Dow chemical suing people who have a yearly income of $1000 for $10000 after the tragedy in Bhopal (which still hasn't been cleaned up) is so low and disgusting that one wonders what kind of snarling inhuman lunatics run that company.
It is this kind of thing that breeds terrorists and whips up frenzy amongst people who have no recourse to medical care, much less fat corporate lawyers.
I can't carry on because I am absolutely speechless with disgust at those fucking bastards.
In my first year at uni back in the early 80's, we were learning the basics of relativity and we got around to the equation E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). As I was just learning about complex numbers in the Maths and Electric Power courses at the same time I recognised that while the mass and energy tend exponentially towards infinity as v aproaches c, it becomes a complex number when v is geater than c. Being a total science fiction nut I asked my prof what this meant. He was just irritated and basically told me to bugger off. I was dissapointed, being convinced that I had discovered the key to FTL travel and read up as much as I could about Tachyons (theoreticals particles that always move FTL) because as I saw it, complex or irrational numbers do not mean that time goes backward.
At the time I thought that this in some way correlated with some sort of "hyperspace", "subspace", "foldspace" or any of those science fiction terms used to make it quicker to get to B from A by transitioning to some special state of space.
With time I forgot about it (discovered girls and booze) but I have never found anything anywhere that goes into the mathematical problems created by v>c in that equation.
Why is it that it is always just dissed off as childs play, while physicists grapple with complex notions of 10-dimensional strings etc?
This has been wanted for a long time. It is a true sign that OSX is becoming a mainstream Unix and, despite all the complaining about GTK, it says a lot about the flexibility of the design. The obvious problems such as menu bars will eventually be overcome and I'm sure that the GIMP will get ported to GTK+2 some time.
Good on the people that did all the hard work and thanks.
This simply points out the reason ebooks have, for the most part, failed miserably: Greed. The whole Software maker paranoia about controlling everything you do on a computer will always backfire in their faces. Not being able to do what you want, how you want with items that you spent your hard earned money on will always piss consumers off.
Microsoft's real secret to success will be their downfall: Microsoft's so-called embrace and extend is not the real secret to their success. The strategy of complete and utter marketing paranoia in which Microsoft will attempt to kill any competitor in any market, no matter how small, to avoid the remote possibility of the competitor ever being a threat to Microsoft. This doesn't apply to Mac OSX because MS has needed them as a token competitor in the past. MS has lost any trust they ever had amongst independant developers because of this.
I'm a 2 bit sysadmin for a small company and both klez and bugbear have managed to get through to various users, even though they had updated virus scanners. My boss' love of porno sites and porno mailing lists is a big boon for spyware on our systems.
The article is ludicrous because the real threat with exploits is to commercial systems, and I'm thankful that my bank uses a Sun JVM Java client (despite Java's crappiness, it is still the only language which has security in it's design) and hasn't fallen for MS Passport. When and if they do I'm changing banks.
Learning is intrinsically an action where the brain is excercised in order to be able to carry out the action on it's own. Very much like sport if you want to think of it that way. Computers do not change this in any way: Learning remains learning. A computer cannot make you learn any better, I would think. The techno-addict mentality of modern schools probably makes learning worse in that too much time is spent playing with technical toys (I don't mean modern job requisites like word processing, using mail etc, just mucking with the devices) instead of getting the children to use their own brains.
You're right but I remember that the summer of 2001 (a friend of mine lives in Moscow) was the hottest ever on record. That and the extremes of the coldest winters on record (Moscow would be more under a continental climate than western Europe I think) does make one think doesn't it?
OSX has some of the functionality mentioned here in it's netinfo database, and system and programme defaults can be set through the defaults command which is based on xml. Applescript is a good glue between the CLI , System and other software.
What is interesting is MS' motivation behind this. It does seem as they are of the opinion that having an amazing shell will pull all the OSS crowd over to using Win instead of Linux/BSD/*NIX. Why I think it won't work, at least in the first few iterations, are because: a.MS still has that licence problem which they would rather die than let go of. b.You still have to pay extra $$$ for the whole bundle of extraneous shit that you don't need. c.It will still be easier to script apps in VBA. 80% of the extra cludge, OO this , reflection that etc will go unused.
