Call me a cynic but I think the whole thing was a PR stunt.
1) Announce draconian unbearable restrictions on your new OS that you don't want to pass. Include other only slightly less harsh restrictions that you do want to pass (DRM). 2) Wait for people to complain loudly about the unbearable restriction. 3) Change unbearable restriction to something more reasonable. Keep other restrictions (DRM) 4) If anyone complains, claim you've compromised. 5) ???? 6) Profit!!!!!
Do you want to keep doing what you're doing, or do you want to be a manager? Being the manager is more lucrative if you're successful but you're not going to get to both play IT admin and manager of a large company. You'll be spread way too thin.
The job you don't want to do, you need to hire for. If that's the mangerial role, you need to make sure you don't end up a lowly surf by managing the hiring process very very carefully to ensure you retain control at all times.
If you are unable or unwilling to find any decent new hires, you'll get no where, possibly end up being sued, and you'll burn out doing it.
Experience is a necessary but not sufficient condition to not making newbie mistakes, and by that I mean decisions that sound logical and intuitive/plausible until you actually try them in the real world. Experience is very important. Yes you can have a very bad mechanic with 17 years in the trade. But I guarantee you no one in their right mind is going to let someone work on a multi-million dollar race car with 3 months experience just because they're intelligent. You need both.
As for scientific discoveries favouring younger minds, there's an easy explanation for that. You have thousands of inexperienced youngsters that try lines of thought more seasoned people would never think to try because they run counter to all they've been taught. Most of these youngsters get nowhere. The few that are both smart and lucky enough to try the RIGHT technique that goes against the ingrained way of doing things are hailed as superstars. When you've been staring at the same problem for 20 years the mind tends to fall back into the same patterns. Agile minds isn't the whole story though.
I usually play a game with them. I say uh-huh just enough to get them talking. I'm careful not to agree to anything though, and I don't give them any information. The ones selling stuff usually go into this long speil about how lucky you are to be selected for their wonderful product and start telling you about it. At which point I either go silent and try not to laugh at their "hello? hello?" at the other end (so I can time how long it takes them to hang up) or I just put the phone down for a couple of minutes. Unfortunately they usually move on after about 30 seconds to a minute. If they're going to waste my time though, I'm going to take great pleasure in wasting as much of theirs as I can. One game you can play is to see how long you can keep them talking without agreeing to anything. There's no point in asking them not to call or getting angry at them. They don't care.
...to be locked out of running my software, playing my music and videos, and generally having my hardware crippled for Christmas. I've been good all year. I've been looking forward to my windows advantage. Why oh why can't I have my "trusted computing" and DRM for Christmas?
Well I did dozens (not hundreds) of transactions and then was finally bitten. Paypal refused to look into a small value transaction for an item that was sent broken in pieces and clearly repacked unless I provided evidence on a company letterhead faxed internationally within 10 days of opening the dispute. I complained to consumer bodies and was told that since it was a person not a company that my transaction was with that I was out of luck. They weren't interested in looking at Paypal's behaviour either. Luckily I'd used a credit card, so for a AUD28 transaction I mailed the item back in the same condition and issued a chargeback. It cost me AUD11 plus all the time and money I wasted with Paypal's repetition of the same demands. The seller in the meantime tried to coerce me into dropping the dispute and removing negative feedback (that basically just stated fact) using vague legalise that didn't hold water (using SquareTrade). Ebay and Paypal weren't interested in looking into that at all.
I closed my Paypal account, put a stop on transactions from my bank account and credit card, and I've used Ebay only once since that incident (for a set of 3 items I couldn't obtain any other way).
I've been very careful to make statements I can back up 100% above because Paypal administrators have been known to send cease and desist letters if people do publicly air their greivances.
You might not consider me a credible source, but I certainly find myself credible.
I measured these but I can't make up my mind if they're a particle or a wave.
Re:That's all true - but Hubble can't see them.
on
The Hubble Lives On
·
· Score: 1
A truely monstrous array of telescopes will NOT do the same thing as Hubble. They'll do different science. Hubble has done fantastic science. These telescopes do cost big money but compared to other things the governments do, it's not that much. We should be maintaining Hubble until we have a direct replacement in the form of a space telescope.
