It is certainly possible that you are right. However, you could also be wrong. She might be a depressed procrastinator/worry wort, and the obstacle of this super expensive but ultimately useless (as far as she is concerned) computer really prevented her from getting into those online classes.
Assuming the version of events in the article are correct, then I blame Dell first.
Dell's job should be to serve the customer and get them what they want, since Dell can't possibly guess what they need. Talking someone into using something they are not familiar with is a misplaced form of advocacy. It is as bad as talking people into buying something they don't need.
That she payed a whopping $1100 for a laptop makes it even worse. Since she is a bit of a ludite, I expect the computer will not be used for extreme graphics or number crunching. So she probably overpaid by as much as $500 versus what she really needed. However this was her choice, and her bad. She should have asked savvy friends for advice on this purchase, or done some research on "the intenets".
I cannot blame her for complaining about the verizon CD. That's how that stuff is sold, and even many so called "power users" would not know how to configure that stuff if the CD didn't do it automatically for them. I find it hard to blame Verizon as well, since it is non-trivial to do automatic setup via CD for linux. Maybe something clever could be done, but there will always be some that fall between the cracks.
Ultimately I like to blame Dell here. If their sales interface was better, she would not only have gotten what she wanted, and maybe even what she needed.
I am a big ubuntu fan myself, but find it idiotic that other fans pretend to know what is best for others. If ubuntu was an exact drop in replacement for windows, then I don't see what the advocacy is about, and if it isn't then someone who wants whatever they are used to should be allowed to do so. (someone might argue that Vista is even more different from what she is used to than ubuntu, but that would be Microsoft's problem, not a problem of misplaced advocacy)
I also question this bad habit of many ludites to call customer service for help. Don't people have friends anymore, or are they ashamed to ask for help?
I am also disturbed that the default kneejerk response to this story is even more ubuntu advocacy. Ironic when considering that misplaced advocacy is what gave ubuntu a black eye here in the first place. Way to go morons, in destroying for an OS that I love.
Seems there is some reading comprehension required as well.
Also funny how you used perp in the following sentence. I guess you assume everyone is a perp, or you kind of disproved your own point.
"You're assuming that the perp was pulled over for a violation. ".
Perp is short for perpetrator, and it generally means someone who has perpetrated (committed a crime). Whether found guilty or not.
I am a law abiding citizen, and find it rude to stick a camera in someone's face who are just there to do their job. Maybe in 30 years it will be so common that nobody cares, but as of 2008, I think it is still considered rude.
I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over.
You do? Well, if I was that cop and came over such a jerk with an attitude, I would proceed and give you a ticket (instead of just a warning as I had originally planned). Have a good day, punk.
I would imagine it would be compressed, and since much of the wiki is text it would shrink a lot. I'm thinking at 2 GB would do it, which would easily fit on today's flash memory. And for multimedia content such a pics, they cold convert to smaller and lower quality jpeg's saving at least that much.
This is more than a guess. Larry Goldfarb from Baystar claimed, in his declaration, under penalty of perjury, that Boies himself told him that they expected IBM to settle, and settle quickly.
Most poker players, when their bluff has been called, will slow down and fold. SCO made the choice to go all in. While there is no law against that, it was a very foolish and costly business decision. Because it is now becoming more and more clear, that SCO did not have any of the evidence they were boasting.
I suspect Boies might have adviced SCO to back down and settle, but that Yarro & Co insisted that the game continues, if nothing else, to keep SCO's stock price up for the short term. With declining business they would have imploded anyways, so might as well get some wall street dollars while they're hot.
As long as they avoid prison and class action suits targeing their private assets, the insiders made out like bandits, while investors have lost all, and IBM have spent a fortune on litigation cost.
How the hell would NK come up with some 500 fully loaded dump trucks worth of fertilizer, and dump it in a hole? It would be visible from the friggin moon.
From the article "The commentator noted YouTube has "dismembered conservative and politically incorrect speech" in the past, pulling videos critical of Islam and even banning popular conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who is also a WND columnist."
I have yet to read a column by Malkin that could not be chartacterized as hate speech. Hardly a standard by which Youtube could be judged. I think even Hitler would be ashamed to have Malkin as a PR person. Cause that's one filtlhy lady, to put it mildly.
I always find it amusing that ultra-rightwingers like this squawk about cencorship. They LOVE cencorship. They would be perfectly happy to KILL for the right to cencor things they dislike.