Since a lot of people seem to make some sort of bond between this topic and global warming, I agree that there isn't much proof that the planet is warming, in an abstract theoretical sense. However I consider what I experience as proof for me:
When I got to Europe in 1986 from Africa, Winters were blisteringly cold in Berlin in Germany, and I remember one Winter in particular, 86-87, where the temperature went down to -29 Degrees Centigrade. I remember summers here being a balmy 26 to 28 Degrees Centigrade, on a hot summer. I mived to Switzerland in 1989 in time to see a small lake near to Zurich freezing over for most of the Winter for the last time.
Since then, in the countryside near to Zurich, the last time the small ski-stations had enough snow, anytime in winter for people to ski for more than a week was 1992. I remember sitting outside in the sunshine at 14 degrees Centigrade in a T-shirt, playing my bass guitar, on January 14th 1998. Summers have, since the mid to late 90's, regularly broken all time high records and almost every summer since about 1998 has reached 30 to 32 Degrees Centigrade.
On top of this the weather has become increasingly chaotic. Autumn and Spring storms that regularly reach huricane strength, each couple of years breaking the record of the last set of storms a few years ago, meandering cold fronts going off their usual west-east course in Winter and bringing a week of sudden (in the space of one hour) freezes of down to -14 Degrees Centigrade which last a few days and the temperature then suddenly boucing back up to 10 Degrees Centigrade. Almost every year now has major flooding in central Europe.
That was my experience here in Europe. My sister in Australia tells me that the country is getting dryer all the time and the bush fires bigger every year.
That does make me think, and I don't think that any piece of strange, backward legislation by a somwhat dubious Dubya is going to change that.
In Linux everywhere, to keep this on topic, there is one application that I truly miss: 2D Vector Illustration like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia freehand. I find it funny that everyone always talks about Photoshop vs. GIMP where most illustrators use Photoshop AND and illustration programme.
I've used the GIMP and I know that in a pinch I could very well manage with it and use other tools to convert to CMYK for printing. The lack of bicubic extrapolation in the GIMP does force one to be more careful in image scaling though. But what about illustration?
I've seen some efforts on Freshmeat and Sourceforge involving SVG, but none of these provide decent anti-aliasing of vector lines which has become pretty much of a must these days. It's also kind of ironic that Adobe is the only one which provides a useful SVG viewer.
Itis a niche market but attention to details like this in the GIMP and a vector illustration programme would move some more people into considering Linux or OSS.
Someone further down posted this: "We recently were accepting applications for a vacant position. We were FLOODED with resumes from web developers. They all went in the trash. Why? Because they were a dime a dozen and didn't have the overall skills to support our customers. We wound up hiring a guy with good GENERAL skills, because those can be broadly applied to our diverse environment."
This is why I got my job, I've been an IBM, and Wang (remember them) operator, PC-software salesman, Mac-DTP guy, Multimedia programmer, Web coder, Linux and Win admin apart from being a part time nurse, a windsurfing instructor and a bassist in a punk band. I speak six languages fluently and have lived in 5 countries. I will work for crap money if it means I get a job. Stay flexible and learn as much as you can about everything. Flipping burgers is something that keeps you alive and it is not to be laughed at.
and this: "There is much garbage code out there, largely caused by too many people coding "Fast Food" type development tools. Can somebody please tell me why it takes a 2GHz processor and 512MB of RAM to show me my appointment calendar? Then crash while I'm looking at it?"
This is such a piece of truth in this this pig lazy, fuckstupid environment in IT today. I admin a Linux and a Novell box at work and the BS Novell supporter asked me why I do all the admin at the console, and I told him because it's stable, fast and doesn't bring the machine to it's knees. My boss laughs at me using vim for scripting yet dies from heart failure because bloat monster word friggin ups and dies on him in the middle of some BS document, with formatting that a 5 year old could do with html or Tex.
I love his comment so much that I'll repeat it: why does a calendar require a 2GHz machine with 512MB RAM to run and then crash with monotonous regularity?