Just a slight correction. The visible part of the spectrum is only a tiny part. The atmosphere is actually Opaque to MOST wavelengths. (First heavy weight lesson when I did my Astro masters was on atmospheric absorption at different wavelengths. Was a real eye opener!)
Hopefully NASA admin's on again off again relationship with Hubble will be on again for long enough to get it serviced! To me the repair is a no-brainer.
This is the usual tactic. Scare up publicity and increase demand using an artificial supply shortage. Supply down, demand up, outrageous prices normal, CEO gets bonus.
Well by your def I'm in the expert group - I use ssh and ftp daily. I have taught how to use grep and sed and find at Uni. (A systems programming elective)
My big gripe with Linux is that while some things are standard, lots of basic things aren't. When I first log in, I can't be sure which version of what command works how, where to find it, where to find config data etc. man is a piece of excrement that may have been praised when it was invented in the 60s but is long past its used by date. info isn't any better. I find I have to spend a while struggling and referring to the manual to get anywhere. I also can't run most of the advanced software I use every day without going to incredible effort to get semi-stable versions working under emulation or WINE.
Every time I pick a distro the rules change for it too. I use to be a Slackware man, then Slack went into decline. Then I was a Redhat man, and they stagnated and pulled this Fedora crap. After a few broken upgrades I gave up. Stuff like PAM being installed in the upgrade by default and having to spend half a day working out how to get onto my own computer by dual booting and looking on the net. Stuff like installing a new distro and everything I use has moved. Stuff like having read up to script my own Internet connection (this was a few years ago mind you). Stuff like getting my firewall all set up and all of a sudden, a totally different firewall becomes standard. I tried a few distros again years later - Debian which left my Xwindows broken and took days to sort out some obscure problem with a video card, then Mandrake before it became Mandrivel, SuSe - and things had gone 2 steps forward 1 step backward.
So you're wrong, for an expert who's short on time Linux sucks balls. Mind you with Vista customer disadvantage coming my way I might be forced to try again. Free as in sick of being chained to my desk playing sysadmin!!! Yay!
Okay I'm a Windows user primarily, but I've used KDE, Gnome and fvwm. I've also used Macs but not regularly for some time I'll admit. A couple of years ago the company I was working for bought an eMac for testing. I found the UI to be cumbersome and clunky. I certainly didn't think it was useful and it'sn ot just because I wasn't use to the Mac. (I wasn't use to KDE or Gnome, but I loved KDE, and could get along with Gnome most days).
Why do Mac users go on and on about how useable and intuitive they are? I mean last time I looked this was still the OS where you move a disk into the recycle bin to eject it. Windows isn't intuitive. Neither is LInux. But neither is MacOS either.
There's 2 good reasons Linux distributions don't compete:
1) The arrogant RTFM attitude of most developers. Coming across as the unkempt social retard that most Linux evangalists come across as doesn't help, but there is no good reason (not even laziness of the user) to actually take the time to fire off volleys of abuse at the people you're trying to convince your software is best.
2) The fragmentation. There's only one MacOS but good luck working out what command does what or where anything is when you sit down in front of a brand new Linux distro (of which there are hundreds). Don't worry though, with many different versions planned for Vista, and this mess with activation, I'm sure it'll start to compete with Linux for being the hardest to get into.
I simply don't care if something's pretty. So long as it's not such an eyesore it's hard to look at, who cares. I want icons that represent the application I'm launching. I don't care if it's pretty, just make it representative. I don't care what colour things are so long as they don't cause eye strain. I don't want transparency and animation. They're just fucking distractions.
As far as I'm concerned no one's got it right, and it's just constantly getting worse. Desktops peaked in the late 90s. People are now trying to solve problems that aren't there. They're trying to invent a better hammer and unsurprisingly making a pig's breakfast of it.
Okay that's got to be one of the stupidest things I've heard lately.
First of all I don't care what someone with no experience of something thinks of it. I'd be more interested in what someone using all 3 would think.
Secondly, I want my computer to be easy to use and to allow me to accomplish things. I do have a preference for the colour of my desktop for example, but I'd use a computer with a hideous pink colour scheme if it got the job done sensibly. (Of course it wouldn't because a pink colour scheme would be difficult to arrange in such a way that it was easy to work with for days, but that's about usability and not cool or pretty factor). Honestly save pretty and beautiful for your hiking trips and your partners. Cool looks just aren't that important.
