorry, is this
/.er: y35, why?
Me: I mean is this the place where stupid, anticompetitive technologies like DVD are debunked in a daily basis and where the geekactivists assemble to suggest how to combat them with all their might?
/.er: N4h! It i5 411 p0stur1ng. H4v3 U g0t 50m3 pr0n in DVD btw?
Me: ?
One of the few Guatemalan democraticaly elected presidents was ousted by a military coup sponsored by the CIA, if I remember correctly a banana producer company did not like that the President was doing such pesky things as to trying to benefit the working conditions of Guatemalan workers of the company.
As an aside many Guatemalan people had to take asylum in Mexico and the US as a result of the messy 30 years of civil war that followed.
About Iran I dont know, I think the fundamentalists hate everybody, even themselves.
In the contrary, it shows pretty clearly where priorities are.
God created everything in 7 days. The big bang and evolution are probably some of the tools he used to accomplish that task. Between those two statements, there is no conflict.
The problem is that both evolution and big bang can exist quite happily without a god. Both of them are pretty good theories of how the universe works that don't require of a superior being to try to explain how things happen.
That is why religious extremists can't stomach these and other similar theories, in spite of the evidence screaming in their faces.
When animals hunt other animals, it's survival of the fittest, but when humans do it, it's mass extinction?
I find it funny when I hear about environmentalists who are vegetarian because they believe that animals should be held up to the same level as humans.
"The day a human goes to jail for killing an animal, that day we will become civilized" Leonardo Da Vinci, I think.
In case you don't feel rosy about animal rights, go and visit an intensive farming facility, and I dare you to eat meat of one of the animals slaughtered there.
Has it ever occurred to these people that animals (Surprise Surprise!) eat other animals? The only difference between what we do and what a wild cougar does is that we _debate_ whether we should do what we are doing. The most ironic part is that by debating, we prove our distinction, nay... superiority over the animal kingdom.
Have it ever occured to you that only people, surprise, surprise, kills animals in an unecessary manner, and the richer you are, the more you need to kill? (not that you would do it your self, mind you, but all those BicMacs were a cow before).
HUmans are the only animal that kills other animals when all the basic satisfactors the slaughtered beasts provide have been fully covered.
Don't believe me? A few example tokens:
-Do overweight people need to eat that much meat?
-DOes somebody that has already a leather jacket (that could be replaced by something else) need another leather jacket?
-Do people need to eat shark fin soup? (throwing away all the shark, after cutting away the fin, in the process).
-Do animals kill other animals as a sport or entertainment?
And so on and so forth. Carnivore animals in the other hand kill only what they need.
As you can see, the differences betweeen cougars and humans are pretty appreciable and go far beyond our ability to debate things, which is something also important.
We can value life, because we have culture and a brain, anybody with some degree of education understands that the uniqueness of every animal species is a rarity that ought to be disturbed as little as possible.
Yes, I know we shouldn't extinguish an entire species, but I can't wait to hear environmentalists use this news to try to prove the destructive nature of man.
Oh yes, I know, we are not destructive at all. All those rain forrests, jungles and more are tales that older people use to tell us to make us sleep.
There was never a rain forrest many times bigger than the current Amazonas in BRazil, and all those houses in Western Europe, where there is almost no wildlife left, were all the time there, God put them there the day he created the world.
To try to blame modern man for the actions of its ancestors is absurd.
And who is trying to do that? To say that our ancestors were very destructive of their surrounding environment will just show that there is trait in human behavior to use beyond our needs. But us being humans should learn from that.
This is almost as stupid a notion as Americans today being in any way responsible for their great, great grandparents owning slaves.
I don't see what one thing have to do with the other.
Actually...
Actually you started allucinating at this point.
... was turned off. Or your antagonist probes that conservative religious people are amazingly funny to read.
And how do you think the "feature" is going to be avoided in websites that don't like it?
Webadmin time is not free you know, this just adds unnecesaryand unrequested burden to the side of the webadmins.
It exactly describes the spam model: the websites pay (in time and resources) for a decision taken somewhere else that they do need to be spammed.
In such an small planet, in which distances are shortening, more people are working in a different country to their own, global commerce is a reality, and so on and so forth, what makes more sense: a global authority that coordinates the efforts of all the people in the planet or 200 national goverments that make a mess out of things that ought to be simple?
I can go now and using the same configuration, buy tickets for a trip around the world, a new computer, or whatever.
I can't access the UK goverment's "portal".
Draw your own conclussions.
... you read this in that other site.
Traitor.
PS: I don't read "the other site". A friend told me about it, honest.
PS to PS: I hope the people of the other site reading this site realize how childish they look when they refer to this site as that other site. As far as we are concerned you can go back to that site and leave this site in peace.