What never ceases to amaze me in these fucking hard economic times (I actually earn less than imported high tech workers, which is why I have a job) when people complain about foreigners etc etc working for less while IT workers and Engineers have been spoiled to death over the last 20 to 30 years, is that people always look for someone else to blame, instead of realising that life is fucking hard and trying to adapt to it.
Christ, over here in Europe, the Germans are pissed as hell that their government has just issued in a wave of tax increases, with all businesses bitching about how this strangles motivation and inovation. But most people, while pissed, realise that the fucking bills have to be paid, those bills including things like the German national medical aid and unemployment insurance. They're also cutting military spending. Power to them. This is plain financial sense. I do absolutely not understand how people can find Bush's tax cuts for the rich and huge, enormous military spending good in any way. It might boost jobs in the military sector but, for the love of pete, your tax money pays for all of that, not withstanding that his $40billion increase in military spending is more than a lot of countries have in total every year. Your pres should be looking after jobs for his people, not spending billions on strange anti-nuclear-missile technology against terrorists who fight with fucking kalashnikows, car-bombs and box cutters.
I'm a Sys Admin in Switzerland for a small company. I was unemployed here for almost a year before I took the overworked, underpaid job that I now have. I have since found out that a guy from Egypt (MCSE) and a guy from India (CS degree) both interviewed for the job. They were both turned down because they both expected almost double of what I am earning. Their level of IT education was higher than mine and they were both very competent I have heard. I'm envious that I don't have the education to ask for salaries like they did.
The morals of the story: 1.When times are hard you have to go with the times. This goes for workers of every nation, race and creed. 2.An institution will go for the IT solution that provides the best price/performance solution. 3.IT workers of all nations are dumb in that we don't form Unions. The exploitation of IT workers of all nations, seems to be similar to the sweat shops of the third world.
Power to India for considering moving to Linux on a big scale. The independance gained for them is a major point given that MS (and other large US industries) are not above using the US government to strong arm nations into becoming franchises for those same industries. I only wish that some other governments, including those here in Europe *and* the US would have the same long term view, because MS is only going to get more and more mean and tricky the more they fear the Linux revolution.
I really hope that the gcj effort manages to implement all the classes of the standard Java API and above all that the compilation to binary becomes a reality for all Java developers. The implied importance of it being GPL is not that important to most of us who actually do use Java, the limitations, lack of AWT, Swing or a full SWT, memory consumption and speed are much more important. I wish I had the time so that I could work on this myself, because this would provide Java Developers the possibility of finally writing GUI code on Windows, Linux and Mac that could compete on a level ground with C# and.NET.
I can already see problems arising with Mono in that I simply don't trust MS not to try and kick it in the balls with a patent suit after it has started to become widely used..NET and C# might be easy to use and very powerful, thereby providing the "carrot"for many developers, but I think it is naive and irresponsible to think that MS will play fair. Have they ever done so before?
Java is easy to use and secure, and at the moment, on cellphones which have Java bytecode instruction sets in their CPU's, is anexcellent opportunity for expansion. Cellphones are a booming market and present a real chance for Java on the client side with J2ME. Being able to compile to native code would make it even better suited for that purpose. MS knows how important the Cellphone market is which is why they are up to their tricks and abuse there again (Sendo) and which is why almost all Cellphone makers are giving MS a wide berth and are using Symbian, which brings the story back to Java...
I'm sorry if I came across as being judgmental. I don't understand the hype of both sides in this issue. I come from a country originally- South Africa- that had gun laws similar to those in the states and for most of my life there I can remember perhaps one incident of someone saving life and property with a gun, but I do remember at least two incidents of family members killing one another with guns, numerous gun related accidents and few burglaries where a gun was ever used. It just seemed that guns were more of a pain that anything else. YMMV.
Why on earth do you Americans want your guns so badly? Don't very many people get killed each year in gun accidents? I find some of the arguments here very strange, such as the ones equating guns with a kettle of all things? Guns are designed to KILL, not to boil water. I don't understand it at all. 99,9% of gun owners will never have the chance to defend anything with their home arsenals, but a much higher percentage of them will kill or seriously wound their spouses/neighbours/children/friends in gun accidents.
