In Oklahoma, we implemented a great, progressive, environmentally responsible "recycling" tax on all new automobile tires. Everybody pays $1 on each new tire. The money goes into a special "trust fund" and is used to reimburse companies that collect, recycle and re-use old tires.
Citizens loved it. Businesses loved it. The government loved it. The "trust fund" collected millions in dollars, created new businesses and jobs, and helped clean up the environment. It was win-win-win.
That is, until one year the regular budget fell short, and our dipshit legislature raided the millions of dollars in the "trust fund" to pay for something worthless, like more social programs or blowjobs for cops or something.
Now, we have some of the largest tire-dumps in the US sitting around waiting to be cleaned-up. The legislature is only paying a "pro-rata" share of the tax proceeds to recyclers, something like half the normal amount. Tire recycling companies are going out of business left and right. And, this is really the best part, the legislature now wants to raise the fucking tax to $2 per tire to bail the program out.
Seriously? Firefox will happily fire up whatever pdf viewer you want as an external program. Running it as a plugin just makes the browser bloated, harder to maintain, and probably less secure.
I guess if you're into that sort of thing, though, you should try the pdf kpart functionality in Konqueror.
I once worked at a place as a contractor (non-union) *snip* my expirences in dealing with the Union were not pleasent.
Of course they weren't. You were a competitor. Did the union hire you? If not, it was management making an end-run around the union. I wouldn't expect a union to *let* you do their work, let alone *help* you.
I was not allowed to open a server case
I wouldn't let an outside contractor (let alone a competitor) touch my servers either. But, then again, I'm competent to fix my own problems. Dunno about this "union" in question.
I could not pull my network cable from the back of my PC
Ditto. Of course, I merely advise people not to go unplugging things instead of prohibiting them. But I still get to laugh at them and clean up the mess when something explodes. I've seen people plug telephones into network cards, network cables into telephones, fuck-up all the little pins on the monitor when plugging it in, and, (really this is the best), try to swap monitors without changing the scan rate, letting out the magic smoke in the process. The best way to avoid all that is to just mandate that only competent people can work on computers, period.
Of course, the other good way is to take the "dentist" approach to professional services: belittle people when they fuck things up. Think about it: if you told your dentist "I tried to do my own root-canal and chipped a tooth" he would call you an idiot to your face, and proceed to hurt you even more than usual while fixing it. Even if you just tell him you haven't been brushing, you can probably expect a mild chiding. If you told him "I went to Larry the dentist instead of you last time, because he charges less. But he fucked up my gums, so, could you fix them?" you'd be lucky to wake up from the laughing gas.
There are great examples of useful unions for people who make more than the average salary, especially in highly technical jobs.
Aircraft mechanics, for instance, have fantastic unions. They guarantee their members have the necessary skills and training, as well as pay, that they need to perform their highly stressful jobs well. They know that, without a union, the money would not be spent on important aspects of their jobs, and that, when things went wrong, the mechanics would be the first ones to take the blame. So, they band together to say "If you fire the guy who cleans parts, or replace him with your retarded son-in-law, you fire all of us," and this makes sure the job is done correctly.
This sounds like the most useful aspect of a technical union, imho. Managers and PHBs will cut costs until wires are sparking and nobody is left working at the company who knows how to use whatever program the business is 90% dependent upon. Traditionally, consultants have filled this niche by providing a reliable supply (at inflated prices) of technical knowledge and fire-fighting services for when the cost-cutting goes a little too far and the last competent IT guy quits to become a BMX biker. Normally, at this point, a consultant would come in with the newest version of $BIG_BIG_SOFTWARE and switch the entire company, or at least provide transition services until new staff can be found and trained.
With Open Source, that model doesn't work as well. Yet, there is still a need for highly competent technical know-how of the types of things that only come up every couple of years. How does an Open Source shop guarantee that the boss doesn't fire the only guy who knows how to debug a kernel?
First, you decry the fact that colleges produce mindless drones. Then you say you want a drone. And then you say you don't. And, in the end, you still think the ideal employee has a degree.
