Assume Joe "The Plumber" drinks 2 beers every night when he comes home. Assume this is not lo-alcohol beer but regular plain old lager. If Joe Plumber is an American, it's a weaker, more tasteless beer regardless. But let's put Joe Plumber in the UK, Ireland or call 'm "Jan Loodgieter" (NL), "Calle Rörmokaren" (SE/NO) or "Hans Installateur" (GER) or "Tomàs Zednik" (Czech R). Let's assume he drinks beers in the same way his dad and granddad before him. Good, strong beers, fine, tasty beers in pints, boots, strange Belgian glasses and whatnot. Let's assume all of these people drink these beers anyway, with or without the chemical in it.
Simply putting this chemical into the beer will not likely change the habits of all of these Joes. In France and the rest of the world, wine consumption didn't exactly triple when an article about the French paradox was published either. Partially because Joe might not read the newspaper because he's too busy in the pub. So having said that, how could this have an adverse affect?
Founded in 1552, this brand is still going strong with the same smell/feel/look my grandfather's grandfather used. Instead of ridiculing this, I would think it would be a sad day when this product would disappear. It is the oldest brand of shaving products known to me.
Licorice tattoo turned a gun metal blue Scrawled across the shoulders of a dying town But the one eyed jacks across the railroad tracks And the scar on its belly pulled a stranger passing through He's a juvenile delinquent never learned how to behave But the cops would never think to look in, in Burma Shave
And the road was like a ribbon and the moon was like a bone He didn't seem to be like any guy she'd ever known He kinda looked like Farley Granger with his hair slicked back She says I'm a sucker for a fella in a cowboy hat How far are you going he said depends on what you mean He says I'm only stopping here to get some gasoline I'm guess I'm going thataway just as long as it's paved I guess you'd say I'm on my way to Burma Shave
And with her knees up on the glove compartment She took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer And she popped her gum and arched her back Hell Marysville ain't nothing but a wide spot in the road Some night my heart pounds like thunder I don't know why it don't explode cause everyone in this stinking town has got one foot in the grave And I'd rather take my chances out in Burma Shave
Presley's what I go by, why don't you change the station Count the grain elevators in the rearview mirror She said Mister anywhere you point this thing Has got to beat the hell out of the sting Of going to bed with every dream that dies here every morning And so drill me a hole with a barber pole And I'm jumping my parole just like a fugitive tonight Why don't you have another swig And pass that car if you're so brave I wanna get there before the sun comes up in Burma Shave
And the spider web crack and the Mustang screamed Smoke from the tyres and the twisted machine Just a nickel's worth of dreams and every wishbone that they saved Lies swindled from them on the way to Burma Shave
And the sun hit the derrick and cast a bat wing shadow Up against the car door on the shot gun side And when they pulled her from the wreck You know she still had on her shades They say that dreams are growing wild just this side of Burma Shave
Why? Why do you think you need such a thing? What are you going to use it for?
There's a plethora of different media out there. Anything from Punch-cards to Single-reel tape to QIC, HDD with different interfaces, hell, even Magneto Opical/UDO and Microfilm or, God forbit, Floppy or even normal Casette Tapes (Remember MSX "DatRecorders"?)
Then there's a plethora of software used to write to these media. Any tape drive usually was written to with Networker, DataProtector/Omniback II, AMANDA, NetBackup or BackupExec, not to mention older iterations such as ArcServe and whatnot. The Harddisks can be formatted with the most wild versions of FAT, FAT16, 32, NTFS in various flavours, Ext*, Reiser and so on, while Casette tapes were written by a BASIC OS.
Then there's a plethora of software used to create the objects on those media. You have your CoDecs for rich media, your office formats of yore like WordPerfect 5.1... The list is nigh endless. When you say you want a media reading PC, you need to delimit your project somewhat, because you could end up with half a data center filled with machines for various purposes.
So, again: - Why do you need it? - What for?
Besides, if you still have floppies with your original copy of The Secret of Monkey Island on it, do you really need to be able to read those, or do you simply surf into a retro-gaming site to find the images and a suitable run-time environment for them?
What irks me is that I have a bluetooth hands-free set in the car that allows me to pick up the call at a minimum risk. The way I see it, a hands-free conversation is about the same distraction-level as talking to a passenger.
So if hands-free kit were simply mandatory, or if call handling were more standardized and well handled in cars (every car a bluetooth hands-free set by default, for instance??) you wouldn't need such tomfoolery.
In Italy and Israel everyone drives like a psycho beeyotch from hell. In France nobody cares about what the car looks like because after parking it in Paris three times it's gonna be dented and have other cars' lacquer all over it.