I don't follow American gun laws closely, but the things I do see are usually very strange arguments on both sides of the fence. Arguments such as "people kill people, not guns" or "gun ownership makes one more likely to run off and kill your school class" are both ludicrous IMO. Killing someone without a gun is a lot harder than it is with one, and there is really no statistical proof that gun ownership makes one more prone to violence.
Obviously, though, I would think that the pure numbers of people who are killed with a gun by a family member or aquaintance are much higher than the numbers of people whose lives are saved by being able to defend themselves with a gun.
I think this issue will only ever get resolved by the ability to take a decision on what is the lesser of two evils, not by feelings of security and strength given by a gun or by feelings of fear by not owning one. The only way one would be really able to defend oneself efficiently with a gun is if one practically lived with it, because unless you carry a gun all the time, how will you be able to defend yourself when you're coming out of a bar or a restaurant?
When I read batshit insanity like this, it reminds me of the Nazis during their final desperate years of power coming up with some extremely wierd so-called weapons to defeat their enemies, such as the wind cannon, or the assault rifle that could shoot around corners. It also reminds me of the CIA's experiments with LSD on American citizens in the 60's.
Trying to find patterns in terrorism in a game is so absolutely brainlessly stupid I can't believe that some moron came up with the idea. Real people are infinitely more complex than a game, and real life suffering, oppression and bloodshed can not be simulated in a game, or else people would not be playing UT or Quake.
I have often wondered about the insane, in my eyes, American love affair with the gun. Given that the majority of deaths due to gunshot wounds are due to accidents, this might be able to improve things along those lines. For all those people talking about how gun owners' families will now no longer be able to protect themselves, perhaps they should ask themselves just how many people actually ever do use a gun to protect themselves.
While we're all busy bashing MS and Flash, perhaps we shouldn't forget that Webdesigners, the professional ones nearly all use Dreamweaver and/or Flash. Golive doesn't come close to being an industry standard tool although it has improved greatly in version 6. The reason those people use Dreamweaver is because it makes webpage creation faster, not specifically easier. It also has pretty good intergation with the above mentioned server side languages.
What this will mean for DW and Flash is that MS will slowly, in one or two versions, phase out PHP and JSP intergration (they'll claim that the "customers" don't want it) and they'll add MSSQL, IIS, Frontpage and Office integration, by default, thereby making most webpages not work in other browsers or on other server platforms. They'll start adding "extras" into Flash (.NET automatic webservices and scan-your-drive-for-pirated-music stuff for free). They'll probably make a crippled version of the Flash plugin for the Mac in order to avoid the anti-trust complaints and kill the Linux one. They will almost certainly kill off the Mac versions of the MX suite ("because the sales there are so small" they'll say).
However, this will probably backfire nicely in MS's face. Coldfusion, in spite of it's ease (I've used it and it is easy), has become a major deadweight in the company, due to the advances in PHP. There is no real reason today to go for ColdFusion, given that it is expensive and the tags are proprietry. Flash already has a pretty good competitor for animated vector stuff with Livemotion2.0 from Adobe and *new* Flash only sites have all but died out because the ergonomics of the web dictate that you have to design for compatibility and therefore almost every Flash site has to have a HTML version accompanying it and that pushes up development costs and companies don't have money today for luxuries as they did in the dotcom days. This generally restricts Flash to be used as a tool for making animations.
Adobe could counter a buy out like this quite nicely in that they release their own version of the Flash plugin, thereby becoming the "standard" in web graphics that they have been running after for so long. In the resulting confusion and chaos in Webplugins, which "standard" do you think would win? MS tried this with DHTML, and even though they 95% of the browser market they don't have a monopoly on authoring, as almost all sites code for standards these days.
Mainly this would lose Adobe another competitor, because MS would certainly botch any attempt to gain designers with an MS version of Freehand. just as they have botched almost every attempt to make a competitor to Photoshop.
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Dow chemical suing people who have a yearly income of $1000 for $10000 after the tragedy in Bhopal (which still hasn't been cleaned up) is so low and disgusting that one wonders what kind of snarling inhuman lunatics run that company.