What is it? Do you want employees that "actually work and be efficient", or do you want people who "do what their told"?
Yes, in fact, since most technology can in some way be used by [terrorists/the Chinese/aliens] for their nefarious purposes, we should just classify all patents. In fact, invention itself should be outlawed. Oh, and thinking too.
So, let's round up anyone with the ability to build a computer in their garage, and lock them away in a work camp to protect their important work from exploitation by [terrorists/the Chinese/aliens].
That will ensure that, wherever we are going in this handbasket, the military will be there with the resources it needs to protect us from [terrorists/the Chinese/aliens].
Because, if there's one thing that has enabled progress in the Western world, it's government bureaucracy along with suppression of technical knowledge by the military industrial complex.
kids are in college learning what should be taught in highschool
Is it just me, or does Slashdot have this same conversation over and over again? I don't think either colleges or highschools want it any other way, which is sad. Education is backwards because the money is at the wrong end.
And dare I say, class size has something to do with it?
Yes, and integration and Federal control over schools has a lot to do with it as well. Separating students by intelligence is frowned upon; the "smart" classes could end up mostly middle-class white kids. God forbid home schooling and school vouchers ever become the norm. They're usually denounced as some sort of racist plot to enslave humanity by allowing halfway intelligent students to learn in an environment devoid of degenerate idiots.
And eventually, they will make their great discovories; just later in life.
I'm not sure that's entirely sustainable. At a certain point, the effort in continued education will become more than most people are willing to put up with. Sure, there will be those few who buck the trend, but scientific leadership is a dynamo. And the overall trend, at least in the US, is that it's dying; which is probably the real lesson to be taken from statistics such as these.
Wow... that was a really nice rant. Gotta keep that one in my archives.
Heh. Yeah I'd say you pretty much nailed it.
Stupid people are valuable, because they have to be fed anyways, and they're cheaper than the robots and oil it would take to replace them. Television and radio keeps stupid people stupid, motivates them to keep working, and transfers their disposable income to the wealthy and intelligent.
Short term, stupid people will get more stupid and more abundant. Advertisers and businesses will promote stupidity. Long term, they will all become useless eaters when fusion reactors come online and manufacturing methods outstrip their abilities.
Quickbooks will work fine for you, for now. But I'd suggest you should really evaluate who your competitors are and what they are using.
As my econ professor always said, you can make money working 10 hours a day on your own business, but capitalism is biased towards big companies.
Wal-Mart didn't get where they are today by outsourcing everything. They write everything themselves, pay only for what they need, and take advantage of the fact that they can write an application once and deploy it at a thousand stores. No one will ever be able to compete with Wal-Mart on prices. That is their strategy: no overhead. That strategy wouldn't work if they used Quickbooks. And the only way to compete with this strategy is to stay as far away from Wal-Mart as possible (figuratively and literally).
Look at UPS. 90% of small businesses probably rely on them to ship their products. But UPS isn't satisfied with this relationship. They see room for improvement, by getting rid of the overhead inherent in small businesses, like warehouses, and employees, and Quickbooks. So, in the next 10 years, UPS will move to take over their customers' core business functions and streamline the processes with custom-built software. They began preparing for this years ago. And if you're reliant upon them, you will have little choice.
Really, you should decide right now how big your business will become. And, in many ways, you are. You have three workstations now, but if you expect to ever have ten, start now! Don't settle on a solution that limits you to five. If you're content to exist in the niche markets that companies like UPS and Wal-Mart will never be able to touch, great. Continue using Quickbooks. If you want to hold your own selling more than just the latest fad, start bringing as much as possible in-house.
I think so, too. But think of this: Can you run an emulator on both cores? That may be integral to Intel's strategy. As long as the app is hoggish enough, it runs fine normally, but perhaps not at all in an emulator running on half a CPU.
How about sitting down and trying to make the best email app there is instead of just trying to copy existing ones down to their cosmetic features.
That's been done, plenty of times. Just look at the GIMP. And what do the GIMP developers get for their "innovative interface"? Ridicule and scorn to the effect of "make it look like Photoshop!"
