I thought the reason... was because it wasn't a Linux company, so it wouldn't seem like you would be losing any partiality.
I thought the idea was that they didn't want to ally with a specific distro; so being bought by Red Hat or Corel would have been problematic. But VA is distro-neutral; they might even bundle LinuxOne if you asked them to.
I noticed in one of the screenshots that they've slightly revised the QuickTime player; at least they seem to have gotten rid of that dumb "thumbwheel" volume control and replaced it with a slider.
"(sic)" is used to indicate an error; and even if "clueful" is a neologism, I hardly think it was an error.
Please, emmett, do tell. Why did you include that bit of editorial comment in a redhat story?
Because Slashdot has an editorial viewpoint. They're pro-Open Source. Get over it.
Do I get a chance to read the story and decide for myself what opinion to form?
No, you don't. Once emmett expresses an opinion, you are not allowed to read the article, or to form an opinion of your own, no matter how much you want to. Slashdot will use its orbital mind-control lasers to prevent you from having an opinion of your own. Ever.
Well, what can be done with the stroke of a pen can be undone just as easily. The next President could, in theory, sign an executive order on his first day in office, declaring all executive orders of the past eight years null and void. (Maybe not a bad idea.)
I remember from reading Hawking's A Brief History of Time that one hypothesis under serious consideration (at the time it was written, anyway) was that there was no "T=0", no discrete starting point to the universe. If one were to trace the timeline back, one would asymptotically approach zero hour, but never quite reach it.
(Hope I didn't butcher this explanation too badly; I am not a physicist, and I don't even play one on TV.)
The context of this explanation was an audience that a group of cosmologists -- Hawking among them -- had had with the pope. His Holiness advised the assembled physicists that they could never unravel the mystery of the very start of the universe, since that was an act of God, and beyond mortal understanding. Hawking thought it ironic that the pope had ascribed to God a role which, by this hypothesis, didn't exist.
I have been shopping a lot lately at Bookpool; they have ridiculously deep discounts. They only have technical (specifically, computer-related) books, though; if you're looking for a John Grisham fix, you'll have to look elsewhere.
For general merchandise, I usually use Buy.com; I've been happy with them, though a friend of mine ran afoul of their returns policy a couple of times.
With the advent of the 'Perfect Baby' everyone will be running around carrying a miniature Leonardo DiCaprio or a tiny Cameron Diaz. And with that, they'll all be exactly identical, no more individuals - sorry.
<humor> On the other hand, is it really fair that there's only one Cameron Diaz? Shouldn't there be enough of them for everyone who wants one? </humor>
More seriously, do you really think everyone would choose to have identical children? Would, for instance, Pat Buchanan and Oprah Winfrey both want their children to look or act like each other? Why do you think everyone would want their kids to look like Leo DiCaprio, when there's no shortage of people who hate him?
If you worry about the loss of individuality, then you're not putting enough faith in the individuality that already exists.
MS may not entirely dodge that bullet; I think that the lawsuit depends on compliance (or lack thereof) in their Java VM, which is still part of IE (and thus, part of Windows). Also, Rational does not have the right to use the trademarked Java name and logo without compliance any more than Microsoft does. (Though IANAL, so I may be wrong.)
Rational, it seems to me, has no motive to keep J++ non-compliant; it would be a great selling point to have a development platform that could produce either COM-friendly, Windows-only code or 100% Pure Java.
My only concern here is that Rational seems to favor high-price, high-margin products; we are unlikely to see a $100 "J++ Desktop Edition" from Rational. (Oh, well, I like Kawa and JBuilder anyway.)
Prior to this rearrangement, Bob Young was Chairman and CEO of Red Hat, and Szulik was President (since Novermber 1998); the only change is that the CEO title -- and with it, responsibility for day-to-day operations -- is changing hands.
I don't see any type of penalty that would actually make a difference in the way the world worked today.
How about this: all obsolete versions of all Microsoft products -- Win95, Office97, and (soon) NT4, among many others -- be made available in source-code form under GPL, BSD, or some other free/open license.
