I am example of that. Whenever I am left to do my work I get as much done as I possibly humanly can. Then they assign a new person from a low cost location (hello there chaps in Mumbai) and management believes that will increase productivity.
What happens in reality is that I have to spend most of the time explaining to people how to do things, thus I actually don't have time to do the stuff myself. We get less things done. And when the chaps in low cost locations get good enough to do things on their own, they leave for a company that actually pays them better (they may move where I live: welcome to the UK!).
My firm fails to see that by paying the correct salary to another person they would avoid the eternal retraining of new people, and there would eventually be an increase of productivity (because the new, properly remunerated hiree would not feel such an strong urge to change jobs).
You will never convince the peanut counters and some CEOs and Chief Software Architects that IT work is not like building walls or trinkets.
All the nice chaps at MS are not providing direction to the company in the ways we know (which include breaking the law btw).
Most people would have problems making business with somebody they know is dishonest, but in Slashdot there is always a MS apologist willing to overlook a company with a record littered with illegal, immoral and abusive business practices.
You should keep in mind that people relate to MS as a monolith, all those nice chaps in MS just follow orders from the top brass, which is intent in dominating the industry by underhanded means if necessary.
People on this site often argue that Joe User is too stupid to use Linux (the usual nonsense about using the command line, GUI that is not "user friendly" whatever the heck that means) but as soon as it comes to applications needed, this archetypical simpleton uses Photoshop for his graphics needs!?!
Who in the FOSS movement wants to attract investors?
You are setting up your own strawman, which look more like a dead horse, and are beating it up to dead.
Stop it buddy, give it a rest.
The FOSS ideals were not started in order to attract investors. That is your deluded view of the world, but ha s no basis in reality. Honestly, ask your shrink, not everything you think is true actually is.
Companies are moving to use open source for the obvious advantages it has (as a user you are freer to change providers or have input on how the software changes, if your provider goes bust you have a fighting chance to keep your software working, as a developer you get to stand in the shoulders of giants, and can use sophisticated tools for your work that would be otherwise too expensive for you to have), but they were lured by the positive points of the development model, not because geeks went begging to them for help.
If there is no Photoshop in Linux, well, shame, but alas, if you *really* need Photoshop (not as an intellectual masturbatory exercise, but in a professional capacity) then get yourself a Windows machine and be happy.
You see, you just sound stupid because use the term religion as a term of abuse.
Religious people know that Linux of FOSS is not a religion, proponents of FOSS get annoyed because it clearly uses terminology from a completely different are of expertise that tries to derogate both the word and the people associated to it (by implying the worst traits of religion as descriptive of this people).
The problem is that people like you can muster the fact that there are people who have reached a logical conclusion about how they want the world to be. That is called principles buddy, if you sell yours to the higher bidder that is your problem, other people don't and the least they deserve should be respect for that, specially since people in the FOSS movement are not forcing anybody to join.
You don't like Linux or FOSS?: who the fuck is pointing a gun to your head to install the latest distro or to release under the GPL any software you write?
Don't like it, don't use it, show some manners and accord the most basic courtesy to people that don't agree with you but that are principled and consistent.
.... to free software, we would have no alternatives to Windows (and OSX, which btw, is based in a lesser form of Free software).
The idiotic, deriding meme of Linux (or FOSS in general) as a "religious" movement is getting pretty tired.
Nobody calls Gates or Ballmer religious zealots for supporting with all their might, both intellectual and material, the development and commercialization of closed source software.
Linux is not as strong as many of us would like it to be, but it is substantially stronger than it was one, five or ten years ago. It did not depended on Wine or Crossover for that, there is no reason why the GIMP or some other application could not reach the refinement of Photoshop in the future (If I was Adobe I would release the source code or make a Linux version pronto).
As things are now the GIMP (and several other applications) covers the needs of many people, it is only the uber snobs with $1000+ SLR digital cameras that keep missing Photoshop in Linux. For the rest of us the existing applications to crop here and there a picture, change format, play a bit with brightness and some basic effects , are perfectly adequate.
You can say whatever you want about him, but he genuinely tried to improve the situation of the people in general.
He was constrained by the paranoid world view of the US, and as demonstrated by the case of Guatemala, and Chile, a democracy with a government of the wrong flavor simply had no chance to survive the attacks orchestrated by the US political elite.