These retards believe that as long as something is politically incorrect, it must be good. Pro torture, against abortion, pro death sentence, against healthcare, pro cencorship (except when it's their stuff) , against flagburning, pro big government, against taxes, for budget deficits, pro poverty, pro wealth, anti middle class. Luckily for them, boh houses of congfress, as well as the white house are on the same page as these ridiculous parodies of Hitler and Goering.
We're nerds. Deal with it. Consider yourself lucky that you got laid, and move on.
Nerds will never be more than husband 1.0, or maybe husband 0.99.
Any woman who marries a nerd is eventually looking to upgrade to Jock 1.2, after having secured enough funds from nerd 1.0 to pay for Jock 1.2's beer habit.
As to kids, etc. You might be better off without the hassle. And pencilnecked nerds in the company of children looks suspsicious anyways. Just send them the best possible christmas and birthday present, and hope the mother isn't anything like the wicked queen in Snowhite.
Since I don;t liek to eb bosmbastic witout looking at the facts, I went back and skimmed the report.
I notice that the IDC report concentrates on only 1 thing:
Revenue of Vista. Revenue of the Microsoft Ecosystem surrounding Vista.
I have no reason to doubt the numbers.
However, the author fails to state that one man's revenue is another man's expense.
So the author sees Vista simply as a stimulus to the economy.
However, another way to look at it, is in terms of productivity.
And return of investment of capital.
The "Microsoft Ecosystem" is a tax on those who use it.
Vista will significantly increase this tax.
That means a net drop in profitability and productivity.
The best analogy of IDC's message would be a publication by the Saudi government, praising the benefit of increased oil consumption and increased oil prices. Justified by employment and revenue of oil companies.
As a stimululus to the economy, Vista is useless. If this is the main purpose, EU could do much better, by building infrastrucuture, researching energy sources. Vista makes no more sense than mandating more frequent haircuts, starting banana plantations in germany, etc.
By delaying Vista deployment in Europe, EU contries reap the following benefits:
1)Extend the life of existing systems. 2)Delays HW upgrade cost by N months. (probably enough to give a nice kick to the bottom line for EU companies - by using already fully written down HW) 3)Delays Vista upgrade cost by N months.(capital costs money) 4)Shields their companies from spending bilions of dollars for the privilege of beta-testing software. (MS tradition is to release half-tested software. The WORKING version arrives in first service pack 6 months later.) Huge savings in application testing. Reduced test cycles with fewer bugs found. 5)By delaying upgrade, if and when EU companies upgrade, it will be a smoother & quicker transition, plus new HW needed for the upgrade has come down in price. Moore's law.
I expect all this to save at least $100 billion dollars for EU companies.
US companies might want to follow this path as well, and already most of them have a policy to test this sort of thing anyways before widely deploying an upgrade.
I have not bothered reading this lousy little white paper, but I am convinced that my argument is valid, and no amount of spin can possibly shave much off the $100's of billions EU will gain by delaying this OS.
When Yahoo US posted material legal in the US and not legal in France (but accessible from France), they got fined in France. What did they do ? - Try and get the US courts to rule that US (1st amendment) law applied to their internet site. Appealed all the way to the supremes (who have declined to take it - ie. the US establishment is ducking the issue so far).
That's not called ducking the issue. That's called following the law. US supreme court does not have jurisdiction in France. The supreme court has no standing to change french law. If Yahoo thinks that taking it to supreme court will help them, they deserve all they can get for being morons.
Many countries have extradition laws. Most countries who are against death penalties will not extradite unless they get a guarrantee that death penalty will not be used. It is up to the local country to decide whether they should extradite or not, and even if there are agreements to extradite, there is no guaranteews these will be honored.
International law is tricky, and to be effective each country has to give up a little bit of sovereignty. We have an international criminal court, human rights commision, the international court of Justice (only states can bring a case before it). Civilized countries bring their grievances to an international court. Barbarian nations (such as post-millenium USA) does otherwise.
The boogey man issue you are trying to paint does not seem to be all that important. If anything the real issue is the tendency to unilateral action and disregard for international law the last 6 years, something that has set us back 20 years.
If getting rich quick and love of money are sins, then certainly gambling, which in the long run makes you poorer, is a Good Thing.
In fact the state lotteries, indian Casonos, and the online gambling sites, perform the valuable public service of sinning on our behalf, so that we all can become poorer and go to heaven.
Dynamic (inerpreted) languages is far better suited for almost all types of user interfaces than compiled languages. With all rules there are exceptions, of course, which why I can claim to have sone wisdon, while you cling to pedantry.
j2ee and bytecompiled java, or C++, or a number of other compiled languages are utterly unsuitable for business application presentation.