The old software would get picked up, debugged, and redistributed cheaply (CheapBytes.com, anyone?); and other operating systems could improve their Windows compatibility. There would be very little actual intervention in Microsoft's operations, and their current product line remains intact -- but everyone else gets a leg up.
This is an especially elegant solution, because it calls Microsoft's "freedom to innovate" bluff. You wanna innovate? Go right ahead -- in fact, you're going to have to innovate to compete with free versions of your older products. Put up or shut up.
... predicts the arrival of Kalki, the final Avatar of Vishnu, in CE 1999, and describes how he will rule over the Universe for a period of 108 years starting in 2003, before returning to his abode, Vaikunta. Preceding his arrival, "the world will be full of calamities and situations will be changing every instant".
Uh, yeah, okay.
But what does that have to do with the fact that Carrie-Anne Moss is such a babe?
Hmmm... am I the only 'geek' who thought Ringworld was a piece of crap?
That's a bit stronger than I'd word it, but yeah (or "yah", as Niven insists on spelling it), it's not his best.
I'd still recommend some Niven, but not Ringworld; check out the Flatlander and Crashlander anthologies (about Gil the Arm and Beowulf Shaeffer, respectively), and if you can find them, his Teleportation series (a classic exploration of the social effects of technological change, and one of these stories described what we now know as The Slashdot Effect) and his time travel series (The Flight of the Horse).
And since you discussed fantasy, note that Niven's Warlock series (The Magic Goes Away) is fantasy written to appeal to SF readers, with a logical reason for why magic used to work but doesn't anymore.
Similarly, I'd recommend some Spider Robinson, but not Stardance; start with the "Callahan's Bar" series, and also Deathkiller (which combines Mindkiller and Time Pressure).
I don't understand your title, but I agree that this SOAP stuff is first rate work.
In the new movie "Fight Club", the Brad Pitt character's family got its wealth from selling a high-priced brand of soap. (The soap is made using a "special process" that turns out to be pretty gross.) The movie's logo is the words "Fight Club" embossed on a bar of soap.
One of my professors got his undergrad degree in aerospace engineering -- he worked on the Apollo program and helped send people to the moon. In his domain, he was great -- but one day we stopped sending people to the moon, and he had to find a new job.
In January of 1996, I was programming at an aerospace firm, using C, Oracle, and Pro*C. Two months later, I was working at a credit bureau, for a significantly higher salary -- using C, Oracle, and Pro*C.
If aerospace goes downhill, we can pack our bags and switch over the finance. If finance takes a downturn, it's off to the energy sector. (At least here in Houston it is.)
Of all the professions I can think of, only programming and accounting have such portable skill sets; and when a company goes out of business, the accountants are the last ones to be let go.
We have reason to worry about a general economic downturn, but no moreso than anyone else. Petroleum engineers, aerospace engineers, medical technicians, and others have to worry about downturns in specific sectors; but programmers abide, because Windows and Unix are everywhere.
Just keep your tools sharp and your resume up-to-date.
There comes a time when you can still get hired for exactly what you're getting paid to do now, but not for something new, even if you could easily pick it up in a few weeks,
It's been my experience that the point at which you switch jobs is the *wrong* time to try to switch skill sets; when you're trying to negotiate salary and placement, you need to play to your current strengths.
Once you're in the door, though, then you start branching out. "Say, boss, I hear you're looking at doing the new system in Java. I've been looking at Java in my off time, might I take a crack at it?"
The manager is faced with a choice between looking for new talent with Java experience, and hoping that they turn out to be worth the exorbitant salary -- or using a known quantity, someone who already knows the company's business model, who might need to do some studying.
For most managers, this is a no-brainer; they go with the person they know. And voila, you've added to your skill set while staying gainfully employed.
The key is to avoid shops that specialize in a single technology, even if it's the current "hot" language or platform. (That's Perl now, right? I haven't been keeping score lately.)