Thirdly I don't know which box they'd gravitate towards. That'd be a very personal thing. A pretty icon on any system could draw their attention. Or more likely if one had a desktop set up with their favourite colour.
Lastly a person that never saw a computer before would run from all 3 as they'd be scared of it. Don't believe me? Talk to someone in their 50s or 60s that's had nothing to do with computers.
That's the point. It isn't a few weeks till you get a new car. It's a few years. The JWST is not a replacement either. It doesn't cover the exact same wavelengths as Hubble. This is important as the science you can do with a telescope depends heavily on which part of the spectrum it works in. OWL and other adaptive optics and aperture synthesis telescopes won't "simply blow HST away" either. There are limits to what you can do with both techniques, and the people posting and making such rubbish blanket statements are really doing a lot of people a disservice in posting.
For adapative optics, the atmosphere is still in your way even if you can shake your mirrors or fiddle with the digital picture to PARTIALLY compensate. You can't do anything about radiation in wavelengths that are completely opaque to the atmosphere. If the light never reaches your telescope you simply can't study it.
For aperture synthesis, interferometry (which is harder to the shorter your wavelength gets) only provides improved resolution. The surface area of the mirror is not virtually increased in any way. You can't do anything with light you haven't collected.
The brighter and less distorted an image is the more you can do with the science. Looking through the atmosphere you encounter decreases in both brightness (down to nothing at some wavelengths) and distortion that you can only partially compensate for.
So continuing this godforsaken analogy this is like getting rid of the SUV that tows your boat and that you go off roading with, because you might be getting a 4 cylinder station wagon (that can't do the same job anyway) in 5 years.
It makes me more of an expert than someone that doesn't know the terms.
You don't have a new car being delivered in a couple of months. More like 5-10 years away actually. You don't throw away the old one in the meantime. Furthermore the new telescopes don't cover the same part of the spectrum as Hubble.
Hubble isn't expensive in the grand scheme of things and until we have several new telescopes doing exactly the same sort of science it needs to be protected.
Well let me preface this by saying I have a Masters in Astronomy.
You're talking rubbish. Where do you get your information? Star Trek episodes?
You can't "use a laser and either flexible mirrors or computers to remove the distortion of the atmosphere". Adaptive optics can compensate for the distortion to differing degrees at different frequencies. You don't get anything for free. You can't simply magically remove the atmosphere with techology and get exactly the same results. Also while our technology has moved on, the vast majority of mirror making is not at all revolutionary. Furthermore multi-telescope aperture synthesis is MUCH more difficult using optical telescopes than it is with radio telescopes and while you can improve your resolution, you don't increase your signal strength or the amount of light you're collecting to suddenly make the equivalent of a huge telescope.
Tell me when you decide your car's getting old and need to be replaced, do you scrap and wait till you then save money for a new one? Why should we be getting rid of Hubble BEFORE we have a replacement exactly?
I've met Stallman. He's a hard man to respect because his social skills aren't up to par. The disrespect (and hostility) he gave me for being the only person in a suit at a University programmer's society meeting, and his dismissive answer a simple question ("How do you counter attacks that claim Linux is unfriendly". Basically he said it was news to him that it was unfriendly and moved on.)
Here's the thing us "nerds" need to remember. It's a lot easier to believe FUD uttered against an eccentric socially inept person with poor hygene and a bizzare sense of humour than it is against someone who's got some charisma and isn't an ass. Stallman may or may not be past it as a programmer, but he's got good ideas. His presentation of them lets him down big time.
Slashdot Mirror
...or you could just print it out. The whole thing. Every version :-)
Call me a cynic but I think the whole thing was a PR stunt.
1) Announce draconian unbearable restrictions on your new OS that you don't want to pass. Include other only slightly less harsh restrictions that you do want to pass (DRM).
2) Wait for people to complain loudly about the unbearable restriction.
3) Change unbearable restriction to something more reasonable. Keep other restrictions (DRM)
4) If anyone complains, claim you've compromised.
5) ????
6) Profit!!!!!