There is now consensus by those who know what they are talking about that interpreted languages cut down on developer time, and increase useability and decrease bugs for business application presentation.
Ruby on Rails, Pythyn Gears, php, and similar frameworks is the only way to go for such guis. Swing, Visual C++,Visual C, X11, etc. etc. are unsuitable. Even Basic and tkl si preferrable to the complied languages.
Teh orogonal article writer has no idea what he is talking about and should have his journalistic license revoked.
Most vendors(OS, APP, HW) limit the number of combinations they support for practical reasons. In most cases that is just stated in realease docs etc. that software xyz is supported on devices X, Y, Z. Putting in blocks to explicitly make it impossible to install on any but the supported devices sounds like an overkill and a bad idea, but I would not automatically assume it is a conspiracy to make more money. It might be just a matter of how much resource they are willing to spend on certification for older models.
BASIC is not a good language for beginners. Never was. It will tak eyoumore time to unlearn bad habits form basic, than the time you think you're savng by "getting ahead".
And C#, is a language you should not learn at all.
C# is simply a java knockoff. C# was only made because MS didn't like Sun controlling java. The diferences between thsoe languages are hardly even cosmetic.
So, I think your question qualifies as a troll, or you need to get out more.
If you want a beginner's language, you should pick something interpreted, but it should NOT be basic. Let the kids get in there and see results immmediately, instead of having to tinker with compilers and framerworks, and IDE's and what have you. Programming in.BET as a beginner is like learning to swim, with a whistling monkey on your back, and pirhanas chewing on your nads. All distraction and no educational value.
The first language should be something simple, clean, and interpreted, such as python or ruby. I would even pick perl before any of the above.
Then java or C, or both, stay away from C++. Then maybe some web framework, such as ruby on rails.
Back in the 80's when Maggie pushed to pump it up as fast as possible, she was setting UK up for a future crisis. That's the fault with necocons. To get to their kind of Utopia, you usually need to devastate what you have, so when you get there, the's no THERE there. Oil was pumped up and sold on the cheap. Which increased glut and dependency. Plus, future monetary worth of those reserves are orders of magniture greater than the current use value. Neocon alchemy: turning gold into lead.
Peak Oil already has happened. Peak OIL USA happened i the 70's. Other major oil producers are hitting their peaks soon.
Now fossil fuels in the form of oil and naturagal gas, and some coal is what we use. It is the cheapest, energywise to produce, and it is in abundance(for now).
Renewable energy sources represent only a very snall fraction of what we consume.
There has been some talk of alternatives such as biodiesel, grass, corn, and who kows what. The problem with these sources is that they geneate CO2, but even worse, their energy efficiency is almost 0, and they deplete the top soil. The president's state of the union speach was a red herring at best, incompetent and naive at the worst.
The largest exporter of oil to USA is Canada. The Oil tar its in Canada has been touted a solution. Problem is that it is extremely expensive to extract, adn it takes a lot of energy to extract.
We have renwable sources such as hydropower, but there aren[t a lot of rivers left, so hydro is only ging to provide minor help.
On the short term (30 years), we will need to dramaticaly increaae renewable energy, such as solar, wind, tide, wave, geothermal. We will also need to dramatically improve energy conervation. We need more eficient devices, better insulated houses, house designs that will lessen the need for winter heating and summer cooling. Energy conservation is by far the largest untapped source. But even this won't be enough. Emerging economies will eed energy as well.
We can not expect that the countries with emerging economies will forgo their rights to development. The total amount of energy consumption is going to increase, no sdoubt about it.
Research and building out new alternative renewable low-emision energy sources is ging to take a long time.
Apparently the consumers are NOT going to do the right thing, as evidenced by the SUV glut in USA at the edge of an energy crisis. Aggrwssive taxation on fossil fuels, and ineficnebt fossil fuel devices such as cars will be necessary to nudge the market in the right direction.
Nuclear power will not be enough to make a smooth transition from oil to renewables. But without many new nuclear plants, the tranisiton will be much worse. ALmost Mad Max.
My predictions are dire: Even if the governments start to do the right things now (which I have zero confidence that they will do), and do the needful:
Increase nuclar power capacity, increase renewables, agressively fund research into alternatives, pass legislation that encourages use of renewables and punishes fossil glut, provide financial incentives for consumers and businesses to use alternatives and to conserve, and tax the heck out of the hogs.
EVEN WHEN ALL THE ABOVE IS DONE, WE WILL LIKELY RUN INTO A MAJOR AND PAINFUL ENERGY CRISIS.
That takes care of the energy issue.