The fact is, people don't want to learn a new interface, even if it's better. They want something that is basically like the interfaces they are used to.
Why do you think VCRs all have the same arrow on the play button? Why do you think the keypad on my Audiovox cell phone has the same buttons on it as my old Nokia?
I had a user tell me last week that the OpenOffice Save button didn't do the same thing it did in Word. He said that Word had a "Save As" button instead, that give you a dialog and a chance to choose a filename. After walking into the next room to show him that Word did, in fact, have the exact same Save button, I switched his button on OpenOffice to have "Save As" instead.
OSS apps can be whatever people want them to be. Most people want them to be similar to the apps they are used to on Windows, even if they don't quite know what that is exactly. In fact, most OSS apps started out with completely different interfaces, and have gradually become more like their Windows counterparts due to exactly these issues.
1. To resolve or settle (differences) by working with all the conflicting parties: mediate a labor-management dispute. 2. To bring about (a settlement, for example) by working with all the conflicting parties. 3. To effect or convey as an intermediate agent or mechanism.
They're probably just using "mediated" in a confusing way. Though it usually has positive connotation, I guess it can have a negative meaning as well.
I was wondering the same thing. I don't think I've ever consciously eaten "a healthy breakfast". If anything (usually it's nothing), it's just the sugary snacks and cola the submitter demonizes.
Though I can't find it now, this probably has to do with the study that showed people who stay up late are smarter than those who wake up at 6AM every day (as if that needed proof).
No, actually, in this case, he was wrong (by about a week). Somebody who downloaded Netscape 8.0 when it was released, then updated to 8.1 when it was released, would have a day of unpatched vulnerability.
Somebody who downloaded Firefox 1.0.3 on the day the latest exploit was revealed, then updated to 1.0.4 the day it was released, would have at least a week of vulnerability.
U.S. law prevents Internet providers from reading customer e-mail.
This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Despite what the law says, the Supreme Court has said that ISPs *can* read your mail, because it's a "store-and-forward" service.
Using port 25 directly, which is not stored, is the only e-mail that's still illegal to snoop. Unfortunately, if this passes and ISP's block port 25, that won't make a bit of difference. Americans should then *expect* their ISP to routinely read mail that goes through their servers.
No. In a CEO's mind, those issues are completely separate, and have been for years.
In a few more months, the neurons that contain these concepts in the heads of most CEOs will find each other, and the issues will become one. But, until then, we'll still see Billy G. begging for more H1-B visas instead of helping colleges to create those workers with "security" experience that he's interested in hiring all-of-a-sudden.
Re:At least they're taking extra precautions...
on
Tinfoil Hat House
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Seriously, space blankets work great to keep out the day star. I put one on a couple of windows last year, and went most of the summer without air conditioning. I'd bet it was 10 degrees cooler than without.
Those window films you buy at Home Depot are mostly the same stuff, but with a huge markup. And, though you can still kind of see through a space blanket, they block much more light than any of the commercial films.
It's probably not economical to re-apply film every summer and remove it for the winter. And space blankets aren't reusable. But there used to be a site on the 'net that sold reusable films. I'd tell you what I think they are probably made of, but I haven't ordered my supply yet:)
Attacking Mozilla for following standard security procedures for bugs is fucking childish.
No, the fact that the most recent bugs were hidden for months and leaked along with an exploit is fucking childish.
Both RedHat and Mozilla have been trying this "hide all the bugs" crap for a while and it has resulted in worse security. And the only reason they're bitching at each other now is that each one wants to be the sole provider of updates. This is the kind of behaviour you would expect from Microsoft, not from open source.
Slashdot Mirror
In Oklahoma, we implemented a great, progressive, environmentally responsible "recycling" tax on all new automobile tires. Everybody pays $1 on each new tire. The money goes into a special "trust fund" and is used to reimburse companies that collect, recycle and re-use old tires.
Citizens loved it. Businesses loved it. The government loved it. The "trust fund" collected millions in dollars, created new businesses and jobs, and helped clean up the environment. It was win-win-win.
