I guess all those finite element and fluid flow analysis packages out there just wrote themselves. You know about those, right? They're what drove the design of computers for a very long time. Computers weren't designed from the beginning to let you download music, videos, and basically supplant television as the glass teat in your life.
The issue/problem is trying to unseat Windows as the current/incumbent OS. Many efforts are made to give Linux distos a "Windows" feel simply because that is what people are used to. In order to educate people that the OS is NOT what the story is all about, you need to show them an interface that they are comfortable with and willing to work within. When all the applications that they want to run *just run*, then they might understand.
One of the biggest conceits within the Linux community is "Of course it't better, so just use it". Even if it's true, you need to help people along the path. Think of it as a language. If I could *prove* that, for example, Esperanto was a better and more efficient language for communication I would have a hard time making people switch if it was completely unlike anything they had ever seen before. There needs to be a strong tie to the language they already know to ease the pain of switching, or else it just isn't worth it.
I could ramble on about the problems, and where Linux apps really aren't as polished as Windows (Gaim vs Trillian for example) but I'm pretty drunk right now. Typing this much has been a pretty significant accomplishment.:)
10 is only easier if you count with your fingers. If you can break free of that, you can count in any base you want. Doing math in hexidecimal is tough due to lack of practice, but certainly not impossible.
1. Metric sounds like a nice idea, but really isn't in practice. With 12 inches in a foot you can divide it by 2, 3, and 4 without endlessly repeating decimals (and the need to make a 1/3 meter mark on the stick just in case). Base 10 lets you divide by 2 and 5, with not much call to divide things in fifths.
2. QWERTY was not designed to be inefficient, but it was designed so that typewriters didn't jam. Ultimately, not having to stop to free stuck keys made typists _more_ efficent.
Hopefully you're from somewhere other than the USA, otherwise there's some obvious commentary about the quality of our educational system.
Because it isn't "free". It may not cost any money, but you know there will be advertisements or other policies in place which stuff Microsoft in your face all the time. It would be entirely possible that the only way you could connect is with an MS application which brings you pop-up ads or just remind you how "great" Microsoft is. Or just a small slow-down in accessing Google vs MSN searches...
None of this would be completely bad if it wasn't a company which continually uses extensive campaigns of FUD and anti-competitive practices to keep innovation and competition out of the market. And I'm not saying that they don't innovate on their own, but often they squash the first movers until they can bring the same product to market with a more polished GUI.
Accepting free things from Microsoft implies that you support the way that they do business. I'd pay for Google WiFi before I took it from Microsoft.
delivers mail along that path ignoring MX records, etc.
UUCP uses "!" characters, which were called "bangs". To get a file using uucp you would have to specify every hop to get to the machine hosting it:
machine1!machine2!machine3!final_machine
UUCP was used (if I remember correctly) at a time where routers weren't common (if they existed at all) and most inter-network connectivity was via multi-homed machines.
Peak implies that after you reach that point the available supply begins to decrease.
Plateau implies that the level of production can be sustained for some time.
What demand does is unknown, but that might be the reason for chosing the terms they did. Plateau makes more sense to me since I never figured out how so many dinosaurs died in the same place to make for convenient drilling a couple of million years later. Did they all wash up on some shore after the meteor strike?
No, it shouldn't. The Qwerty-esque style still increases efficiency over the standard alphabetical layout, and is called such since the keys are arranged in a pattern that isn't too much of a departure for people used to qwerty keyboards.
Dvorak is interesting, and a good thing for some people who actually have to type in the english language as their primary use of their computer (transcriptionists or such). For coders and sysadmins, Dvorak breaks down because many of the things you are typing aren't words anyway (cd, ps -ef, pwd, chmod).
Finally, Qwerty wasn't designed to slow typists down as much as it was to clearance the angles that the strikers hit the page on manual typewriters. Slowing typists down was a side effect.
that Sony brought the concept to market as a successful product and didn't just run to the patent office with a vague idea of something that might be produced. Who cares that he had the idea first? I had the idea for e-books in 1997 when it became obvious that you could get a portable LCD screen with enough battery life to read a book. Nobody, including me, really cares any more.
Unless there is evidence that Sony stole this idea and did not develop it independently then Sony invented the actual product by offering it for actual sale. The German guy should be happy that some Sony exec didn't figure out that it would be cheaper to have him killed than pay the lawyers.
Actually, browsing the web is NOT necessary. The internet is an optional luxury that you choose to pay for. People who design content for it are under no obligation to meet your whims. ADA already works for the brick-and-mortar stores, and forcing websites to be ADA compliant is about as stupid as suing GM because their cars aren't operable my multiple amputees. Maybe libraries should be forced to hire people to read to illiterates.