The other issue is CO2. CO2 is what makes some of the red herring alternatives unfit. Coal, tar sands, biodiesel, freak grass, etc. are expensive (energywise) to produce, and they don't help with the emission issue at all. teh only reason the current administration is riding that horse, is to get some votes from the midwest for the next election. And, Mr President, George Mongo Bush, excuse me for calling you a freaking retard, but that's what you are: HYDROGEN IS NOT AN SOURCE OF ENERGY. IF IT WAS, I WOULD PROPOSE THAT WE CANCEL THE ALARM AND JUST BUY ENOUGH BATTERIES TO GET US OVBER THE LOOMING ENERGY CRISIS!
Well I was thinking, what about prior art? So IMDB came to mind. Where the public has been building this huge database over almost 2 decades, starting way back on USENET. So at least IMDB ought to be able to kick amazon's ass in the courts....Here's a history. http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?history Because of its growth out of the Usenet community, the mission statement to provide it for free to the users of the internet, and the strong anti-commercial sentiments as more corporate traffic and advertising moved online, deciding to turn the IMDb into a business was a very tough and debated decision. But the need to be able to support its growth, compete with new commercial projects and control its destiny made it obvious that the IMDb would have to incorporate. In late 1995 the decision was made to incorporate and in January of 1996 the IMDb was incorporated as became Internet Movie Database, Ltd.
So, commercial, but not yet pure evil. Well, talk of the devil..... fast forward to 1998.... In Jeff Bezos, the people at the IMDb saw a kindred spirit, someone who understood the internet and its community, not just its potential as a marketplace, and thus when Jeff's people at amazon.com contacted them, they were willing to listen. What they heard was amazing, essentially "we want you to keep doing what you're doing."
Mod up parent please. Or i'll do one better, repeat the whole post here:
Cut from an AC post:
Michael E. Anderer, of the SCOX "Halloween" memo fame is the CTO of Realm Systems. His old homepage "S2 consulting" hosted the developer forum for Realm. A number of other M$FT links raise the disturbing question if this product is real or elaborate "opposition" research on the part of Redmond.
Realm Systems has secured an additional $9 million dollars in funding on July 7, 2005.
The paper SEC filing, describing the new funding has been secured by penguinistas, and is available at : Debt and bridge financing
$7.5 MM came from a single unnamed individual.
Frank Artale, an ex-M$FT VP for NT, was appointed chairman of the board of Realm in January, 2005 , when Realm had secured a previous $8 million dollar investment.
Frank Artale and Michael Anderer's stories first become entertwined over Entirenet. Entirenet is a Redmond and Bellevue, Washington based Windows documentation company. Anderer served as nominal CEO of Entirenet in the 2001- 2003 timeframe. Artale, then serving as Veritas VP for Windows had purchased Entirenet for Veritas in March 2001 for an undisclosed ammount.
Anderer, acting as CEO of Entirenet, announced the acquisition of the South Carolina M$FT training firm, HunterStone, in November, 2002.
Artale had left Veritas by March 2003 when his next venture "Consera Software" was announced. Consera had venture funding provided by Ignition Partners, a Seattle venture outfit staffed with a prominent group of ex-M$FT VP's, including Cameron Myhrvold. Myhrvold has especially close ties to Artale.
Anderer left Entirenet about this time.
Frank Artale has continued to work with Ignition Partners. He was appointed Chairman of the Board of Rendition Networks in Sept 2004, as part of a $6 million dollar Ignition investment. Rendition was quickly sold in Dec, 2004.
Other Artale ventures include Therion, sold in May 2005. He has recently added to the Kenai Software board in July 2005 Kenai's executives, e.g. David Mock and Byrren Yates (CFO) overlap Realm's executives and public investors. Artale is considered an expert on the profitable exit sale of start ups. Other Frank Artale endeavors include advisory roles at Zenprise, Centrify, Accel Partners, and formerly a board position at Level 8.
Michael Anderer's continuing relationship with the Seattle-area venture capital organized by highly placed ex-M$FT VP's indicates his reputation has survived the Halloween memo release.
The audit was done, but SCO refused to provide information on some of the items in the audit, namely the licenses to MS and Sun. Over the next 2 years SCO has refused to provide those licenses, and thus failed their duties under the contract.
Slashdot Mirror
It is certainly possible that you are right. However, you could also be wrong. She might be a depressed procrastinator/worry wort, and the obstacle of this super expensive but ultimately useless (as far as she is concerned) computer really prevented her from getting into those online classes.
Assuming the version of events in the article are correct, then I blame Dell first.