It is this kind of thing that breeds terrorists and whips up frenzy amongst people who have no recourse to medical care, much less fat corporate lawyers.
I can't carry on because I am absolutely speechless with disgust at those fucking bastards.
In my first year at uni back in the early 80's, we were learning the basics of relativity and we got around to the equation E=mc^2/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2). As I was just learning about complex numbers in the Maths and Electric Power courses at the same time I recognised that while the mass and energy tend exponentially towards infinity as v aproaches c, it becomes a complex number when v is geater than c. Being a total science fiction nut I asked my prof what this meant. He was just irritated and basically told me to bugger off. I was dissapointed, being convinced that I had discovered the key to FTL travel and read up as much as I could about Tachyons (theoreticals particles that always move FTL) because as I saw it, complex or irrational numbers do not mean that time goes backward.
At the time I thought that this in some way correlated with some sort of "hyperspace", "subspace", "foldspace" or any of those science fiction terms used to make it quicker to get to B from A by transitioning to some special state of space.
With time I forgot about it (discovered girls and booze) but I have never found anything anywhere that goes into the mathematical problems created by v>c in that equation.
Why is it that it is always just dissed off as childs play, while physicists grapple with complex notions of 10-dimensional strings etc?
This has been wanted for a long time. It is a true sign that OSX is becoming a mainstream Unix and, despite all the complaining about GTK, it says a lot about the flexibility of the design. The obvious problems such as menu bars will eventually be overcome and I'm sure that the GIMP will get ported to GTK+2 some time.
Good on the people that did all the hard work and thanks.
This simply points out the reason ebooks have, for the most part, failed miserably: Greed. The whole Software maker paranoia about controlling everything you do on a computer will always backfire in their faces. Not being able to do what you want, how you want with items that you spent your hard earned money on will always piss consumers off.
Microsoft's real secret to success will be their downfall: Microsoft's so-called embrace and extend is not the real secret to their success. The strategy of complete and utter marketing paranoia in which Microsoft will attempt to kill any competitor in any market, no matter how small, to avoid the remote possibility of the competitor ever being a threat to Microsoft. This doesn't apply to Mac OSX because MS has needed them as a token competitor in the past. MS has lost any trust they ever had amongst independant developers because of this.
I'm a 2 bit sysadmin for a small company and both klez and bugbear have managed to get through to various users, even though they had updated virus scanners. My boss' love of porno sites and porno mailing lists is a big boon for spyware on our systems.
The article is ludicrous because the real threat with exploits is to commercial systems, and I'm thankful that my bank uses a Sun JVM Java client (despite Java's crappiness, it is still the only language which has security in it's design) and hasn't fallen for MS Passport. When and if they do I'm changing banks.
Fear that no one's listening to you?
Learning is intrinsically an action where the brain is excercised in order to be able to carry out the action on it's own. Very much like sport if you want to think of it that way. Computers do not change this in any way: Learning remains learning. A computer cannot make you learn any better, I would think. The techno-addict mentality of modern schools probably makes learning worse in that too much time is spent playing with technical toys (I don't mean modern job requisites like word processing, using mail etc, just mucking with the devices) instead of getting the children to use their own brains.
You're right but I remember that the summer of 2001 (a friend of mine lives in Moscow) was the hottest ever on record. That and the extremes of the coldest winters on record (Moscow would be more under a continental climate than western Europe I think) does make one think doesn't it?
OSX has some of the functionality mentioned here in it's netinfo database, and system and programme defaults can be set through the defaults command which is based on xml. Applescript is a good glue between the CLI , System and other software.
What is interesting is MS' motivation behind this. It does seem as they are of the opinion that having an amazing shell will pull all the OSS crowd over to using Win instead of Linux/BSD/*NIX. Why I think it won't work, at least in the first few iterations, are because:
a.MS still has that licence problem which they would rather die than let go of.
b.You still have to pay extra $$$ for the whole bundle of extraneous shit that you don't need.
c.It will still be easier to script apps in VBA. 80% of the extra cludge, OO this , reflection that etc will go unused.