Had Castro allowed normal democracy the US would have infiltrated parties, the media and if necessary, would have supported right wing guerrillas (like it was done in Nicaragua, even if Ronald Regan could not remember it). Under such environment only a tight political control will allow you to survive.
And the black people have only good things to say about the Cuban assistance received from Angola.
It is amazing that you don't know who they were fighting. If given a choice between apartheid and communism I would chose communism any day, specially if I wasn't "Aryan"...
The US has had the gall to arrest foreign entrepreneurs that are not doing business with the US but do with Cuba.
They also forbid any subsidiary or companies doing business with the US to do business with Cuba.
That is what the blockade means. Only by the most difficult legal contraptions a company can do safely business in Cuba without the idiocity of the US foreign policy immediately kicking in.
That is more than you can say about many poor USians...
Emphasis in Cuban medicine is prevention not cure.
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
·
· Score: 1
And although you are correct regarding the lack of medicine you can go and check the WHO website for general health statistics, many of which beat developed countries, including the US.
Things are far from perfect, but talking about lack of medicines is nitpicking since health services are much more than that.
There are plenty of Cubans that are committed to their Revolution and to the way things are, but of course that muddles the US view of world affairs which is black and white, with us or against us nonsense, that your current President so idiotically embraced publicly and wholeheartedly.
International contempt? No, really, I am sure there are more countries that have supported Cuba all these years than countries that haven't, you make it look like there is total unanimity about the condemnation of Cuba's regime, which could not be further from the truth.
1.- Bullshit. Honestly. Tell us which normal task requires access to the CLI. Package installation? No, there is a GUI. Patches? GUI. CD/DVD burning? GUI. File management? GUI. Programming? GUI. Basic system administration? GUI. User account management? GUI. So go on, fight your corner, because a corner is where people insisting on this point are.
2.- Which hardware is hard to install in Linux? Hardware crippled to work with Windows only? Well yeah, tell the Mac fanboys how that goes with their machines. So lets see: mice, keyboard and monitors are mostly plug and play (monitors weren't in the past), the immense majority of USB mass storage devices work, most digital cameras will be recognized as such, as will do most scanners. Modems? If they are real modems, yeah, no problem, if not you may still be able to use them. CD/DVD players and burners? Yeah, covered. Network cards? I can't remember last time one did not work out of the box.
The hard bits: graphic cards and WiFi cards. With time they will come. I have had projects in which the requirement was Linux using WiFi, we looked for a manufacturer explicitly supporting Linux and he got the contract. We will get there, but your original blanket statement is tired and outdated. Somebody migrating an existing machine to XP or (goodness protects him) Vista may find that half his hardware is no longer supported. This normally does not happen with Linux.
3.- No pro-audio applications? You are joking, so I'll let this one pass. There are several applications that can quite happily handle multichannel recording for example, but I am not expert in the field, but I know you are worng. For the casual user Audacity is more than enough for audio management. As for Games, you say "hard to come by IF they are ported to Linux", well, you are obviously missing some trends, I never saw companies porting all their games ro Apple machine neither. So exactly what is your point? There are plenty of very good Linux games out there. But certainly if you chose games running in WIndows and then point to Linux saying "look Linux sucks!" frankly you are being childish. There are certainly some holes in application availability, but this tends to be now in applications for seasoned users or specialist in niche markets. Linux rules in other fields like oil exploration, movie production and grid computing, but we are not going to say that Windows or OSX suck for that reason alone, would we?
4.- Elitism (me rolls eyes, thinks about Apple fanboys). Honestly, grow a thicker skin. There are plenty of people out there ready to help. If somebody tell you to RTFM is it too much to reply "yes, I did". Honestly, you gloss over the point that lots of newbies haven't read the most basic docs. I don't condone unpolitness, but I have never experienced it and am quite able to ignore the idiots. That is not a Linux problem, it is a social problem, and that is seen in pretty much any popular forum (look at slashdot for example).
Finally your credentials don't give more weight to your argument. I could display mine and they would crush yours, but that is not the point. Let the arguments speak for themselves. As for your wife tell her that my 70 year old mother has been using Ubuntu as her desktop for a couple of years now. OK, she is not working any longer and her needs are very basic, but she is open minded and willing to learn (and lets not forget that she saved a goo load o money in the bargain) , examples like that should put the rest all these inane blanket assertions about Linux not being ready for the desktop.