That is, until one year the regular budget fell short, and our dipshit legislature raided the millions of dollars in the "trust fund" to pay for something worthless, like more social programs or blowjobs for cops or something.
Now, we have some of the largest tire-dumps in the US sitting around waiting to be cleaned-up. The legislature is only paying a "pro-rata" share of the tax proceeds to recyclers, something like half the normal amount. Tire recycling companies are going out of business left and right. And, this is really the best part, the legislature now wants to raise the fucking tax to $2 per tire to bail the program out.
Seriously? Firefox will happily fire up whatever pdf viewer you want as an external program. Running it as a plugin just makes the browser bloated, harder to maintain, and probably less secure.
I guess if you're into that sort of thing, though, you should try the pdf kpart functionality in Konqueror.
Does this really mean they're running a "net loss" of $2 millon? Or, does it mean the "net loss in revenue" between quarters was ~$2 million?
I once worked at a place as a contractor (non-union) *snip* my expirences in dealing with the Union were not pleasent.
Of course they weren't. You were a competitor. Did the union hire you? If not, it was management making an end-run around the union. I wouldn't expect a union to *let* you do their work, let alone *help* you.
I was not allowed to open a server case
I wouldn't let an outside contractor (let alone a competitor) touch my servers either. But, then again, I'm competent to fix my own problems. Dunno about this "union" in question.
I could not pull my network cable from the back of my PC
Ditto. Of course, I merely advise people not to go unplugging things instead of prohibiting them. But I still get to laugh at them and clean up the mess when something explodes. I've seen people plug telephones into network cards, network cables into telephones, fuck-up all the little pins on the monitor when plugging it in, and, (really this is the best), try to swap monitors without changing the scan rate, letting out the magic smoke in the process. The best way to avoid all that is to just mandate that only competent people can work on computers, period.
Of course, the other good way is to take the "dentist" approach to professional services: belittle people when they fuck things up. Think about it: if you told your dentist "I tried to do my own root-canal and chipped a tooth" he would call you an idiot to your face, and proceed to hurt you even more than usual while fixing it. Even if you just tell him you haven't been brushing, you can probably expect a mild chiding. If you told him "I went to Larry the dentist instead of you last time, because he charges less. But he fucked up my gums, so, could you fix them?" you'd be lucky to wake up from the laughing gas.
There are great examples of useful unions for people who make more than the average salary, especially in highly technical jobs.
Aircraft mechanics, for instance, have fantastic unions. They guarantee their members have the necessary skills and training, as well as pay, that they need to perform their highly stressful jobs well. They know that, without a union, the money would not be spent on important aspects of their jobs, and that, when things went wrong, the mechanics would be the first ones to take the blame. So, they band together to say "If you fire the guy who cleans parts, or replace him with your retarded son-in-law, you fire all of us," and this makes sure the job is done correctly.
This sounds like the most useful aspect of a technical union, imho. Managers and PHBs will cut costs until wires are sparking and nobody is left working at the company who knows how to use whatever program the business is 90% dependent upon. Traditionally, consultants have filled this niche by providing a reliable supply (at inflated prices) of technical knowledge and fire-fighting services for when the cost-cutting goes a little too far and the last competent IT guy quits to become a BMX biker. Normally, at this point, a consultant would come in with the newest version of $BIG_BIG_SOFTWARE and switch the entire company, or at least provide transition services until new staff can be found and trained.
With Open Source, that model doesn't work as well. Yet, there is still a need for highly competent technical know-how of the types of things that only come up every couple of years. How does an Open Source shop guarantee that the boss doesn't fire the only guy who knows how to debug a kernel?
Wow, you're an idiot.
First, you decry the fact that colleges produce mindless drones. Then you say you want a drone. And then you say you don't. And, in the end, you still think the ideal employee has a degree.
What is it? Do you want employees that "actually work and be efficient", or do you want people who "do what their told"?
Yes, in fact, since most technology can in some way be used by [terrorists/the Chinese/aliens] for their nefarious purposes, we should just classify all patents. In fact, invention itself should be outlawed. Oh, and thinking too.