A citizen is defined as someone who has served their time in the military.
Almost; the requirement was two years of public service, which might or might not be in the military, at the discretion of the government. Also, you had to have actually completed your service; if you were on active duty, you were still not allowed to vote or hold office. Finally, even those who hadn't qualified to vote still had freedom of speech, property ownership, etc.
Heinlein expanded on this in an essay in Expanded Universe, and suggested alternatives: require that the voter solve a quadratic equation, or pay a modest poll tax. (Think about that one; could anyone afford to buy an election if votes were $20 a pop?) Finally, he suggested (without any apparent irony) only allowing mothers to vote.
His idea was not so much pro-military as it was against automatic, universal suffrage. He thought there should be some kind of standard that voters be required to meet: civic-mindedness (the public service rule), intelligence and education (the equation-solving rule), a vested interest in the future (the mothers-only rule), or simply motivation (the poll tax).
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with Heinlein; in fact, I don't, though I acknowledge that he was addressing a very real and vexing problem.
I always thought the old "Firefly" model of collaborative selection/filtering could be useful for "Net Nanny" types of applications.
Here's where we find out whether the goal of the CDA types is really protecting children (in which case this solution is acceptable) or censorship of society at large (in which case, the freedom allowed by this scheme would be unacceptable).
Bets, anyone?
Also, apropos nothing, did you notice the file sizes for Draft 01? Text: 11K HTML: 16K Word: 177K
Yes, Word requires a tad over 16 bytes per character of text. (Yeah, I know, it would be a lower ratio in a larger file.)
Slashdot Mirror
(Okay, probably not. But you get the idea.)
As usual, I caught the error about 0.1 seconds after hitting "Submit" ...
$year4 = ($year < 70) ? "20$year" : "19$year";
I noticed in one of the screenshots that they've slightly revised the QuickTime player; at least they seem to have gotten rid of that dumb "thumbwheel" volume control and replaced it with a slider.
"The Y2K threat appears to have been overestimated. Time to get a real life."
(Hope I didn't butcher this explanation too badly; I am not a physicist, and I don't even play one on TV.)
The context of this explanation was an audience that a group of cosmologists -- Hawking among them -- had had with the pope. His Holiness advised the assembled physicists that they could never unravel the mystery of the very start of the universe, since that was an act of God, and beyond mortal understanding. Hawking thought it ironic that the pope had ascribed to God a role which, by this hypothesis, didn't exist.
For general merchandise, I usually use Buy.com; I've been happy with them, though a friend of mine ran afoul of their returns policy a couple of times.
On the other hand, is it really fair that there's only one Cameron Diaz? Shouldn't there be enough of them for everyone who wants one?
</humor>
More seriously, do you really think everyone would choose to have identical children? Would, for instance, Pat Buchanan and Oprah Winfrey both want their children to look or act like each other? Why do you think everyone would want their kids to look like Leo DiCaprio, when there's no shortage of people who hate him?
If you worry about the loss of individuality, then you're not putting enough faith in the individuality that already exists.
Here it is; the page also contains links to two other ads in the same campaign.
Rational, it seems to me, has no motive to keep J++ non-compliant; it would be a great selling point to have a development platform that could produce either COM-friendly, Windows-only code or 100% Pure Java.
My only concern here is that Rational seems to favor high-price, high-margin products; we are unlikely to see a $100 "J++ Desktop Edition" from Rational. (Oh, well, I like Kawa and JBuilder anyway.)
Szulik is credited with managing Red Hat's IPO.
The old software would get picked up, debugged, and redistributed cheaply (CheapBytes.com, anyone?); and other operating systems could improve their Windows compatibility. There would be very little actual intervention in Microsoft's operations, and their current product line remains intact -- but everyone else gets a leg up.
This is an especially elegant solution, because it calls Microsoft's "freedom to innovate" bluff. You wanna innovate? Go right ahead -- in fact, you're going to have to innovate to compete with free versions of your older products. Put up or shut up.