Do you want to keep doing what you're doing, or do you want to be a manager? Being the manager is more lucrative if you're successful but you're not going to get to both play IT admin and manager of a large company. You'll be spread way too thin.
The job you don't want to do, you need to hire for. If that's the mangerial role, you need to make sure you don't end up a lowly surf by managing the hiring process very very carefully to ensure you retain control at all times.
If you are unable or unwilling to find any decent new hires, you'll get no where, possibly end up being sued, and you'll burn out doing it.
Experience is a necessary but not sufficient condition to not making newbie mistakes, and by that I mean decisions that sound logical and intuitive/plausible until you actually try them in the real world. Experience is very important. Yes you can have a very bad mechanic with 17 years in the trade. But I guarantee you no one in their right mind is going to let someone work on a multi-million dollar race car with 3 months experience just because they're intelligent. You need both.
As for scientific discoveries favouring younger minds, there's an easy explanation for that. You have thousands of inexperienced youngsters that try lines of thought more seasoned people would never think to try because they run counter to all they've been taught. Most of these youngsters get nowhere. The few that are both smart and lucky enough to try the RIGHT technique that goes against the ingrained way of doing things are hailed as superstars. When you've been staring at the same problem for 20 years the mind tends to fall back into the same patterns. Agile minds isn't the whole story though.
Lucky you. I've never been a seller either but I won't use Paypal again. See my other post today on this subject for details.
I usually play a game with them. I say uh-huh just enough to get them talking. I'm careful not to agree to anything though, and I don't give them any information. The ones selling stuff usually go into this long speil about how lucky you are to be selected for their wonderful product and start telling you about it. At which point I either go silent and try not to laugh at their "hello? hello?" at the other end (so I can time how long it takes them to hang up) or I just put the phone down for a couple of minutes. Unfortunately they usually move on after about 30 seconds to a minute. If they're going to waste my time though, I'm going to take great pleasure in wasting as much of theirs as I can. One game you can play is to see how long you can keep them talking without agreeing to anything. There's no point in asking them not to call or getting angry at them. They don't care.
Actually I still think my boss is a jerk...
(I'm definitely kidding. Got 2 of the best bosses I've ever had just at the moment. And they don't even read slashdot, so this isn't just a suck up).
...to be locked out of running my software, playing my music and videos, and generally having my hardware crippled for Christmas. I've been good all year. I've been looking forward to my windows advantage. Why oh why can't I have my "trusted computing" and DRM for Christmas?
Well I did dozens (not hundreds) of transactions and then was finally bitten. Paypal refused to look into a small value transaction for an item that was sent broken in pieces and clearly repacked unless I provided evidence on a company letterhead faxed internationally within 10 days of opening the dispute. I complained to consumer bodies and was told that since it was a person not a company that my transaction was with that I was out of luck. They weren't interested in looking at Paypal's behaviour either. Luckily I'd used a credit card, so for a AUD28 transaction I mailed the item back in the same condition and issued a chargeback. It cost me AUD11 plus all the time and money I wasted with Paypal's repetition of the same demands. The seller in the meantime tried to coerce me into dropping the dispute and removing negative feedback (that basically just stated fact) using vague legalise that didn't hold water (using SquareTrade). Ebay and Paypal weren't interested in looking into that at all.
I closed my Paypal account, put a stop on transactions from my bank account and credit card, and I've used Ebay only once since that incident (for a set of 3 items I couldn't obtain any other way).
I've been very careful to make statements I can back up 100% above because Paypal administrators have been known to send cease and desist letters if people do publicly air their greivances.
You might not consider me a credible source, but I certainly find myself credible.
That was my point.
In the 20th and 21st Centuries we should know better than to use lie detectors and pychos I mean psychics.
I measured these but I can't make up my mind if they're a particle or a wave.
A truely monstrous array of telescopes will NOT do the same thing as Hubble. They'll do different science. Hubble has done fantastic science. These telescopes do cost big money but compared to other things the governments do, it's not that much. We should be maintaining Hubble until we have a direct replacement in the form of a space telescope.
But whatever magic is needed to play, I don't have because it just pops up a blank window.