Now smile please.
Don't trash grafitti if you can't use it.
The 30 minutes train ride to work and back has become a productive time when I can prepare several emails, even if I have to stand all the trip.
I could never do that with any keyboard.
And who told you that? A Macdonalds recruiter?
/.er can utter such nonsense here.
I used to read Time magazine and Newsweek, but I got tired of the article that reads: "now I am visitng town and one can feel that progress is going on: Coke adds are everywhere, everybody listens to the latest hit of Maddona, and the latest Mcdondls join has just opened." Or the counterpart: "we are analyzing now the issues surrounding , we can see that all is in a stay of decay, the fashion shops we are so used to in the western world are nowhere to be seen and a surely pirated version of MS WIndows in used in every shop".
If "serious" reporters get confussed this bad, no wonder that a poor
Mcdonalds as a mean to measure peace and stability. Gimme a blody break.
Nonsense.
I have Javascript enabled, running Solaris and it does not work.
They simply decided that UNIX users are not worth the bother.
And of a pile of useless ZIP disks. All of them COD.
I lost more than 1G of data (10 disks died a slow, Click,click,click!, painful, Click,click,click!, death).
I will never ever buy, promote, use , receive as a gift, donate, use as a paperweight any products from this company.
Click,click,click!
Most ball-sports are based on war. eg. baseball is based on sieging a castle, football is 2 armies trying to "take" the others castle (=score a goal).
Well, I still have to see the bodies of dead players. Although you could make a point about an alegory of war represented in sport games, by no means is an explicit association. In a video game the association is direct and explicit, too diferent in my opinion.
What about martial arts? They're definately violence based. but there is ONE big difference: the difference between violence and played violence.
You ignore the most important thing that makes martial arts acceptable for children : a context, even an educational context. Most reputable Martial Arts teachers will go to extreme pains to make you understand the discipline of the sport, and how you can hurt somebody with your skills. You know all the time you can hurt people and use of the art in an offensive rather than defensive fashion is dicouraged.
A game in the other hand happens out of context, you kill but nobody suffers, it reinforces a way of acting that can contribute to imbalance troubled minds.
Kids know the difference between playing and real.
Who is saying the contrary? What I say is that violent, descontextualized games promote an attitude towards finding violence fun. We adults know that descontextualized violence can be fun, either in a game, a film or a book, but most normal people understand that violence is not desirable.
Children, which in many ocassions are still finding a set of values, or that have none, can make more easily the wrong association and as we have seen, eventualy take that association to the real life. Not because they were playing games, but because many things around them (games included) coudl not convince them of the negative value of violence for violence sake in real life.
If violent games are outlawed there are a lot of things that shoulkd be outlawed:
-under 18, you cannot play a part in any play that contains violence/murder/whatever. (sorry kid, you can't be McBeth..)
-ballgames (most, not all. However I highly doubt kids will go: Yeah! Bowls! what a cool sport... ).
A play happens in a very specific context: a drama class, with peers from which you can receive input and a teacher that guides you and an audience that provides feedback. Unlike a game that usualy happens completely isolated and out of any context.
Ballgames have a disciplinary frame that makes very clear that violence will be punished (or at least is meant to be punished). A violent game is the exact opposite: violence will be rewarded and there are no rules. From a formative point of view I think there is no doubt what is more positive.
I just don't understand what the holly war is all about, for me each device solves different needs.
A Palm based device is used to organize information quickly and eficently. Web pages, MP3 files or recorded voice are cumbersome to manage (otherwise we would not have things like the programs that do so), also Web browsing, MP3 playing and voice recording are very taxing activities for the battery. THen a device that needs to handle bunches of information (appointments, phone numbers, small notes) does not need to be bloathed for these tasks.
Yes, the battery. I can go for a month to the middle of the Namib dessert with two pairs of AAA batteris and will have no problems. You are more independent. With a WinCE (or whatever they are called today) I am virtualy glued to a power outlet.
The Windows based devices are aiming to do all what a normal Laptop computer can do, and since they are not that smaller than some Sony Laptops or even old Toshiba librettos, why should somebody buy a toy if one can have the real thing? They are trapped in a limbo between Laptops and Palms, and the force of gravity of both should reap this idea appart. I even have an Acer Laptop that is just sligthly bigger and bulkier than a A4 notebook. It plays MP3, can browse the Web and I can choose my Word processor and Spreadsheet (Lotus SmartSuite97, came free in a magazine's cover CD), my browser (Mozilla) and all this for lest than double the price of the Windows toys. All comfortably sitting in my Lap while riding the train. A coupke of Sony's laptops are even smaller.