But what does that have to do with the fact that Carrie-Anne Moss is such a babe?
Seriously, this is just a tad off-topic...
(The page linked to here is a description of an e-mail exchange with IDG's lawyers; at the bottom of that page is a link to the "offending" site.)
I'd still recommend some Niven, but not Ringworld; check out the Flatlander and Crashlander anthologies (about Gil the Arm and Beowulf Shaeffer, respectively), and if you can find them, his Teleportation series (a classic exploration of the social effects of technological change, and one of these stories described what we now know as The Slashdot Effect) and his time travel series (The Flight of the Horse).
And since you discussed fantasy, note that Niven's Warlock series (The Magic Goes Away) is fantasy written to appeal to SF readers, with a logical reason for why magic used to work but doesn't anymore.
Oh, and most important of all: Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.
Similarly, I'd recommend some Spider Robinson, but not Stardance; start with the "Callahan's Bar" series, and also Deathkiller (which combines Mindkiller and Time Pressure).
In January of 1996, I was programming at an aerospace firm, using C, Oracle, and Pro*C. Two months later, I was working at a credit bureau, for a significantly higher salary -- using C, Oracle, and Pro*C.
If aerospace goes downhill, we can pack our bags and switch over the finance. If finance takes a downturn, it's off to the energy sector. (At least here in Houston it is.)
Of all the professions I can think of, only programming and accounting have such portable skill sets; and when a company goes out of business, the accountants are the last ones to be let go.
We have reason to worry about a general economic downturn, but no moreso than anyone else. Petroleum engineers, aerospace engineers, medical technicians, and others have to worry about downturns in specific sectors; but programmers abide, because Windows and Unix are everywhere.
Just keep your tools sharp and your resume up-to-date.
It's been my experience that the point at which you switch jobs is the *wrong* time to try to switch skill sets; when you're trying to negotiate salary and placement, you need to play to your current strengths.
Once you're in the door, though, then you start branching out. "Say, boss, I hear you're looking at doing the new system in Java. I've been looking at Java in my off time, might I take a crack at it?"
The manager is faced with a choice between looking for new talent with Java experience, and hoping that they turn out to be worth the exorbitant salary -- or using a known quantity, someone who already knows the company's business model, who might need to do some studying.
For most managers, this is a no-brainer; they go with the person they know. And voila, you've added to your skill set while staying gainfully employed.
The key is to avoid shops that specialize in a single technology, even if it's the current "hot" language or platform. (That's Perl now, right? I haven't been keeping score lately.)
Almost; the requirement was two years of public service, which might or might not be in the military, at the discretion of the government. Also, you had to have actually completed your service; if you were on active duty, you were still not allowed to vote or hold office. Finally, even those who hadn't qualified to vote still had freedom of speech, property ownership, etc.
Heinlein expanded on this in an essay in Expanded Universe, and suggested alternatives: require that the voter solve a quadratic equation, or pay a modest poll tax. (Think about that one; could anyone afford to buy an election if votes were $20 a pop?) Finally, he suggested (without any apparent irony) only allowing mothers to vote.
His idea was not so much pro-military as it was against automatic, universal suffrage. He thought there should be some kind of standard that voters be required to meet: civic-mindedness (the public service rule), intelligence and education (the equation-solving rule), a vested interest in the future (the mothers-only rule), or simply motivation (the poll tax).
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with Heinlein; in fact, I don't, though I acknowledge that he was addressing a very real and vexing problem.
I always thought the old "Firefly" model of collaborative selection/filtering could be useful for "Net Nanny" types of applications.
Here's where we find out whether the goal of the CDA types is really protecting children (in which case this solution is acceptable) or censorship of society at large (in which case, the freedom allowed by this scheme would be unacceptable).
Bets, anyone?
Also, apropos nothing, did you notice the file sizes for Draft 01?
Text: 11K
HTML: 16K
Word: 177K
Yes, Word requires a tad over 16 bytes per character of text. (Yeah, I know, it would be a lower ratio in a larger file.)