If this really is important, the market will sort it out. Not in terms of Target or Walmart losing business, but by another independent person finding/creating a middleware solution that works well enough. Everybody bitches about the power of the large corporations and how hard it is to compete. Here is a business opportunity which may have some real potential if all those blind people really want to shop on-line.
In many instances, they simply took existing US inventions and improved them incrementally. Without the initial R&D costs they can afford to undercut the original US manufacturers (except for the auto industry, which was mostly killed by overall laziness and the greed of the UAW). After that they just had to rely on the rampant US consumerism to drive people to the cheapest product in the mareket. US consumers don't care who makes their stuff, as long as they can get more stuff than somebody else.
stay away from the straight razors. I inherited a few (1/2 dozen or so) when my great-uncle died. just to prove that I could, I used to shave with them (I was 25, about 10 years ago). The major problems were:
1. You need a mirror. Usually I shave in the shower and do it by feel. With a straight razor you often need both hands.
2. It's hard to do in the morning when you aren't coordinated. Especially the delicate spots (under your nose, just behind the jaw).
3. you have to be somewhat of a contortionist (or ambidexterous) to get to all the spots you need to reach.
Disposables are the way to go for the most part. I haven't tried the classic double-edged safety razors tho.
Passing and ethics course and acting in an ethical manner are completely unconnected. It might even be unethical to pass a course on ethics if you know in advance that you plan to act in an unethical manner in the future....
But the people who really need to learn business ethics are the stuffed shirts in the corner offices. They need to learn that they shouldn't turn around and blame IT that their laptop is broken when they installed AOL on it the night before their big presentation. Then it might leak out that during the fix it was discovered that there were a lot of contacts for mail order bride services.
Don't abuse your IT staff and your privacy issues vanish. We really don't care that much.
The biggest problem for me is that it's still a pretty unattractive interface. It's getting better, and I know a lot of people will shout about the skin-ability of GTK apps, but that is way too much effort.
How hard would it be to just tell it that in a chat window I want to _display_ green text on a black background? I don't want to change what I'm sending (since I don't care past using caps to shout at people), just give me a menu option for "background color" and "text color".
(All the GTK stuff, whether it's GAIM or Gnome or whatever, seems to be spiralling into some ridiculous complexities. It's hard for us non-programmers to get a handle on all the time)
With people like RMS and Theo, there don't seem to be any choices except to do it *their* way. They would definitely pull a "cut off your nose to spite your face" move just to make sure that people haven't forgotten about them or their ideology. They would rather see beneficial projects fail than see them successful without incorporating their values.
It's really kinda sad that they would use something which is not a FOSS issue to raise a fuss.
It's always good to put the best spin you can on it, but he really wanted that job. He could have been part of a team of 4 instead of a one-man show, always on call, etc, etc. And the people he works for now are no better really.
In my experience, it depends on what your prospective employers are looking for.
Me, I'm a UNIX admin with a MS in Engineering, no certifications and completely self taught. I've never (knock on wood) been out of a job, and right now I'm working with a bunch of people who put more value on what I could do and how I worked with a team than what certifications I (don't) have.
A friend of mine is a great Windows admin. He knows his Active Directory stuff well and all the arcane Exchange best practices like the back of his hand. He has multiple MS certs and works in a shithole. The last place he interviewed at, everybody on the team loved him but when his resume got to the VP he threw it away because he doesn't have a college degree. Threw it away. Over the objections of all the people who actually talked to him.
So, given that, gather a few of the cheaper certifications you can to get your foot in the door with the ignorant. They won't impress people who really know what the story is, but it will get you in the door to talk to them and impress them with what you really know.
IANAL, but in the sources you've cited, it was discovered the cow was pregnant before the money changed hands. That alters the situation significantly. If the cow had already been purchased and then became pregnant, the seller would not have any recourse.
Downloading is not what people are being prosecuted for. They are being prosecuted for making copyrighted material available for download in direct violation of said copyright agreement. The RIAA doesn't give a shit if you download 10 or 100 songs. However, if you make 2 songs available to 1 million people, then they care.
It really isn't hard at all. When you buy a CD you are bound by the copyright on that CD. Whether it says you can rip it to MP3 for personal use or not, that's what you are agreeing to. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess all those finite element and fluid flow analysis packages out there just wrote themselves. You know about those, right? They're what drove the design of computers for a very long time. Computers weren't designed from the beginning to let you download music, videos, and basically supplant television as the glass teat in your life.
The issue/problem is trying to unseat Windows as the current/incumbent OS. Many efforts are made to give Linux distos a "Windows" feel simply because that is what people are used to. In order to educate people that the OS is NOT what the story is all about, you need to show them an interface that they are comfortable with and willing to work within. When all the applications that they want to run *just run*, then they might understand.