Linux is ready for many desktops, maybe not yours (for mine it was ready 10 years ago).
Whenever China goes for radical, wholesale change, a few million die, get displaced or fall in abject poverty.
Stop trade with China and the only thing that is going to happen is that people that thought they were going to be wealthier all of the sudden would be dirt poor again. The political and social turmoil would make look Tiananmen square like a paltry insignificance.
People advocating fast change in China simply do not know what they are talking about. Accelerate change and you will have enough people dissatisfied (1% of Chinese people is 12 million people) ready to wreck complete havoc with an stable Chinese state.
Chinese leaders understand this and have said as much, and of course, since it also serves many of their political and personal short term objectives they follow gradual change fully .
If you have said less than 30 years ago that market economy would be implemented in China, voluntarily, by the Chinese Communist party, you would have been thrown in a mental institution. Change is happening, but the inertias to be fought are of an scale that other countries can't imagine.
Sometimes I think the US should just leave the world alone. You can't figure out Iraq or Afghanistan but are trying to figure out China. Hmmm, good luck with that one if you get McCain..... (or anybody else for that matter).
Slashdot Mirror
I am example of that. Whenever I am left to do my work I get as much done as I possibly humanly can. Then they assign a new person from a low cost location (hello there chaps in Mumbai) and management believes that will increase productivity.
What happens in reality is that I have to spend most of the time explaining to people how to do things, thus I actually don't have time to do the stuff myself. We get less things done. And when the chaps in low cost locations get good enough to do things on their own, they leave for a company that actually pays them better (they may move where I live: welcome to the UK!).
My firm fails to see that by paying the correct salary to another person they would avoid the eternal retraining of new people, and there would eventually be an increase of productivity (because the new, properly remunerated hiree would not feel such an strong urge to change jobs).
You will never convince the peanut counters and some CEOs and Chief Software Architects that IT work is not like building walls or trinkets.
The enormous majority of other companies don't.
So your point is completely useless frankly.
.... are taken by Ballmer and Gates.
All the nice chaps at MS are not providing direction to the company in the ways we know (which include breaking the law btw).
Most people would have problems making business with somebody they know is dishonest, but in Slashdot there is always a MS apologist willing to overlook a company with a record littered with illegal, immoral and abusive business practices.
You should keep in mind that people relate to MS as a monolith, all those nice chaps in MS just follow orders from the top brass, which is intent in dominating the industry by underhanded means if necessary.
Honestly, who *needs it* even in Windows?
People on this site often argue that Joe User is too stupid to use Linux (the usual nonsense about using the command line, GUI that is not "user friendly" whatever the heck that means) but as soon as it comes to applications needed, this archetypical simpleton uses Photoshop for his graphics needs!?!
Linux detractors simply can't have it both ways.
Paint, notepad and workpad are not part of the OS.
...).
Under no sane definition.
Take it from an expert (I know, I know, I should not use authority to push an argument, but really
Are there any Computing Engineers left in Slashdot?
Who in the FOSS movement wants to attract investors?
You are setting up your own strawman, which look more like a dead horse, and are beating it up to dead.
Stop it buddy, give it a rest.
The FOSS ideals were not started in order to attract investors. That is your deluded view of the world, but ha s no basis in reality. Honestly, ask your shrink, not everything you think is true actually is.
Companies are moving to use open source for the obvious advantages it has (as a user you are freer to change providers or have input on how the software changes, if your provider goes bust you have a fighting chance to keep your software working, as a developer you get to stand in the shoulders of giants, and can use sophisticated tools for your work that would be otherwise too expensive for you to have), but they were lured by the positive points of the development model, not because geeks went begging to them for help.
If there is no Photoshop in Linux, well, shame, but alas, if you *really* need Photoshop (not as an intellectual masturbatory exercise, but in a professional capacity) then get yourself a Windows machine and be happy.
You see, you just sound stupid because use the term religion as a term of abuse.
Religious people know that Linux of FOSS is not a religion, proponents of FOSS get annoyed because it clearly uses terminology from a completely different are of expertise that tries to derogate both the word and the people associated to it (by implying the worst traits of religion as descriptive of this people).