Dell's job should be to serve the customer and get them what they want, since Dell can't possibly guess what they need. Talking someone into using something they are not familiar with is a misplaced form of advocacy. It is as bad as talking people into buying something they don't need.
That she payed a whopping $1100 for a laptop makes it even worse. Since she is a bit of a ludite, I expect the computer will not be used for extreme graphics or number crunching. So she probably overpaid by as much as $500 versus what she really needed. However this was her choice, and her bad. She should have asked savvy friends for advice on this purchase, or done some research on "the intenets".
I cannot blame her for complaining about the verizon CD. That's how that stuff is sold, and even many so called "power users" would not know how to configure that stuff if the CD didn't do it automatically for them. I find it hard to blame Verizon as well, since it is non-trivial to do automatic setup via CD for linux. Maybe something clever could be done, but there will always be some that fall between the cracks.
Ultimately I like to blame Dell here. If their sales interface was better, she would not only have gotten what she wanted, and maybe even what she needed.
I am a big ubuntu fan myself, but find it idiotic that other fans pretend to know what is best for others. If ubuntu was an exact drop in replacement for windows, then I don't see what the advocacy is about, and if it isn't then someone who wants whatever they are used to should be allowed to do so. (someone might argue that Vista is even more different from what she is used to than ubuntu, but that would be Microsoft's problem, not a problem of misplaced advocacy)
I also question this bad habit of many ludites to call customer service for help. Don't people have friends anymore, or are they ashamed to ask for help?
I am also disturbed that the default kneejerk response to this story is even more ubuntu advocacy. Ironic when considering that misplaced advocacy is what gave ubuntu a black eye here in the first place. Way to go morons, in destroying for an OS that I love.
Beats me.
Looks to me that the OP is a troll playing the slashdot editors for fools.
My point exactly.
Seems there is some reading comprehension required as well.
Also funny how you used perp in the following sentence. I guess you assume everyone is a perp, or you kind of disproved your own point.
"You're assuming that the perp was pulled over for a violation. ".
Perp is short for perpetrator, and it generally means someone who has perpetrated (committed a crime). Whether found guilty or not.
I am a law abiding citizen, and find it rude to stick a camera in someone's face who are just there to do their job. Maybe in 30 years it will be so common that nobody cares, but as of 2008, I think it is still considered rude.
And a jerk gets what a jerk deserves.
I wonder what happens if you inform a cop that you are recording him when he pulls you over.
You do? Well, if I was that cop and came over such a jerk with an attitude, I would proceed and give you a ticket (instead of just a warning as I had originally planned). Have a good day, punk.
I would imagine it would be compressed, and since much of the wiki is text it would shrink a lot.
I'm thinking at 2 GB would do it, which would easily fit on today's flash memory. And for multimedia content such a pics, they cold convert to smaller and lower quality jpeg's saving at least that much.
This is more than a guess. Larry Goldfarb from Baystar claimed, in his declaration, under penalty of perjury, that Boies himself told him that they expected IBM to settle, and settle quickly.
Most poker players, when their bluff has been called, will slow down and fold. SCO made the choice to go all in. While there is no law against that, it was a very foolish and costly business decision. Because it is now becoming more and more clear, that SCO did not have any of the evidence they were boasting.
I suspect Boies might have adviced SCO to back down and settle, but that Yarro & Co insisted that the game continues, if nothing else, to keep SCO's stock price up for the short term. With declining business they would have imploded anyways, so might as well get some wall street dollars while they're hot.
As long as they avoid prison and class action suits targeing their private assets, the insiders made out like bandits, while investors have lost all, and IBM have spent a fortune on litigation cost.
In some places, voting is mandatory.
Guess you're the clown, not me. Dork.
Only the average american nimcompoop would fall fro this kind of nutty speculation.
USA is the promised land of conspiracy theories.
If poor old Ocaam had launched his "razor" theory here, he'd probably be hanged.
How the hell would NK come up with some 500 fully loaded dump trucks worth of fertilizer, and dump it in a hole? It would be visible from the friggin moon.
From the article "The commentator noted YouTube has "dismembered conservative and politically incorrect speech" in the past, pulling videos critical of Islam and even banning popular conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who is also a WND columnist."
I have yet to read a column by Malkin that could not be chartacterized as hate speech. Hardly a standard by which Youtube could be judged. I think even Hitler would be ashamed to have Malkin as a PR person. Cause that's one filtlhy lady, to put it mildly.
I always find it amusing that ultra-rightwingers like this squawk about cencorship. They LOVE cencorship. They would be perfectly happy to KILL for the right to cencor things they dislike.