Pity you didn't say black window....It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Just a slight correction. The visible part of the spectrum is only a tiny part. The atmosphere is actually Opaque to MOST wavelengths. (First heavy weight lesson when I did my Astro masters was on atmospheric absorption at different wavelengths. Was a real eye opener!)
Hopefully NASA admin's on again off again relationship with Hubble will be on again for long enough to get it serviced! To me the repair is a no-brainer.
This is the usual tactic. Scare up publicity and increase demand using an artificial supply shortage. Supply down, demand up, outrageous prices normal, CEO gets bonus.
Well by your def I'm in the expert group - I use ssh and ftp daily. I have taught how to use grep and sed and find at Uni. (A systems programming elective)
My big gripe with Linux is that while some things are standard, lots of basic things aren't. When I first log in, I can't be sure which version of what command works how, where to find it, where to find config data etc. man is a piece of excrement that may have been praised when it was invented in the 60s but is long past its used by date. info isn't any better. I find I have to spend a while struggling and referring to the manual to get anywhere. I also can't run most of the advanced software I use every day without going to incredible effort to get semi-stable versions working under emulation or WINE.
Every time I pick a distro the rules change for it too. I use to be a Slackware man, then Slack went into decline. Then I was a Redhat man, and they stagnated and pulled this Fedora crap. After a few broken upgrades I gave up. Stuff like PAM being installed in the upgrade by default and having to spend half a day working out how to get onto my own computer by dual booting and looking on the net. Stuff like installing a new distro and everything I use has moved. Stuff like having read up to script my own Internet connection (this was a few years ago mind you). Stuff like getting my firewall all set up and all of a sudden, a totally different firewall becomes standard. I tried a few distros again years later - Debian which left my Xwindows broken and took days to sort out some obscure problem with a video card, then Mandrake before it became Mandrivel, SuSe - and things had gone 2 steps forward 1 step backward.
So you're wrong, for an expert who's short on time Linux sucks balls. Mind you with Vista customer disadvantage coming my way I might be forced to try again. Free as in sick of being chained to my desk playing sysadmin!!! Yay!
Okay I'm a Windows user primarily, but I've used KDE, Gnome and fvwm. I've also used Macs but not regularly for some time I'll admit. A couple of years ago the company I was working for bought an eMac for testing. I found the UI to be cumbersome and clunky. I certainly didn't think it was useful and it'sn ot just because I wasn't use to the Mac. (I wasn't use to KDE or Gnome, but I loved KDE, and could get along with Gnome most days).
Why do Mac users go on and on about how useable and intuitive they are? I mean last time I looked this was still the OS where you move a disk into the recycle bin to eject it. Windows isn't intuitive. Neither is LInux. But neither is MacOS either.
There's 2 good reasons Linux distributions don't compete:
1) The arrogant RTFM attitude of most developers. Coming across as the unkempt social retard that most Linux evangalists come across as doesn't help, but there is no good reason (not even laziness of the user) to actually take the time to fire off volleys of abuse at the people you're trying to convince your software is best.
2) The fragmentation. There's only one MacOS but good luck working out what command does what or where anything is when you sit down in front of a brand new Linux distro (of which there are hundreds). Don't worry though, with many different versions planned for Vista, and this mess with activation, I'm sure it'll start to compete with Linux for being the hardest to get into.
I simply don't care if something's pretty. So long as it's not such an eyesore it's hard to look at, who cares. I want icons that represent the application I'm launching. I don't care if it's pretty, just make it representative. I don't care what colour things are so long as they don't cause eye strain. I don't want transparency and animation. They're just fucking distractions.
As far as I'm concerned no one's got it right, and it's just constantly getting worse. Desktops peaked in the late 90s. People are now trying to solve problems that aren't there. They're trying to invent a better hammer and unsurprisingly making a pig's breakfast of it.
Okay that's got to be one of the stupidest things I've heard lately.
First of all I don't care what someone with no experience of something thinks of it. I'd be more interested in what someone using all 3 would think.
Secondly, I want my computer to be easy to use and to allow me to accomplish things. I do have a preference for the colour of my desktop for example, but I'd use a computer with a hideous pink colour scheme if it got the job done sensibly. (Of course it wouldn't because a pink colour scheme would be difficult to arrange in such a way that it was easy to work with for days, but that's about usability and not cool or pretty factor). Honestly save pretty and beautiful for your hiking trips and your partners. Cool looks just aren't that important.
