On the other hand, any competent web developer should be able to pick up Ruby + Rails in a couple weeks - especially if there's an existing Rails developer for them to bug with questions.
Seriously - the job ad should say "Ruby on Rails developer: 2+ years web development experience on *nix (i.e. Perl, PHP)".
It's definitely one way only, since there's no way for a lander to have enough fuel to blast off from Mars, let alone bring the requisite infrastructure with it.
No way?
There are *tons* of ways to accomplish a round trip to mars, even with current technology. If the program had real funding like the moon program did and developed new technology, it'd be even easier.
Going to Mars would be very cool, but I'd imagine that it would require considerable resources. Is it really worth it?
If it can redirect money from military spending, then it's *obviously* worth it. The aerospace industry *will* get a certain amount of funding for something - their lobbyists are ninjas. Every dollar that gets spent on bombs causes infrastructure damage somewhere that needs to be repaired later. A dollar spent on space exploration has no downside.
The reality of large Mars missions is that the human is only along for the ride, sort of like a color commentator, to help snare the public's imagination and more funding.
Bullshit. If the mars mission is actually doing useful work, then having people physically there will make the work much more efficient. Humans on mars can make decisions in real time. The latency of radio signals makes trying to do anything significant remotely really obnoxious.
A bad programmer will fuck up a program. A bad lawyer will fuck up people's lives, and then probably move into politics and fuck up entire countries.
It's getting more and more that a bad program is a lot like a bad law, but I agree. People who can't handle simple abstract logic should go study art history or something.
The programming courses are so simple, but you have to take courses like Calculus IV and Physics II.
People drop out of CS programs because of programming courses too. The first thing that gets people is recursion. The next big thing is pointers. Some people just aren't prepared for those concepts, and it's too much for them.
Sure, Calc takes out some students too, but in a good CS program the programming courses aren't "easy" for everyone either.
Bottom line - OLPC network mesh software is pre-alpha.
Just because the OLPC is designed to use the entire WiFi band for its mesh network *does not* imply that it's not a mature design, just that it wasn't designed to co-exist with other WiFi networks on the same band.
Many of the companies with service centers would like that to be true, but that doesn't mean that it is. As always, in the *only way* to know your legal standing in a case like this is to talk to a lawyer.
If that were true in this case then it would make it *utterly* obvious that someone at Microsoft was ethically at fault. If such an agreement were assumed then the letter included in the case indicated a lack of acceptance of that arrangement - in which case doing anything other than shipping it back untouched would be obviously unacceptable.
For example, in the GIMP : Create a New Image, the order is [Help] [Reset] [Cancel] [Okay]. Last I looked, this was an LTR (left-to-right) locale. The default action in EVERY other environment is on the left in LTR locales.
Except Windows, where the default action is in the middle (i.e. the hardest to find possible choice):
Windows Dialog
Or Mac OS Classic, where it works just like in Gnome:
Mac Classic Dialog
Or In Mac OS X, where it works just like in Gnome:
OS X Dialog
I can't find a screenshot, but KDE seems to work like Windows.
I still don't see what the problem is here. There are two common ways of doing it. Mac and Gnome do it one way, Windows and KDE do it the other. *shrug*
You can see a lot of investment starting to pour into the area of Hydrogen cell powered cars because people have realized the issues we will face shortage come ten years from now.
If anyone had really "realized the issues we will face", they wouldn't have even *considered* hydrogen fuel cells as a solution. Hydrogen fuel cells look great on paper if you assume that the hydrogen and the infrastructure to distribute it will magically appear out of thin air. But it won't, so hydrogen research is just a way for these companies to generate great looking press releases without doing anything useful.
That stuff's just trivia. Even scientists can't answer those - and if they have any use for the answers they know where to look them up. But... the fact that *every* area of human knowledge has great volumes of trivia isn't an excuse to be completely uneducated.
Wait a second... Just because there appear to be two sides to some issue *does not* mean that the right answer is to be found somewhere in the middle. Perhaps the answer is there, but to simply assume that it is is foolish.
No Christian church or theology with significant number of adherents advocates bombing abortion clinics. On the other hand, mainstream Muslim clerics do openly advocate violence against non-Muslims.
And a Muslim would say that no Muslim group with a significant following advocates your favorite example of extremist Muslim terrorism, but that mainstream Christian clerics openly advocate turning the entire middle east into a "glass parking lot".
Again, religion is a really easy way to rationalize violence - and to expect no violence from *any* ideology that preaches "we're right, you're wrong, you have to follow our rules in your country" is absurd.
without it OSS in business still has a big FAIL stamped on it's forehead.
What you really mean to say is that, without this specific tool, you'd have to change some of your business processes in order to use different software. The funny thing is that it's a different tool for each person who makes this complaint.
It's perfectly possible to use FOSS to support running pretty much any business. The only real exception is where the business itself is to produce data in proprietary file formats - i.e. acting as a graphics design consultant is frequently the job of creating photoshop files rather than graphics design. But database reporting doesn't fall into that category; not even close.
Greater than George Washington or Abraham Lincoln?