These retards believe that as long as something is politically incorrect, it must be good. Pro torture, against abortion, pro death sentence, against healthcare, pro cencorship (except when it's their stuff) , against flagburning, pro big government, against taxes, for budget deficits, pro poverty, pro wealth, anti middle class. Luckily for them, boh houses of congfress, as well as the white house are on the same page as these ridiculous parodies of Hitler and Goering.
We're nerds. Deal with it. Consider yourself lucky that you got laid, and move on.
Nerds will never be more than husband 1.0, or maybe husband 0.99.
Any woman who marries a nerd is eventually looking to upgrade to Jock 1.2, after having secured enough funds from nerd 1.0 to pay for Jock 1.2's beer habit.
As to kids, etc. You might be better off without the hassle.
And pencilnecked nerds in the company of children looks suspsicious anyways.
Just send them the best possible christmas and birthday present, and hope the mother isn't anything like the wicked queen in Snowhite.
Since I don;t liek to eb bosmbastic witout looking at the facts, I went back and skimmed the report.
I notice that the IDC report concentrates on only 1 thing:
Revenue of Vista.
Revenue of the Microsoft Ecosystem surrounding Vista.
I have no reason to doubt the numbers.
However, the author fails to state that one man's revenue is another man's expense.
So the author sees Vista simply as a stimulus to the economy.
However, another way to look at it, is in terms of productivity.
And return of investment of capital.
The "Microsoft Ecosystem" is a tax on those who use it.
Vista will significantly increase this tax.
That means a net drop in profitability and productivity.
The best analogy of IDC's message would be a publication by the Saudi government, praising the benefit of increased oil consumption and increased oil prices. Justified by employment and revenue of oil companies.
As a stimululus to the economy, Vista is useless. If this is the main purpose, EU could do much better, by building infrastrucuture, researching energy sources.
Vista makes no more sense than mandating more frequent haircuts, starting banana plantations in germany, etc.
By delaying Vista deployment in Europe, EU contries reap the following benefits:
1)Extend the life of existing systems.
2)Delays HW upgrade cost by N months. (probably enough to give a nice kick to the bottom line for EU companies - by using already fully written down HW)
3)Delays Vista upgrade cost by N months.(capital costs money)
4)Shields their companies from spending bilions of dollars for the privilege of beta-testing software. (MS tradition is to release half-tested software. The WORKING version arrives in first service pack 6 months later.) Huge savings in application testing. Reduced test cycles with fewer bugs found.
5)By delaying upgrade, if and when EU companies upgrade, it will be a smoother & quicker transition, plus new HW needed for the upgrade has come down in price. Moore's law.
I expect all this to save at least $100 billion dollars for EU companies.
US companies might want to follow this path as well, and already most of them have a policy to test this sort of thing anyways before widely deploying an upgrade.
I have not bothered reading this lousy little white paper, but I am convinced that my argument is valid, and no amount of spin can possibly shave much off the $100's of billions EU will gain by delaying this OS.
What did they do ? - Try and get the US courts to rule that US (1st amendment) law applied to their internet site. Appealed all the way to the supremes (who have declined to take it - ie. the US establishment is ducking the issue so far).
That's not called ducking the issue. That's called following the law. US supreme court does not have jurisdiction in France. The supreme court has no standing to change french law. If Yahoo thinks that taking it to supreme court will help them, they deserve all they can get for being morons.
Many countries have extradition laws. Most countries who are against death penalties will not extradite unless they get a guarrantee that death penalty will not be used. It is up to the local country to decide whether they should extradite or not, and even if there are agreements to extradite, there is no guaranteews these will be honored.
International law is tricky, and to be effective each country has to give up a little bit of sovereignty. We have an international criminal court, human rights commision, the international court of Justice (only states can bring a case before it). Civilized countries bring their grievances to an international court. Barbarian nations (such as post-millenium USA) does otherwise.
The boogey man issue you are trying to paint does not seem to be all that important. If anything the real issue is the tendency to unilateral action and disregard for international law the last 6 years, something that has set us back 20 years.
The bible is an open endorsement for gambling.
If getting rich quick and love of money are sins, then certainly gambling,
which in the long run makes you poorer, is a Good Thing.
In fact the state lotteries, indian Casonos, and the online gambling sites, perform the valuable public service of sinning on our behalf, so that we all can become poorer and go to heaven.
Sorry, but you are wrong.
TKL is certainly not web based.
Dynamic (inerpreted) languages is far better suited for almost all types of user interfaces than compiled languages. With all rules there are exceptions, of course, which why I can claim to have sone wisdon, while you cling to pedantry.
j2ee and bytecompiled java, or C++, or a number of other compiled languages are utterly unsuitable for business application presentation.