So, let's round up anyone with the ability to build a computer in their garage, and lock them away in a work camp to protect their important work from exploitation by [terrorists/the Chinese/aliens].
That will ensure that, wherever we are going in this handbasket, the military will be there with the resources it needs to protect us from [terrorists/the Chinese/aliens].
Because, if there's one thing that has enabled progress in the Western world, it's government bureaucracy along with suppression of technical knowledge by the military industrial complex.
kids are in college learning what should be taught in highschool
Is it just me, or does Slashdot have this same conversation over and over again? I don't think either colleges or highschools want it any other way, which is sad. Education is backwards because the money is at the wrong end.
And dare I say, class size has something to do with it?
Yes, and integration and Federal control over schools has a lot to do with it as well. Separating students by intelligence is frowned upon; the "smart" classes could end up mostly middle-class white kids. God forbid home schooling and school vouchers ever become the norm. They're usually denounced as some sort of racist plot to enslave humanity by allowing halfway intelligent students to learn in an environment devoid of degenerate idiots.
And eventually, they will make their great discovories; just later in life.
I'm not sure that's entirely sustainable. At a certain point, the effort in continued education will become more than most people are willing to put up with. Sure, there will be those few who buck the trend, but scientific leadership is a dynamo. And the overall trend, at least in the US, is that it's dying; which is probably the real lesson to be taken from statistics such as these.
yet change the content somewhat and suddenly new rationale come out.
Amateur pornography wants to be free?
You forgot, the US government provides the "great idea" as well as the "implementation", the "budget", the "users", and the "continued support". meh
Wow... that was a really nice rant. Gotta keep that one in my archives.
Heh. Yeah I'd say you pretty much nailed it.
Stupid people are valuable, because they have to be fed anyways, and they're cheaper than the robots and oil it would take to replace them. Television and radio keeps stupid people stupid, motivates them to keep working, and transfers their disposable income to the wealthy and intelligent.
Short term, stupid people will get more stupid and more abundant. Advertisers and businesses will promote stupidity. Long term, they will all become useless eaters when fusion reactors come online and manufacturing methods outstrip their abilities.
Quickbooks will work fine for you, for now. But I'd suggest you should really evaluate who your competitors are and what they are using.
As my econ professor always said, you can make money working 10 hours a day on your own business, but capitalism is biased towards big companies.
Wal-Mart didn't get where they are today by outsourcing everything. They write everything themselves, pay only for what they need, and take advantage of the fact that they can write an application once and deploy it at a thousand stores. No one will ever be able to compete with Wal-Mart on prices. That is their strategy: no overhead. That strategy wouldn't work if they used Quickbooks. And the only way to compete with this strategy is to stay as far away from Wal-Mart as possible (figuratively and literally).
Look at UPS. 90% of small businesses probably rely on them to ship their products. But UPS isn't satisfied with this relationship. They see room for improvement, by getting rid of the overhead inherent in small businesses, like warehouses, and employees, and Quickbooks. So, in the next 10 years, UPS will move to take over their customers' core business functions and streamline the processes with custom-built software. They began preparing for this years ago. And if you're reliant upon them, you will have little choice.
Really, you should decide right now how big your business will become. And, in many ways, you are. You have three workstations now, but if you expect to ever have ten, start now! Don't settle on a solution that limits you to five. If you're content to exist in the niche markets that companies like UPS and Wal-Mart will never be able to touch, great. Continue using Quickbooks. If you want to hold your own selling more than just the latest fad, start bringing as much as possible in-house.
The XBox has had a version of this since the beginning. It didn't stop it from being hacked.
I think so, too. But think of this: Can you run an emulator on both cores? That may be integral to Intel's strategy. As long as the app is hoggish enough, it runs fine normally, but perhaps not at all in an emulator running on half a CPU.
they're all virtually identical, so why not use any of them, which defeats the point of "choice" anyways.
So choose on other grounds than "what it looks like". Like price, like security, like integrated spam filtering.
How about sitting down and trying to make the best email app there is instead of just trying to copy existing ones down to their cosmetic features.