:)
One of the biggest conceits within the Linux community is "Of course it't better, so just use it". Even if it's true, you need to help people along the path. Think of it as a language. If I could *prove* that, for example, Esperanto was a better and more efficient language for communication I would have a hard time making people switch if it was completely unlike anything they had ever seen before. There needs to be a strong tie to the language they already know to ease the pain of switching, or else it just isn't worth it.
I could ramble on about the problems, and where Linux apps really aren't as polished as Windows (Gaim vs Trillian for example) but I'm pretty drunk right now. Typing this much has been a pretty significant accomplishment.
10 is only easier if you count with your fingers. If you can break free of that, you can count in any base you want. Doing math in hexidecimal is tough due to lack of practice, but certainly not impossible.
1. Metric sounds like a nice idea, but really isn't in practice. With 12 inches in a foot you can divide it by 2, 3, and 4 without endlessly repeating decimals (and the need to make a 1/3 meter mark on the stick just in case). Base 10 lets you divide by 2 and 5, with not much call to divide things in fifths.
2. QWERTY was not designed to be inefficient, but it was designed so that typewriters didn't jam. Ultimately, not having to stop to free stuck keys made typists _more_ efficent.
Hopefully you're from somewhere other than the USA, otherwise there's some obvious commentary about the quality of our educational system.
Because it isn't "free". It may not cost any money, but you know there will be advertisements or other policies in place which stuff Microsoft in your face all the time. It would be entirely possible that the only way you could connect is with an MS application which brings you pop-up ads or just remind you how "great" Microsoft is. Or just a small slow-down in accessing Google vs MSN searches...
None of this would be completely bad if it wasn't a company which continually uses extensive campaigns of FUD and anti-competitive practices to keep innovation and competition out of the market. And I'm not saying that they don't innovate on their own, but often they squash the first movers until they can bring the same product to market with a more polished GUI.
Accepting free things from Microsoft implies that you support the way that they do business. I'd pay for Google WiFi before I took it from Microsoft.
You're not saying anything good about MIcrosoft, you're just saying that you're a typical short-sighted, greedy, mostly amoral consumer.
As long as it's free it's good? Do you only buy clothes you know were made in sweatshops? They _are_ cheaper.
Not until the US needs to outsource it's gaming.
That's because Zonk posted it.
Zonk was molested by Sony execs as a child and he's still ashamed of liking it so much.
It's very similar. In SMTP it's called the "percent hack" and allows you to specify mail routing:
m achine.com
machine.com%machine2.com%machine3.com%user@final_
delivers mail along that path ignoring MX records, etc.
UUCP uses "!" characters, which were called "bangs". To get a file using uucp you would have to specify every hop to get to the machine hosting it:
machine1!machine2!machine3!final_machine
UUCP was used (if I remember correctly) at a time where routers weren't common (if they existed at all) and most inter-network connectivity was via multi-homed machines.
Peak implies that after you reach that point the available supply begins to decrease.
Plateau implies that the level of production can be sustained for some time.
What demand does is unknown, but that might be the reason for chosing the terms they did. Plateau makes more sense to me since I never figured out how so many dinosaurs died in the same place to make for convenient drilling a couple of million years later. Did they all wash up on some shore after the meteor strike?
No, it shouldn't. The Qwerty-esque style still increases efficiency over the standard alphabetical layout, and is called such since the keys are arranged in a pattern that isn't too much of a departure for people used to qwerty keyboards.
Dvorak is interesting, and a good thing for some people who actually have to type in the english language as their primary use of their computer (transcriptionists or such). For coders and sysadmins, Dvorak breaks down because many of the things you are typing aren't words anyway (cd, ps -ef, pwd, chmod).
Finally, Qwerty wasn't designed to slow typists down as much as it was to clearance the angles that the strikers hit the page on manual typewriters. Slowing typists down was a side effect.
that Sony brought the concept to market as a successful product and didn't just run to the patent office with a vague idea of something that might be produced. Who cares that he had the idea first? I had the idea for e-books in 1997 when it became obvious that you could get a portable LCD screen with enough battery life to read a book. Nobody, including me, really cares any more.
Unless there is evidence that Sony stole this idea and did not develop it independently then Sony invented the actual product by offering it for actual sale. The German guy should be happy that some Sony exec didn't figure out that it would be cheaper to have him killed than pay the lawyers.
Yeah, and it's soooo much better now. We all get screwed. Yay progress.
Actually, browsing the web is NOT necessary. The internet is an optional luxury that you choose to pay for. People who design content for it are under no obligation to meet your whims. ADA already works for the brick-and-mortar stores, and forcing websites to be ADA compliant is about as stupid as suing GM because their cars aren't operable my multiple amputees. Maybe libraries should be forced to hire people to read to illiterates.