Since a lot of people seem to make some sort of bond between this topic and global warming, I agree that there isn't much proof that the planet is warming, in an abstract theoretical sense. However I consider what I experience as proof for me:
When I got to Europe in 1986 from Africa, Winters were blisteringly cold in Berlin in Germany, and I remember one Winter in particular, 86-87, where the temperature went down to -29 Degrees Centigrade. I remember summers here being a balmy 26 to 28 Degrees Centigrade, on a hot summer. I mived to Switzerland in 1989 in time to see a small lake near to Zurich freezing over for most of the Winter for the last time.
Since then, in the countryside near to Zurich, the last time the small ski-stations had enough snow, anytime in winter for people to ski for more than a week was 1992. I remember sitting outside in the sunshine at 14 degrees Centigrade in a T-shirt, playing my bass guitar, on January 14th 1998. Summers have, since the mid to late 90's, regularly broken all time high records and almost every summer since about 1998 has reached 30 to 32 Degrees Centigrade.
On top of this the weather has become increasingly chaotic. Autumn and Spring storms that regularly reach huricane strength, each couple of years breaking the record of the last set of storms a few years ago, meandering cold fronts going off their usual west-east course in Winter and bringing a week of sudden (in the space of one hour) freezes of down to -14 Degrees Centigrade which last a few days and the temperature then suddenly boucing back up to 10 Degrees Centigrade. Almost every year now has major flooding in central Europe.
That was my experience here in Europe. My sister in Australia tells me that the country is getting dryer all the time and the bush fires bigger every year.
That does make me think, and I don't think that any piece of strange, backward legislation by a somwhat dubious Dubya is going to change that.
Thanks. I think I looked at this a while back when it was still in alpha. It looks very good now, and I'll give it a shot.
In Linux everywhere, to keep this on topic, there is one application that I truly miss: 2D Vector Illustration like Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia freehand. I find it funny that everyone always talks about Photoshop vs. GIMP where most illustrators use Photoshop AND and illustration programme.
I've used the GIMP and I know that in a pinch I could very well manage with it and use other tools to convert to CMYK for printing. The lack of bicubic extrapolation in the GIMP does force one to be more careful in image scaling though. But what about illustration?
I've seen some efforts on Freshmeat and Sourceforge involving SVG, but none of these provide decent anti-aliasing of vector lines which has become pretty much of a must these days. It's also kind of ironic that Adobe is the only one which provides a useful SVG viewer.
Itis a niche market but attention to details like this in the GIMP and a vector illustration programme would move some more people into considering Linux or OSS.
After having browsed through the manual, I can say that I've seen Ideas like this before that I use every day: It's called VIM.
Someone further down posted this:
"We recently were accepting applications for a vacant position. We were FLOODED with resumes from web developers. They all went in the trash. Why? Because they were a dime a dozen and didn't have the overall skills to support our customers. We wound up hiring a guy with good GENERAL skills, because those can be broadly applied to our diverse environment."
This is why I got my job, I've been an IBM, and Wang (remember them) operator, PC-software salesman, Mac-DTP guy, Multimedia programmer, Web coder, Linux and Win admin apart from being a part time nurse, a windsurfing instructor and a bassist in a punk band. I speak six languages fluently and have lived in 5 countries. I will work for crap money if it means I get a job. Stay flexible and learn as much as you can about everything. Flipping burgers is something that keeps you alive and it is not to be laughed at.
and this:
"There is much garbage code out there, largely caused by too many people coding "Fast Food" type development tools. Can somebody please tell me why it takes a 2GHz processor and 512MB of RAM to show me my appointment calendar? Then crash while I'm looking at it?"
This is such a piece of truth in this this pig lazy, fuckstupid environment in IT today. I admin a Linux and a Novell box at work and the BS Novell supporter asked me why I do all the admin at the console, and I told him because it's stable, fast and doesn't bring the machine to it's knees. My boss laughs at me using vim for scripting yet dies from heart failure because bloat monster word friggin ups and dies on him in the middle of some BS document, with formatting that a 5 year old could do with html or Tex.
I love his comment so much that I'll repeat it: why does a calendar require a 2GHz machine with 512MB RAM to run and then crash with monotonous regularity?