The market share of Palm devices explains it all. They found a niche and are filling it nicely, MS panicked, convinced {forced?) some companies to support its efforts and got it wrong.The economic problems have hit everybody in the IT industry, including MS and ilustreous companies like CISCO, Oracle and many others. Why Palm should be immune to this?
What speaks is market share, people voting with their hard earned money. Palm is far from over, once the economic slowdown is over I'll upgrade my Palm III to something else (it is too scrached after 3 years of heavy use) as I am sure plenty of people will do as well. 3 years hardware upgrade cycle. That sounds about right to me.
Sorry people, but violence is not fun, and one precondition to understand this fact is to be adult (I know, there are 40 year old people out there that one can't consider adult, but a line has to be drawn somewhere).
I hear comming the crowd screaming "the Illiad, Shakespeare, read them, violence has always been with us", to what I say, no fscking way. Many of shoot-them-all games trivialize raw violence. Of course they don't make anybody a murderer, but what this enterteinment do is to associate violence and fun, which in my opinion can be only properly understood in all its implications by an adult, not a child.
If the COlumbine stuff showed something (yes, I know, here we go again) is that those youngsters found violence trivial. Games didn't make them what they were, but certainly violent games helped to reinforce their perception of a world in which violence is fun. For all the accounts we have of this an other massacres, the respective individuals were enjoying every moment of it. Tell me how it can be denied that a violent game does not reinforce this kind of perception.
Young people are denied many freedoms because they are not prepared to use that freedom in a responsible way. To put out of their reach entertainment that nobody can deny has such conflicting values is just common sense in my opinion.
If you like being a SysAdmin (you get to do many different things, unlike a programmer or a DBA) maybe you should consider changing industry.
/. without feeling guilty.
Banks and the like: want you slaved to your pager but they pay good money for it. Stay away.
ISP: wnat you slaved to your pager and pay nothing. No comment.
Oil Industry, specialy services companies: they don't always require such hectic pace of activity, it is not unusual that they are strictly 9 to 5 and one rarely needs to carry a pager. There are some peaks of activity but most of the time tasks are mundane and you have time to either play Quake or read
Integrators: very hectic during projects, otherwise just phone support but it depends on clients and contracts.
Universities: you will be close to starvation, but will get some degree of sanity and if you choose correctly will have a lot of fun. If you can afford it why not to take a break working for one until you find the strength to start all over again?
The recent protests at a few multinational summits are a pleasant change of pace, but are the exception
/. editors are obviously in the know of when these things happen. Please guys: let people know in advance of this kind of stuff.
And they achieved what?
It beats me, but, what they were protesting about?
think your answer, you'll be surprised.
The article makes mention that the public just aren't interested. That's untrue. There is a sizable minority of people who do care--even if it's only 1% of the public who cares at all, that's still 3 million Americans. That's a lot of people.
You kill your own argument: if 99% don't care. then people don't care. Democracies are based on the rule of the majority (under certain bounds that protects minorities). 1% of somehow interested peopl is not seizable, because the law has to please (or fool) the mejority, not the 1% that cares.
I agree with you about the awarness part.
Damn! Which button do I click to run that!
But, in about 3 years, Microsoft will stop supporting W2k. Any bug or hole that is found thereafter won't be patched. Thus, by then, you'll have two choices: live with a vulnerable OS, or switch to another OS, a newer version of windows most likely.
And here is MS mistake in my opinion: what thwy should be selling is services, not software: to keep supporting that old Win3.1 at a price. Patches for free? You must be joking!
The clients, not MS, should dictate what is obsolete and what is not, and MS, given that they designed the bloatware, could keep the revenue flowing in their bank by providing services associated to the software they sell.
What do you mean it won't work? This is just a formal proposal to do what they allready do. Every few years release a new version of Windows or Office, and encourage everyone to upgrade.
Last time I checked, to encourage was not sinonymous with to force.
As long as I want to run WordPerfect 1.0 on top of MSDOS 3.0 nobody, even MS and Corel, can come and order me to upgrade.
That is the difference with this derided idea (if it is treu or not it is unimportant, the idea is just stupid).
I really wish MS would do one of these dumb things (subscription, timed obsolescnece) they are saying they will do. That would force people to think their alternatives about the software they use.
I work in a bigcorp with commercial ties with MS beyond the software we use, and guess what, we use Office97 and have no plans AFAIK to upgrade. I would like to see MS trying to force our arm with one of their new ideas to increase their revenue without offering any tangible benefits to us.
Interesting times...
That must have been long time ago.
I configured Samba in solaris 2.6 for a network with 200+ PC clients six months ago and I only need to do any support approx. once every 2 weeks for 5 minutes (usualy is a password realted problem, not even a Samba problem by itself).