I don't know about Asimov vs. Washington, but I'll happily take on an easier one:
Benjamin Franklin was a greater American than Abraham Lincoln, hands down.
That's OK. Without some "elitism" in the form of honoring meaningful accomplishments there is no social pressure to accomplish anything meaningful. A little bit of discrimination can be good too - take AP classes, they discriminate against poor students, and that's a good thing.
How do you deal with kids with mental disabilities? Kids who just 'dont get math' or 'dont get chemistry'?
If the goal is to promote math and science education, you deal with those people by not including them in the program.
Now, I don't necessarily agree with what the initial poster suggested, but being against trying to improve certain aspects of education just because it wouldn't be all-inclusive is absurd. That's like being against poetry contests in English class because they discriminate against non-native English speakers.
Instead of trying to change them, figure out how to do what their leaders do and "sell" them what you want them to think.
This is the technique that's been used to sell bad ideas and confuse populations for all of history. We can do better than that with science, since the idea of trying to rationally understand the world is actually a *good* idea and should *reduce* confusion.
Science is not for everyone, and you are just going to make a lot of good people feel stupid, inferior, or worse if you push too hard and make them aware of things they can't and won't understand.
Bullshit. Having a basic rational understanding of the world is absolutely "for everyone". If someone can't and won't understand the basics of the scientific knowledge that we as a species have struggled for all of history to figure out then they *should* be made to feel stupid - ignorance certainly isn't a virtue to be respected.
Fair enough, but what happens when he decides to leave the company or gets hit by a car?
What happens when the proprietary software vendor goes under? Sure, it's less likely than an employee leaving - but it's also a hell of a lot more devastating since no-one else in the world can effectively support that proprietary package.
Then the business owner needs to find someone else to support the application which is mission-critical to the business.
The most likely situation is that the system will just keep working and won't need any special support for quite a while. When it does need support (most likely because the business owner wants new functionality), any FOSS-aware consultant will be able to help him. You disparage the idea of using something like Craigslist to get support - but being able to go to someone else when your initial vendor becomes unavailable is something that I wouldn't be willing to do without in my business.
While I've never gone looking for any "out of the box" POS hardware/software solutions, I sure haven't seen any.
Those are available from a number of companies, although since the hardware is all standard off the shelf stuff there's no real reason for someone who's even vaguely technical to buy it as a bundle. Simply buying the hardware and plugging it into a computer with any of the decent FOSS packages installed is a straightforward solution to the problem.
it sounds like he's ready to go tinkering.
Yes it does - it even sounds like he's thinking about writing some of his own code, which is probably a mistake. But there's a lot of space between writing his own code and restricting himself to extremely expensive windows-only commercial-off-the-shelf solutions from giant vendors.
That's like saying there's nothing very good on Windows for First Person Shooter games. Or that there's nothing good on Mac for page layout. If you couldn't find any FOSS solutions for a POS setup it's because you didn't look. At all.
There's a very simple reason to limit yourself to FOSS for this sort of application: forwards compatibility. In 10 years or so, you might actually want to use all this data that you've collected - perhaps even migrate it to some new system. With free software and open standards, this will take an expert an hour or two. With proprietary software and random formats designed specifically for vendor lock-in, it's likely to be a god-awful nightmare even for an expert.
There may be some areas where the FOSS solutions are so immature that the proprietary applications have significant practical advantages. Point of sale is not one of them - point of sale with free software on Linux is a well-solved problem with decade old mature solutions at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, any competent web developer should be able to pick up Ruby + Rails in a couple weeks - especially if there's an existing Rails developer for them to bug with questions.
Seriously - the job ad should say "Ruby on Rails developer: 2+ years web development experience on *nix (i.e. Perl, PHP)".
No way?
There are *tons* of ways to accomplish a round trip to mars, even with current technology. If the program had real funding like the moon program did and developed new technology, it'd be even easier.
If it can redirect money from military spending, then it's *obviously* worth it. The aerospace industry *will* get a certain amount of funding for something - their lobbyists are ninjas. Every dollar that gets spent on bombs causes infrastructure damage somewhere that needs to be repaired later. A dollar spent on space exploration has no downside.
Bullshit. If the mars mission is actually doing useful work, then having people physically there will make the work much more efficient. Humans on mars can make decisions in real time. The latency of radio signals makes trying to do anything significant remotely really obnoxious.
It's getting more and more that a bad program is a lot like a bad law, but I agree. People who can't handle simple abstract logic should go study art history or something.
People drop out of CS programs because of programming courses too. The first thing that gets people is recursion. The next big thing is pointers. Some people just aren't prepared for those concepts, and it's too much for them.
Sure, Calc takes out some students too, but in a good CS program the programming courses aren't "easy" for everyone either.
Just because the OLPC is designed to use the entire WiFi band for its mesh network *does not* imply that it's not a mature design, just that it wasn't designed to co-exist with other WiFi networks on the same band.
Not until users stop using IE7. On a web site I recently did dev work for, IE6 was still considered the primary target.
Many of the companies with service centers would like that to be true, but that doesn't mean that it is. As always, in the *only way* to know your legal standing in a case like this is to talk to a lawyer.