If this really is important, the market will sort it out. Not in terms of Target or Walmart losing business, but by another independent person finding/creating a middleware solution that works well enough. Everybody bitches about the power of the large corporations and how hard it is to compete. Here is a business opportunity which may have some real potential if all those blind people really want to shop on-line.
In many instances, they simply took existing US inventions and improved them incrementally. Without the initial R&D costs they can afford to undercut the original US manufacturers (except for the auto industry, which was mostly killed by overall laziness and the greed of the UAW). After that they just had to rely on the rampant US consumerism to drive people to the cheapest product in the mareket. US consumers don't care who makes their stuff, as long as they can get more stuff than somebody else.
stay away from the straight razors. I inherited a few (1/2 dozen or so) when my great-uncle died. just to prove that I could, I used to shave with them (I was 25, about 10 years ago). The major problems were:
1. You need a mirror. Usually I shave in the shower and do it by feel. With a straight razor you often need both hands.
2. It's hard to do in the morning when you aren't coordinated. Especially the delicate spots (under your nose, just behind the jaw).
3. you have to be somewhat of a contortionist (or ambidexterous) to get to all the spots you need to reach.
Disposables are the way to go for the most part. I haven't tried the classic double-edged safety razors tho.
Passing and ethics course and acting in an ethical manner are completely unconnected. It might even be unethical to pass a course on ethics if you know in advance that you plan to act in an unethical manner in the future....
But the people who really need to learn business ethics are the stuffed shirts in the corner offices. They need to learn that they shouldn't turn around and blame IT that their laptop is broken when they installed AOL on it the night before their big presentation. Then it might leak out that during the fix it was discovered that there were a lot of contacts for mail order bride services.
Don't abuse your IT staff and your privacy issues vanish. We really don't care that much.
The biggest problem for me is that it's still a pretty unattractive interface. It's getting better, and I know a lot of people will shout about the skin-ability of GTK apps, but that is way too much effort.
How hard would it be to just tell it that in a chat window I want to _display_ green text on a black background? I don't want to change what I'm sending (since I don't care past using caps to shout at people), just give me a menu option for "background color" and "text color".
(All the GTK stuff, whether it's GAIM or Gnome or whatever, seems to be spiralling into some ridiculous complexities. It's hard for us non-programmers to get a handle on all the time)
With people like RMS and Theo, there don't seem to be any choices except to do it *their* way. They would definitely pull a "cut off your nose to spite your face" move just to make sure that people haven't forgotten about them or their ideology. They would rather see beneficial projects fail than see them successful without incorporating their values.
It's really kinda sad that they would use something which is not a FOSS issue to raise a fuss.
It's always good to put the best spin you can on it, but he really wanted that job. He could have been part of a team of 4 instead of a one-man show, always on call, etc, etc. And the people he works for now are no better really.
In my experience, it depends on what your prospective employers are looking for.
Me, I'm a UNIX admin with a MS in Engineering, no certifications and completely self taught. I've never (knock on wood) been out of a job, and right now I'm working with a bunch of people who put more value on what I could do and how I worked with a team than what certifications I (don't) have.
A friend of mine is a great Windows admin. He knows his Active Directory stuff well and all the arcane Exchange best practices like the back of his hand. He has multiple MS certs and works in a shithole. The last place he interviewed at, everybody on the team loved him but when his resume got to the VP he threw it away because he doesn't have a college degree. Threw it away. Over the objections of all the people who actually talked to him.
So, given that, gather a few of the cheaper certifications you can to get your foot in the door with the ignorant. They won't impress people who really know what the story is, but it will get you in the door to talk to them and impress them with what you really know.
Wow... Maybe just a little *too* defensive there.
IANAL, but in the sources you've cited, it was discovered the cow was pregnant before the money changed hands. That alters the situation significantly. If the cow had already been purchased and then became pregnant, the seller would not have any recourse.
One more time...
Downloading is not what people are being prosecuted for. They are being prosecuted for making copyrighted material available for download in direct violation of said copyright agreement. The RIAA doesn't give a shit if you download 10 or 100 songs. However, if you make 2 songs available to 1 million people, then they care.
It really isn't hard at all. When you buy a CD you are bound by the copyright on that CD. Whether it says you can rip it to MP3 for personal use or not, that's what you are agreeing to. If you don't like it, don't buy it.
which leads directly back to the question:
Why bother with the interview if he can't really answer any questions?
Stick a disclaimer on the answers for christ's sake. If he really is a lawyer, he should know how to disclaim responsibility better than anyone.