What never ceases to amaze me in these fucking hard economic times (I actually earn less than imported high tech workers, which is why I have a job) when people complain about foreigners etc etc working for less while IT workers and Engineers have been spoiled to death over the last 20 to 30 years, is that people always look for someone else to blame, instead of realising that life is fucking hard and trying to adapt to it.
Christ, over here in Europe, the Germans are pissed as hell that their government has just issued in a wave of tax increases, with all businesses bitching about how this strangles motivation and inovation. But most people, while pissed, realise that the fucking bills have to be paid, those bills including things like the German national medical aid and unemployment insurance. They're also cutting military spending. Power to them. This is plain financial sense. I do absolutely not understand how people can find Bush's tax cuts for the rich and huge, enormous military spending good in any way. It might boost jobs in the military sector but, for the love of pete, your tax money pays for all of that, not withstanding that his $40billion increase in military spending is more than a lot of countries have in total every year. Your pres should be looking after jobs for his people, not spending billions on strange anti-nuclear-missile technology against terrorists who fight with fucking kalashnikows, car-bombs and box cutters.
I'm a Sys Admin in Switzerland for a small company. I was unemployed here for almost a year before I took the overworked, underpaid job that I now have. I have since found out that a guy from Egypt (MCSE) and a guy from India (CS degree) both interviewed for the job. They were both turned down because they both expected almost double of what I am earning. Their level of IT education was higher than mine and they were both very competent I have heard. I'm envious that I don't have the education to ask for salaries like they did.
The morals of the story:
1.When times are hard you have to go with the times. This goes for workers of every nation, race and creed.
2.An institution will go for the IT solution that provides the best price/performance solution.
3.IT workers of all nations are dumb in that we don't form Unions. The exploitation of IT workers of all nations, seems to be similar to the sweat shops of the third world.
Power to India for considering moving to Linux on a big scale. The independance gained for them is a major point given that MS (and other large US industries) are not above using the US government to strong arm nations into becoming franchises for those same industries. I only wish that some other governments, including those here in Europe *and* the US would have the same long term view, because MS is only going to get more and more mean and tricky the more they fear the Linux revolution.
I really hope that the gcj effort manages to implement all the classes of the standard Java API and above all that the compilation to binary becomes a reality for all Java developers. The implied importance of it being GPL is not that important to most of us who actually do use Java, the limitations, lack of AWT, Swing or a full SWT, memory consumption and speed are much more important. I wish I had the time so that I could work on this myself, because this would provide Java Developers the possibility of finally writing GUI code on Windows, Linux and Mac that could compete on a level ground with C# and .NET.
.NET and C# might be easy to use and very powerful, thereby providing the "carrot"for many developers, but I think it is naive and irresponsible to think that MS will play fair. Have they ever done so before?
I can already see problems arising with Mono in that I simply don't trust MS not to try and kick it in the balls with a patent suit after it has started to become widely used.
Java is easy to use and secure, and at the moment, on cellphones which have Java bytecode instruction sets in their CPU's, is anexcellent opportunity for expansion. Cellphones are a booming market and present a real chance for Java on the client side with J2ME. Being able to compile to native code would make it even better suited for that purpose. MS knows how important the Cellphone market is which is why they are up to their tricks and abuse there again (Sendo) and which is why almost all Cellphone makers are giving MS a wide berth and are using Symbian, which brings the story back to Java...
I'm sorry if I came across as being judgmental. I don't understand the hype of both sides in this issue. I come from a country originally- South Africa- that had gun laws similar to those in the states and for most of my life there I can remember perhaps one incident of someone saving life and property with a gun, but I do remember at least two incidents of family members killing one another with guns, numerous gun related accidents and few burglaries where a gun was ever used. It just seemed that guns were more of a pain that anything else. YMMV.
Why on earth do you Americans want your guns so badly? Don't very many people get killed each year in gun accidents? I find some of the arguments here very strange, such as the ones equating guns with a kettle of all things? Guns are designed to KILL, not to boil water. I don't understand it at all. 99,9% of gun owners will never have the chance to defend anything with their home arsenals, but a much higher percentage of them will kill or seriously wound their spouses/neighbours/children/friends in gun accidents.