There is now consensus by those who know what they are talking about that interpreted languages cut down on developer time, and increase useability and decrease bugs for business application presentation.
Ruby on Rails, Pythyn Gears, php, and similar frameworks is the only way to go for such guis. Swing, Visual C++,Visual C, X11, etc. etc. are unsuitable. Even Basic and tkl si preferrable to the complied languages.
Teh orogonal article writer has no idea what he is talking about and should have his journalistic license revoked.
Beg to possibly differ.
Most vendors(OS, APP, HW) limit the number of combinations they support for practical reasons. In most cases that is just stated in realease docs etc. that software xyz is supported on devices X, Y, Z. Putting in blocks to explicitly make it impossible to install on any but the supported devices sounds like an overkill and a bad idea, but I would not automatically assume it is a conspiracy to make more money. It might be just a matter of how much resource they are willing to spend on certification for older models.
BASIC is not a good language for beginners. Never was.
.BET as a beginner is like learning to swim, with a whistling monkey on your back, and pirhanas chewing on your nads. All distraction and no educational value.
It will tak eyoumore time to unlearn bad habits form basic, than the time you think you're savng by "getting ahead".
And C#, is a language you should not learn at all.
C# is simply a java knockoff. C# was only made because MS didn't like Sun controlling java. The diferences between thsoe languages are hardly even cosmetic.
So, I think your question qualifies as a troll, or you need to get out more.
If you want a beginner's language, you should pick something interpreted, but it should NOT be basic.
Let the kids get in there and see results immmediately, instead of having to tinker with compilers and framerworks, and IDE's and what have you. Programming in
The first language should be something simple, clean, and interpreted, such as python or ruby. I would even pick perl before any of the above.
Then java or C, or both, stay away from C++. Then maybe some web framework, such as ruby on rails.
Then VB, if they absolutly must.
Exactly.
Back in the 80's when Maggie pushed to pump it up as fast as possible, she was setting UK up for a future crisis. That's the fault with necocons. To get to their kind of Utopia, you usually need to devastate what you have, so when you get there, the's no THERE there. Oil was pumped up and sold on the cheap. Which increased glut and dependency. Plus, future monetary worth of those reserves are orders of magniture greater than the current use value. Neocon alchemy: turning gold into lead.
Peak Oil already has happened. Peak OIL USA happened i the 70's. Other major oil producers are hitting their peaks soon.
Now fossil fuels in the form of oil and naturagal gas, and some coal is what we use. It is the cheapest, energywise to produce, and it is in abundance(for now).
Renewable energy sources represent only a very snall fraction of what we consume.
There has been some talk of alternatives such as biodiesel, grass, corn, and who kows what. The problem with these sources is that they geneate CO2, but even worse, their energy efficiency is almost 0, and they deplete the top soil. The president's state of the union speach was a red herring at best, incompetent and naive at the worst.
The largest exporter of oil to USA is Canada.
The Oil tar its in Canada has been touted a solution. Problem is that it is extremely expensive to extract, adn it takes a lot of energy to extract.
We have renwable sources such as hydropower, but there aren[t a lot of rivers left, so hydro is only ging to provide minor help.
On the short term (30 years), we will need to dramaticaly increaae renewable energy, such as solar, wind, tide, wave, geothermal. We will also need to dramatically improve energy conervation. We need more eficient devices, better insulated houses, house designs that will lessen the need for winter heating and summer cooling. Energy conservation is by far the largest untapped source. But even this won't be enough. Emerging economies will eed energy as well.
We can not expect that the countries with emerging economies will forgo their rights to development. The total amount of energy consumption is going to increase, no sdoubt about it.
Research and building out new alternative renewable low-emision energy sources is ging to take a long time.
Apparently the consumers are NOT going to do the right thing, as evidenced by the SUV glut in USA at the edge of an energy crisis. Aggrwssive taxation on fossil fuels, and ineficnebt fossil fuel devices such as cars will be necessary to nudge the market in the right direction.
Nuclear power will not be enough to make a smooth transition from oil to renewables. But without many new nuclear plants, the tranisiton will be much worse. ALmost Mad Max.
My predictions are dire: Even if the governments start to do the right things now (which I have zero confidence that they will do), and do the needful:
Increase nuclar power capacity, increase renewables, agressively fund research into alternatives, pass legislation that encourages use of renewables and punishes fossil glut, provide financial incentives for consumers and businesses to use alternatives and to conserve, and tax the heck out of the hogs.