Now in Holland and Germany most people stick to the rules in a quite civilized manner, but not as civilized as in Sweden. In Sweden everyone drives huge ass (mostly) European cars (Saabs, Mercs, Beamers, Lexus, Jags, Volvo, whatnot) but the most of them are really nice about it. Almost like Canadians, as it were.
It's not aboot the car, it's aboot culture and psychology. Having said that, you project some properties on BMW owners that might ring true in some cases, but that might be simple projection and envy on your side.
Oh, and before some smart-ass comments: I know Lexus is a subsidiary of Toyota, Japan, and not European. THen again, it beats being a subsidiary of General Motors right now.:-D
So you disregard iTunes and use SharePod to copy content to and from the iPod.
Doesn't make the iPod a less great player. "locked down" in the 21st century doesn't mean anything, don't you know that? There's always some asshole somewhere that will hack / open it.
I see the same complaint about the iPhone and just shrug. It was supposed to be vendor locked. So the first thing that happened in Europe is that people hacked and opened it. There are millions of "open" iPhones in the EU.
I'm amazed nobody pointed this out on slashdot of all places. DOH!
I hate to say it, but I bought an iPod Classic 80 GB about a year ago. Before that I owned an iAudio 30GB XL player, but the screen broke on that one.
This iPod of mine is in use every day. I use it in the car (hooked up to the car stereo via a built in Aux Jack) for my 2.5 hours of commuting, I use it on planes, I hook it up to my home system to randomly meander through the 850 albums I ripped on it (it's too small though, it won't fit my entire collection). I use it at the office with my Altec Lansing travel speakers to provide me with tunes.
The battery still runs ~28 hours if I don't screw around with the screen too much, and the thing operates flawlessly. Plus, the fact that I got six ways of finding the same song (Search, Genre, Artist, Song, Album, Compilation browsing) and all the trimmings of cover information display and whatnot make it a pretty sweet device. Objectively speaking (and I didn't want to even like the iPod because I've never been a Mac fan with their closed platform bollocks), it is still the best player out there even if they're seeing competition from MicroSoft according to critics. But the market has voted with its wallet.
When this one does, I'm hoping I can replace it with the same device, except a ~250 GB Solid State version. So as long as they keep up with the Joneses, I don't see how Wozniak will be right in the foreseeable future. Then again, on a long enough time scale, and product/individual/company/society has a survival rate of zero, right? Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that axiom out.
> For starters, non-citizens have basically no rights and if they want in they have to do what we tell them.
Well, the other poster was right when he said you, sir, are a dick. Firstly, you are from an immigrant country which was built on the blood, sweat and tears of initial non-citizens, you insensitive clod! Secondly, I think it is only civilized to bestow rights on People regardless of creed, religion or ethnicity. Failing to do so makes you a barbarian.
Furthermore you'd be well advised to realize there are 6.7 Billion of "us" and ~300 Million of "you" on this planet. And given the state of your currency, government and financial institutions, I would be very careful with such statements. You might want "out" someday, and you might not be welcome. Matter of fact, you aren't already amongst many of "us".
A photographer always has the right to take the photo. But publication can't be done without the model's consent.
So if someone posts and tags a photo of you in particular (IANAL, but I think group / crowd photos are special here) and you're not happy with it, you can lawfully ask 'm to remove it.
Please, people! Could you quit calling it mathematics? I've looked at the site, and it offers you some basic arithmetic questions. I can do those after ~15 shots of whiskey and a doobie or two. And I suck at Maths.
When I read "mathematics", I think it would be more interesting if Google put some problems where you have to integrate functions with more than three variables, or differentiate functions or some such.
Hear Hear! Somebody give that man a blowjob! Or mod him up some more. Although I wouldn't call it programmer arrogance exclusively. I'd chuck in the words ignorance and incompetence too for good measure.
I don't even want to go into how many times I've had to battle my way through L3 support and Lab obstacles to convince everyone there was a bug in the code rather than the environment. If nobody will put programmers in tech support for a couple of years, the least they can do is teach 'm good and understandable English in speech and writing and send 'm off to a Kepner Tregoe troubleshooting training or two.
As an employee who started out by doing 3.5 years first level support for a host of products at first and then for particular larger accounts, I take offense.
After the first years I rolled into Consulting, meaning implementation, maintenance and enhancement of customers' infrastructure. Then I held a job as a Pre-Sales Consultant for two and a half years, and I was an EMEA Escalation Manager for a year, but in the end I decided I simply like Tech Support so I stepped back into Software L2 support for enterprise customers.