I don't follow American gun laws closely, but the things I do see are usually very strange arguments on both sides of the fence. Arguments such as "people kill people, not guns" or "gun ownership makes one more likely to run off and kill your school class" are both ludicrous IMO. Killing someone without a gun is a lot harder than it is with one, and there is really no statistical proof that gun ownership makes one more prone to violence.
Obviously, though, I would think that the pure numbers of people who are killed with a gun by a family member or aquaintance are much higher than the numbers of people whose lives are saved by being able to defend themselves with a gun.
I think this issue will only ever get resolved by the ability to take a decision on what is the lesser of two evils, not by feelings of security and strength given by a gun or by feelings of fear by not owning one. The only way one would be really able to defend oneself efficiently with a gun is if one practically lived with it, because unless you carry a gun all the time, how will you be able to defend yourself when you're coming out of a bar or a restaurant?
When I read batshit insanity like this, it reminds me of the Nazis during their final desperate years of power coming up with some extremely wierd so-called weapons to defeat their enemies, such as the wind cannon, or the assault rifle that could shoot around corners. It also reminds me of the CIA's experiments with LSD on American citizens in the 60's.
Trying to find patterns in terrorism in a game is so absolutely brainlessly stupid I can't believe that some moron came up with the idea. Real people are infinitely more complex than a game, and real life suffering, oppression and bloodshed can not be simulated in a game, or else people would not be playing UT or Quake.
I have often wondered about the insane, in my eyes, American love affair with the gun. Given that the majority of deaths due to gunshot wounds are due to accidents, this might be able to improve things along those lines. For all those people talking about how gun owners' families will now no longer be able to protect themselves, perhaps they should ask themselves just how many people actually ever do use a gun to protect themselves.
While we're all busy bashing MS and Flash, perhaps we shouldn't forget that Webdesigners, the professional ones nearly all use Dreamweaver and/or Flash. Golive doesn't come close to being an industry standard tool although it has improved greatly in version 6. The reason those people use Dreamweaver is because it makes webpage creation faster, not specifically easier. It also has pretty good intergation with the above mentioned server side languages.
What this will mean for DW and Flash is that MS will slowly, in one or two versions, phase out PHP and JSP intergration (they'll claim that the "customers" don't want it) and they'll add MSSQL, IIS, Frontpage and Office integration, by default, thereby making most webpages not work in other browsers or on other server platforms. They'll start adding "extras" into Flash (.NET automatic webservices and scan-your-drive-for-pirated-music stuff for free). They'll probably make a crippled version of the Flash plugin for the Mac in order to avoid the anti-trust complaints and kill the Linux one. They will almost certainly kill off the Mac versions of the MX suite ("because the sales there are so small" they'll say).
However, this will probably backfire nicely in MS's face. Coldfusion, in spite of it's ease (I've used it and it is easy), has become a major deadweight in the company, due to the advances in PHP. There is no real reason today to go for ColdFusion, given that it is expensive and the tags are proprietry. Flash already has a pretty good competitor for animated vector stuff with Livemotion2.0 from Adobe and *new* Flash only sites have all but died out because the ergonomics of the web dictate that you have to design for compatibility and therefore almost every Flash site has to have a HTML version accompanying it and that pushes up development costs and companies don't have money today for luxuries as they did in the dotcom days. This generally restricts Flash to be used as a tool for making animations.
Adobe could counter a buy out like this quite nicely in that they release their own version of the Flash plugin, thereby becoming the "standard" in web graphics that they have been running after for so long. In the resulting confusion and chaos in Webplugins, which "standard" do you think would win? MS tried this with DHTML, and even though they 95% of the browser market they don't have a monopoly on authoring, as almost all sites code for standards these days.
Mainly this would lose Adobe another competitor, because MS would certainly botch any attempt to gain designers with an MS version of Freehand. just as they have botched almost every attempt to make a competitor to Photoshop.
Nokia is the one of the few companies that have always had usable phones that never crash.
That you don't understand any language besides english?