The problem is that people like you can muster the fact that there are people who have reached a logical conclusion about how they want the world to be. That is called principles buddy, if you sell yours to the higher bidder that is your problem, other people don't and the least they deserve should be respect for that, specially since people in the FOSS movement are not forcing anybody to join.
You don't like Linux or FOSS?: who the fuck is pointing a gun to your head to install the latest distro or to release under the GPL any software you write?
Don't like it, don't use it, show some manners and accord the most basic courtesy to people that don't agree with you but that are principled and consistent.
.... to free software, we would have no alternatives to Windows (and OSX, which btw, is based in a lesser form of Free software).
The idiotic, deriding meme of Linux (or FOSS in general) as a "religious" movement is getting pretty tired.
Nobody calls Gates or Ballmer religious zealots for supporting with all their might, both intellectual and material, the development and commercialization of closed source software.
Linux is not as strong as many of us would like it to be, but it is substantially stronger than it was one, five or ten years ago. It did not depended on Wine or Crossover for that, there is no reason why the GIMP or some other application could not reach the refinement of Photoshop in the future (If I was Adobe I would release the source code or make a Linux version pronto).
As things are now the GIMP (and several other applications) covers the needs of many people, it is only the uber snobs with $1000+ SLR digital cameras that keep missing Photoshop in Linux. For the rest of us the existing applications to crop here and there a picture, change format, play a bit with brightness and some basic effects , are perfectly adequate.
In Catholic countries often Protestants are referred to as sects.
.... know that Cuban progress is real.
The Cuban approach is prevention, not cure, something many countries, the US included, could learn from.
Don't be disingenuous.
The US embargo castigated Cuba in a way that no other communist country was.
We can't possibly know how much blame to appropriate to the US embargo or to economic mismanagement by the Cuban government.
You can say whatever you want about him, but he genuinely tried to improve the situation of the people in general.
He was constrained by the paranoid world view of the US, and as demonstrated by the case of Guatemala, and Chile, a democracy with a government of the wrong flavor simply had no chance to survive the attacks orchestrated by the US political elite.
Had Castro allowed normal democracy the US would have infiltrated parties, the media and if necessary, would have supported right wing guerrillas (like it was done in Nicaragua, even if Ronald Regan could not remember it). Under such environment only a tight political control will allow you to survive.
And the black people have only good things to say about the Cuban assistance received from Angola.
It is amazing that you don't know who they were fighting. If given a choice between apartheid and communism I would chose communism any day, specially if I wasn't "Aryan"...
The US has had the gall to arrest foreign entrepreneurs that are not doing business with the US but do with Cuba.
They also forbid any subsidiary or companies doing business with the US to do business with Cuba.
That is what the blockade means. Only by the most difficult legal contraptions a company can do safely business in Cuba without the idiocity of the US foreign policy immediately kicking in.
Cubans are in good general health and can read.
That is more than you can say about many poor USians...
And although you are correct regarding the lack of medicine you can go and check the WHO website for general health statistics, many of which beat developed countries, including the US.
Things are far from perfect, but talking about lack of medicines is nitpicking since health services are much more than that.
.... believe the expatriates only.
There are plenty of Cubans that are committed to their Revolution and to the way things are, but of course that muddles the US view of world affairs which is black and white, with us or against us nonsense, that your current President so idiotically embraced publicly and wholeheartedly.
The US supported rightist guerrillas.
Why Cuba can't protect their airspace?
International contempt? No, really, I am sure there are more countries that have supported Cuba all these years than countries that haven't, you make it look like there is total unanimity about the condemnation of Cuba's regime, which could not be further from the truth.
The level of abstraction of many programming languages is now so far detached from the hardware that this ascertion is pure nonsense.
Some programmers may benefit from it, but for many others it would be an unnecessary hindrance.
Which takes us to the ultimate conclusion: the monopoly has not been quashed and the company holding it keeps abusing it.
10000 people , 10 bucks each, that is 100000 bucks. That would pay a damn good writer or composer a very good salary for a year.
This idiocy that nowadays only rich people could afford art is complete nonsense.
If that is the system that benefits society as whole (Mozart vs Arctic Monkeys? Give me Mozart any day).