If that were true in this case then it would make it *utterly* obvious that someone at Microsoft was ethically at fault. If such an agreement were assumed then the letter included in the case indicated a lack of acceptance of that arrangement - in which case doing anything other than shipping it back untouched would be obviously unacceptable.
Except Windows, where the default action is in the middle (i.e. the hardest to find possible choice):
Windows Dialog
Or Mac OS Classic, where it works just like in Gnome:
Mac Classic Dialog
Or In Mac OS X, where it works just like in Gnome:
OS X Dialog
I can't find a screenshot, but KDE seems to work like Windows.
I still don't see what the problem is here. There are two common ways of doing it. Mac and Gnome do it one way, Windows and KDE do it the other. *shrug*
Gnome is consistent and very usable - so their guidelines seem to be working. I'm not sure what your complaint is.
If anyone had really "realized the issues we will face", they wouldn't have even *considered* hydrogen fuel cells as a solution. Hydrogen fuel cells look great on paper if you assume that the hydrogen and the infrastructure to distribute it will magically appear out of thin air. But it won't, so hydrogen research is just a way for these companies to generate great looking press releases without doing anything useful.
That stuff's just trivia. Even scientists can't answer those - and if they have any use for the answers they know where to look them up. But... the fact that *every* area of human knowledge has great volumes of trivia isn't an excuse to be completely uneducated.
Wait a second... Just because there appear to be two sides to some issue *does not* mean that the right answer is to be found somewhere in the middle. Perhaps the answer is there, but to simply assume that it is is foolish.
And a Muslim would say that no Muslim group with a significant following advocates your favorite example of extremist Muslim terrorism, but that mainstream Christian clerics openly advocate turning the entire middle east into a "glass parking lot".
Again, religion is a really easy way to rationalize violence - and to expect no violence from *any* ideology that preaches "we're right, you're wrong, you have to follow our rules in your country" is absurd.
What you really mean to say is that, without this specific tool, you'd have to change some of your business processes in order to use different software. The funny thing is that it's a different tool for each person who makes this complaint.
It's perfectly possible to use FOSS to support running pretty much any business. The only real exception is where the business itself is to produce data in proprietary file formats - i.e. acting as a graphics design consultant is frequently the job of creating photoshop files rather than graphics design. But database reporting doesn't fall into that category; not even close.
I don't know about Asimov vs. Washington, but I'll happily take on an easier one:
Benjamin Franklin was a greater American than Abraham Lincoln, hands down.
That's OK. Without some "elitism" in the form of honoring meaningful accomplishments there is no social pressure to accomplish anything meaningful. A little bit of discrimination can be good too - take AP classes, they discriminate against poor students, and that's a good thing.
If the goal is to promote math and science education, you deal with those people by not including them in the program.
Now, I don't necessarily agree with what the initial poster suggested, but being against trying to improve certain aspects of education just because it wouldn't be all-inclusive is absurd. That's like being against poetry contests in English class because they discriminate against non-native English speakers.
This is the technique that's been used to sell bad ideas and confuse populations for all of history. We can do better than that with science, since the idea of trying to rationally understand the world is actually a *good* idea and should *reduce* confusion.
Bullshit. Having a basic rational understanding of the world is absolutely "for everyone". If someone can't and won't understand the basics of the scientific knowledge that we as a species have struggled for all of history to figure out then they *should* be made to feel stupid - ignorance certainly isn't a virtue to be respected.
What happens when the proprietary software vendor goes under? Sure, it's less likely than an employee leaving - but it's also a hell of a lot more devastating since no-one else in the world can effectively support that proprietary package.
The most likely situation is that the system will just keep working and won't need any special support for quite a while. When it does need support (most likely because the business owner wants new functionality), any FOSS-aware consultant will be able to help him. You disparage the idea of using something like Craigslist to get support - but being able to go to someone else when your initial vendor becomes unavailable is something that I wouldn't be willing to do without in my business.
Those are available from a number of companies, although since the hardware is all standard off the shelf stuff there's no real reason for someone who's even vaguely technical to buy it as a bundle. Simply buying the hardware and plugging it into a computer with any of the decent FOSS packages installed is a straightforward solution to the problem.
Yes it does - it even sounds like he's thinking about writing some of his own code, which is probably a mistake. But there's a lot of space between writing his own code and restricting himself to extremely expensive windows-only commercial-off-the-shelf solutions from giant vendors.
Bwahahahahaha!
That's like saying there's nothing very good on Windows for First Person Shooter games. Or that there's nothing good on Mac for page layout. If you couldn't find any FOSS solutions for a POS setup it's because you didn't look. At all.
There's a very simple reason to limit yourself to FOSS for this sort of application: forwards compatibility. In 10 years or so, you might actually want to use all this data that you've collected - perhaps even migrate it to some new system. With free software and open standards, this will take an expert an hour or two. With proprietary software and random formats designed specifically for vendor lock-in, it's likely to be a god-awful nightmare even for an expert.
There may be some areas where the FOSS solutions are so immature that the proprietary applications have significant practical advantages. Point of sale is not one of them - point of sale with free software on Linux is a well-solved problem with decade old mature solutions at this point.