That's been done, plenty of times. Just look at the GIMP. And what do the GIMP developers get for their "innovative interface"? Ridicule and scorn to the effect of "make it look like Photoshop!"
The fact is, people don't want to learn a new interface, even if it's better. They want something that is basically like the interfaces they are used to.
Why do you think VCRs all have the same arrow on the play button? Why do you think the keypad on my Audiovox cell phone has the same buttons on it as my old Nokia?
I had a user tell me last week that the OpenOffice Save button didn't do the same thing it did in Word. He said that Word had a "Save As" button instead, that give you a dialog and a chance to choose a filename. After walking into the next room to show him that Word did, in fact, have the exact same Save button, I switched his button on OpenOffice to have "Save As" instead.
OSS apps can be whatever people want them to be. Most people want them to be similar to the apps they are used to on Windows, even if they don't quite know what that is exactly. In fact, most OSS apps started out with completely different interfaces, and have gradually become more like their Windows counterparts due to exactly these issues.
Mediate:
1. To resolve or settle (differences) by working with all the conflicting parties: mediate a labor-management dispute.
2. To bring about (a settlement, for example) by working with all the conflicting parties.
3. To effect or convey as an intermediate agent or mechanism.
They're probably just using "mediated" in a confusing way. Though it usually has positive connotation, I guess it can have a negative meaning as well.
I was wondering the same thing. I don't think I've ever consciously eaten "a healthy breakfast". If anything (usually it's nothing), it's just the sugary snacks and cola the submitter demonizes.
Though I can't find it now, this probably has to do with the study that showed people who stay up late are smarter than those who wake up at 6AM every day (as if that needed proof).
1.0.4 had been out for a week already before Netscape launched 8.0.
This is, again, wrong. Netscape 8.0 was released on the 19th, three days before Firefox 1.0.4 on the 22nd.
he was still correct (by a day)
No, actually, in this case, he was wrong (by about a week). Somebody who downloaded Netscape 8.0 when it was released, then updated to 8.1 when it was released, would have a day of unpatched vulnerability.
Somebody who downloaded Firefox 1.0.3 on the day the latest exploit was revealed, then updated to 1.0.4 the day it was released, would have at least a week of vulnerability.
U.S. law prevents Internet providers from reading customer e-mail.
This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Despite what the law says, the Supreme Court has said that ISPs *can* read your mail, because it's a "store-and-forward" service.
Using port 25 directly, which is not stored, is the only e-mail that's still illegal to snoop. Unfortunately, if this passes and ISP's block port 25, that won't make a bit of difference. Americans should then *expect* their ISP to routinely read mail that goes through their servers.
Not to mention, most ISPs suck ass (Southwestern Bell, I'm looking in your direction) and charge big bucks for service that doesn't suck ass.
No. In a CEO's mind, those issues are completely separate, and have been for years.
In a few more months, the neurons that contain these concepts in the heads of most CEOs will find each other, and the issues will become one. But, until then, we'll still see Billy G. begging for more H1-B visas instead of helping colleges to create those workers with "security" experience that he's interested in hiring all-of-a-sudden.
Seriously, space blankets work great to keep out the day star. I put one on a couple of windows last year, and went most of the summer without air conditioning. I'd bet it was 10 degrees cooler than without.
:)
Those window films you buy at Home Depot are mostly the same stuff, but with a huge markup. And, though you can still kind of see through a space blanket, they block much more light than any of the commercial films.
It's probably not economical to re-apply film every summer and remove it for the winter. And space blankets aren't reusable. But there used to be a site on the 'net that sold reusable films. I'd tell you what I think they are probably made of, but I haven't ordered my supply yet
Attacking Mozilla for following standard security procedures for bugs is fucking childish.
No, the fact that the most recent bugs were hidden for months and leaked along with an exploit is fucking childish.
Both RedHat and Mozilla have been trying this "hide all the bugs" crap for a while and it has resulted in worse security. And the only reason they're bitching at each other now is that each one wants to be the sole provider of updates. This is the kind of behaviour you would expect from Microsoft, not from open source.