EVEN WHEN ALL THE ABOVE IS DONE, WE WILL LIKELY RUN INTO A MAJOR AND PAINFUL ENERGY CRISIS.
That takes care of the energy issue.
The other issue is CO2.
CO2 is what makes some of the red herring alternatives unfit. Coal, tar sands, biodiesel, freak grass, etc. are expensive (energywise) to produce, and they don't help with the emission issue at all. teh only reason the current administration is riding that horse, is to get some votes from the midwest for the next election.
And, Mr President, George Mongo Bush, excuse me for calling you a freaking retard, but that's what you are: HYDROGEN IS NOT AN SOURCE OF ENERGY. IF IT WAS, I WOULD PROPOSE THAT WE CANCEL THE ALARM AND JUST BUY ENOUGH BATTERIES TO GET US OVBER THE LOOMING ENERGY CRISIS!
Well I was thinking, what about prior art? So IMDB came to mind. Where the public has been building this huge database over almost 2 decades, starting way back on USENET. So at least IMDB ought to be able to kick amazon's ass in the courts....Here's a history.
http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?history
Because of its growth out of the Usenet community, the mission statement to provide it for free to the users of the internet, and the strong anti-commercial sentiments as more corporate traffic and advertising moved online, deciding to turn the IMDb into a business was a very tough and debated decision. But the need to be able to support its growth, compete with new commercial projects and control its destiny made it obvious that the IMDb would have to incorporate. In late 1995 the decision was made to incorporate and in January of 1996 the IMDb was incorporated as became Internet Movie Database, Ltd.
So, commercial, but not yet pure evil.
Well, talk of the devil..... fast forward to 1998....
In Jeff Bezos, the people at the IMDb saw a kindred spirit, someone who understood the internet and its community, not just its potential as a marketplace, and thus when Jeff's people at amazon.com contacted them, they were willing to listen. What they heard was amazing, essentially "we want you to keep doing what you're doing."
IMDB - An Amazon.com Company
Mod up parent please.
Or i'll do one better, repeat the whole post here:
Cut from an AC post:
Michael E. Anderer, of the SCOX "Halloween" memo fame is the CTO of Realm Systems. His old homepage "S2 consulting" hosted the developer forum for Realm. A number of other M$FT links raise the disturbing question if this product is real or elaborate "opposition" research on the part of Redmond.
Realm Systems has secured an additional $9 million dollars in funding on July 7, 2005.
The paper SEC filing, describing the new funding has been secured by penguinistas, and is available at : Debt and bridge financing
$7.5 MM came from a single unnamed individual.
Frank Artale, an ex-M$FT VP for NT, was appointed chairman of the board of Realm in January, 2005 , when Realm had secured a previous $8 million dollar investment.
Frank Artale and Michael Anderer's stories first become entertwined over Entirenet. Entirenet is a Redmond and Bellevue, Washington based Windows documentation company. Anderer served as nominal CEO of Entirenet in the 2001- 2003 timeframe. Artale, then serving as Veritas VP for Windows had purchased Entirenet for Veritas in March 2001 for an undisclosed ammount.
Anderer, acting as CEO of Entirenet, announced the acquisition of the South Carolina M$FT training firm, HunterStone, in November, 2002.
Artale had left Veritas by March 2003 when his next venture "Consera Software" was announced. Consera had venture funding provided by Ignition Partners, a Seattle venture outfit staffed with a prominent group of ex-M$FT VP's, including Cameron Myhrvold. Myhrvold has especially close ties to Artale.
Anderer left Entirenet about this time.
Frank Artale has continued to work with Ignition Partners. He was appointed Chairman of the Board of Rendition Networks in Sept 2004, as part of a $6 million dollar Ignition investment. Rendition was quickly sold in Dec, 2004.
Other Artale ventures include Therion, sold in May 2005. He has recently added to the Kenai Software board in July 2005 Kenai's executives, e.g. David Mock and Byrren Yates (CFO) overlap Realm's executives and public investors. Artale is considered an expert on the profitable exit sale of start ups. Other Frank Artale endeavors include advisory roles at Zenprise, Centrify, Accel Partners, and formerly a board position at Level 8.
Michael Anderer's continuing relationship with the Seattle-area venture capital organized by highly placed ex-M$FT VP's indicates his reputation has survived the Halloween memo release.
Not quite accurate.
The audit was done, but SCO refused to provide information on some of the items in the audit, namely the licenses to MS and Sun. Over the next 2 years SCO has refused to provide those licenses, and thus failed their duties under the contract.