Some artists may struggle, society as a whole would win with the dissemination of arts and knowledge.
http://www.turboprint.de/english.html
I would be shocked if your printer is not supported.
Point for point:
1.- Bullshit. Honestly. Tell us which normal task requires access to the CLI. Package installation? No, there is a GUI. Patches? GUI. CD/DVD burning? GUI. File management? GUI. Programming? GUI. Basic system administration? GUI. User account management? GUI. So go on, fight your corner, because a corner is where people insisting on this point are.
2.- Which hardware is hard to install in Linux? Hardware crippled to work with Windows only? Well yeah, tell the Mac fanboys how that goes with their machines. So lets see: mice, keyboard and monitors are mostly plug and play (monitors weren't in the past), the immense majority of USB mass storage devices work, most digital cameras will be recognized as such, as will do most scanners. Modems? If they are real modems, yeah, no problem, if not you may still be able to use them. CD/DVD players and burners? Yeah, covered. Network cards? I can't remember last time one did not work out of the box.
The hard bits: graphic cards and WiFi cards. With time they will come. I have had projects in which the requirement was Linux using WiFi, we looked for a manufacturer explicitly supporting Linux and he got the contract. We will get there, but your original blanket statement is tired and outdated. Somebody migrating an existing machine to XP or (goodness protects him) Vista may find that half his hardware is no longer supported. This normally does not happen with Linux.
3.- No pro-audio applications? You are joking, so I'll let this one pass. There are several applications that can quite happily handle multichannel recording for example, but I am not expert in the field, but I know you are worng. For the casual user Audacity is more than enough for audio management. As for Games, you say "hard to come by IF they are ported to Linux", well, you are obviously missing some trends, I never saw companies porting all their games ro Apple machine neither. So exactly what is your point? There are plenty of very good Linux games out there. But certainly if you chose games running in WIndows and then point to Linux saying "look Linux sucks!" frankly you are being childish. There are certainly some holes in application availability, but this tends to be now in applications for seasoned users or specialist in niche markets. Linux rules in other fields like oil exploration, movie production and grid computing, but we are not going to say that Windows or OSX suck for that reason alone, would we?
4.- Elitism (me rolls eyes, thinks about Apple fanboys). Honestly, grow a thicker skin. There are plenty of people out there ready to help. If somebody tell you to RTFM is it too much to reply "yes, I did". Honestly, you gloss over the point that lots of newbies haven't read the most basic docs. I don't condone unpolitness, but I have never experienced it and am quite able to ignore the idiots. That is not a Linux problem, it is a social problem, and that is seen in pretty much any popular forum (look at slashdot for example).
Finally your credentials don't give more weight to your argument. I could display mine and they would crush yours, but that is not the point. Let the arguments speak for themselves. As for your wife tell her that my 70 year old mother has been using Ubuntu as her desktop for a couple of years now. OK, she is not working any longer and her needs are very basic, but she is open minded and willing to learn (and lets not forget that she saved a goo load o money in the bargain) , examples like that should put the rest all these inane blanket assertions about Linux not being ready for the desktop.
Linux is ready for many desktops, maybe not yours (for mine it was ready 10 years ago).
Very fucking slowly. That is how.
Whenever China goes for radical, wholesale change, a few million die, get displaced or fall in abject poverty.
Stop trade with China and the only thing that is going to happen is that people that thought they were going to be wealthier all of the sudden would be dirt poor again. The political and social turmoil would make look Tiananmen square like a paltry insignificance.
People advocating fast change in China simply do not know what they are talking about. Accelerate change and you will have enough people dissatisfied (1% of Chinese people is 12 million people) ready to wreck complete havoc with an stable Chinese state.
Chinese leaders understand this and have said as much, and of course, since it also serves many of their political and personal short term objectives they follow gradual change fully .
If you have said less than 30 years ago that market economy would be implemented in China, voluntarily, by the Chinese Communist party, you would have been thrown in a mental institution. Change is happening, but the inertias to be fought are of an scale that other countries can't imagine.
Sometimes I think the US should just leave the world alone. You can't figure out Iraq or Afghanistan but are trying to figure out China. Hmmm, good luck with that one if you get McCain..... (or anybody else for that matter).