Thirdly I don't know which box they'd gravitate towards. That'd be a very personal thing. A pretty icon on any system could draw their attention. Or more likely if one had a desktop set up with their favourite colour.
Lastly a person that never saw a computer before would run from all 3 as they'd be scared of it. Don't believe me? Talk to someone in their 50s or 60s that's had nothing to do with computers.
I'm guessing you're a Mac user. Am I right?
It's all part of the promotion for the upcoming musical: Jesus Crotch Super Star.
That's the point. It isn't a few weeks till you get a new car. It's a few years. The JWST is not a replacement either. It doesn't cover the exact same wavelengths as Hubble. This is important as the science you can do with a telescope depends heavily on which part of the spectrum it works in. OWL and other adaptive optics and aperture synthesis telescopes won't "simply blow HST away" either. There are limits to what you can do with both techniques, and the people posting and making such rubbish blanket statements are really doing a lot of people a disservice in posting.
For adapative optics, the atmosphere is still in your way even if you can shake your mirrors or fiddle with the digital picture to PARTIALLY compensate. You can't do anything about radiation in wavelengths that are completely opaque to the atmosphere. If the light never reaches your telescope you simply can't study it.
For aperture synthesis, interferometry (which is harder to the shorter your wavelength gets) only provides improved resolution. The surface area of the mirror is not virtually increased in any way. You can't do anything with light you haven't collected.
The brighter and less distorted an image is the more you can do with the science. Looking through the atmosphere you encounter decreases in both brightness (down to nothing at some wavelengths) and distortion that you can only partially compensate for.
So continuing this godforsaken analogy this is like getting rid of the SUV that tows your boat and that you go off roading with, because you might be getting a 4 cylinder station wagon (that can't do the same job anyway) in 5 years.
Please stop talking nonsense.
It makes me more of an expert than someone that doesn't know the terms.
You don't have a new car being delivered in a couple of months. More like 5-10 years away actually. You don't throw away the old one in the meantime. Furthermore the new telescopes don't cover the same part of the spectrum as Hubble.
Hubble isn't expensive in the grand scheme of things and until we have several new telescopes doing exactly the same sort of science it needs to be protected.
Well let me preface this by saying I have a Masters in Astronomy.
You're talking rubbish. Where do you get your information? Star Trek episodes?
You can't "use a laser and either flexible mirrors or computers to remove the distortion of the atmosphere". Adaptive optics can compensate for the distortion to differing degrees at different frequencies. You don't get anything for free. You can't simply magically remove the atmosphere with techology and get exactly the same results. Also while our technology has moved on, the vast majority of mirror making is not at all revolutionary. Furthermore multi-telescope aperture synthesis is MUCH more difficult using optical telescopes than it is with radio telescopes and while you can improve your resolution, you don't increase your signal strength or the amount of light you're collecting to suddenly make the equivalent of a huge telescope.
Tell me when you decide your car's getting old and need to be replaced, do you scrap and wait till you then save money for a new one? Why should we be getting rid of Hubble BEFORE we have a replacement exactly?
Try informing yourself before you speak about something you know nothing about. Hell I won't point you at astro journals. Wikipedia will do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics
This sort of bone headed ill informed nonsense should not be modded up. Shame on you all.
I'll repeat my other post here for your sake....
I've met Stallman. He's a hard man to respect because his social skills aren't up to par. The disrespect (and hostility) he gave me for being the only person in a suit at a University programmer's society meeting, and his dismissive answer a simple question ("How do you counter attacks that claim Linux is unfriendly". Basically he said it was news to him that it was unfriendly and moved on.)
Here's the thing us "nerds" need to remember. It's a lot easier to believe FUD uttered against an eccentric socially inept person with poor hygene and a bizzare sense of humour than it is against someone who's got some charisma and isn't an ass. Stallman may or may not be past it as a programmer, but he's got good ideas. His presentation of them lets him down big time.
Simple reasoning would tell us that you're an idiot.
Good to see you using those social skills. People like you are why Linux has no market share. Can't you disagree without being obnoxious?