I do this job because I like it better than the others. Furthermore, I am damn good at diagnosing complex systems (I support Linux based GRID computing solutions at present), I excel at communicating with customers in different cultures and languages in such a way that "hot" sites cool down when I step in and I've been at this game for roughly 7 years if you take the above mentioned hiatus into account. I've been with my company for 13 years, and I can't see myself moving in many directions, because I simply don't like them.
This has nothing to do with a lack of ability, drive, work-ethic or poor communication skills. I speak 5 languages fluently, have forgotten more about mass storage devices, software and infrastructure than most of you on this forum will ever bother to learn, and have continuously harvested praise for my work, which I take seriously.
Now the person who posted the original question might have issues in selling himself to potential employers, this is true. But to say that the entire tech support community are Incompetent Disney-script Monkeys rubs me the wrong way. I double dare most developers to manage enterprise customer relationships in the face of critical system down cases with hordes of managers on their backs. I sincerely doubt many developers would have what it takes to perform that particular role, and I take offense at your snooty post.
Just a thought.
PS. No, I do not work for a mom-and-pop ISP that asks you to type cmd and ipconfig on your MacOS/X box.
Barring what Australian Users think of their ISP, I can't say "socialized" internet access is bad.
In Sweden, the government decided citizens of all ages must have access. So they subsidized an infrastructure that reaches every damn citizen, from city dwellers to deer-raising farmers at the polar circle. Then they oversaw the formation of a number of ISP's. The ISPs would offer packages that were unlimited with 5 IP's per household, 100 Mbit down, 10 Mbit up (nowadays 100), and all that for 30 Euros a month.
If new infrastructure is required, the government and ISPs do a joint subsidized venture, and Bob's yer uncle. Then the government mandated the creation of websites for all major municipalities, government services and institutions, so nowadays most people can do / find most things on the net.
Similarly, Swedes had way cooler cell phones and G3 before the rest of the world (barring Korea and Japan) had gotten so much as a pulse tone.
With what money would the US do that exactly? Damn, you can't even get a tank of gas in large parts of the States right now.
- Most of your banks are hemorrhaging cash like there's no tomorrow. - Therefore the survival rate for said banks might suffer. - Your biggest pension fund insurance company has been bought up internally so you can have an orderly bankruptcy. - Two other financial institutes already nigh toppled completely. - Your remaining financial institutes need a 700 billion dollar rescue venture which none of the European banks endorse. - You are currently involved in two costly wars overseas.
So starting a war in your back yard because of the risk that the Evil European Union poses is a brilliant plan, Maestro!
Besides, why the hell would the US have something against an EU member state next door? What bloody incentive do we have to invade the United States? Although at the rate Induhviduals like yourself are going, you might indeed soon end up with no cash, no power and more enemies than you can shake a bloody stick at.
That argument can, as I'll demonstrate, be carried on ad infinitum and in absurdum:
GCC was written by Stallman, the C front end of which was derived from Bell Labs' C, which was based on B, which in term was a product of a Cambridge (England) Student called Martin Richards (no relation to Keith, I assume) in the sixties. His work was surely severely influenced by Alan Turing's work, who had been influenced by Einstein during the formation of his mathematical theories, who in turn probably owed a debt of gratitude to the likes of Pascal, Huygens, Newton and Leibniz.
All those were from the empirical / objectivist school of thinking which was arguably based on Platonic logic. Plato formulated his ideas long before Intellectual Property Laws/Rights ever existed. Therefore you could argue that Stallman would have been nowhere without Hellenistic culture which was open source in the sense that the notion of proprietary information didn't exist in the same form it does today. Plato, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Newton, Einstein, Turing and Richards were all European, by the way.
Having said that, the first Copyright law known in the Western world originated in 1710 in England, so you could argue that the notions of Free (as in beer) information and Closed (as in copyrighted / proprietary) information both originated in Europe, along with the ideals you hold dear. All this because the US simply hasn't been around long enough to originate anything save McDonalds, Starbucks and the aforementioned over-sized motorized vehicles that don't corner too well and consume too much fossil fuel for their own good.:-)
My original question still stands: Can you prove by numbers and source that most large Open Source Projects originated in the US?
Europeans caring more about the source code is not such a silly notion if you take into account the laws surrounding Openness of Government in countries such as Germany, Sweden, Denmark et al. After all, it was the openness of government that prompted the German state to go for open document standards and Linux in general. If I may speak for my fellow Europeans here, I can say that we don't care so much about the Source code in and of itself, but we do care about information that concerns citizens and governments not being tied into (foreign) corporations' good will and cash register.
The only silly part of that statement was the European bit in the sense that there is no typical "European" yet. The Spaniard might have very, very different views from the Dutchman, Swede, Greek, Serb, Bulgarian or Englishman.
Are you sure about that? Can you substantiate that claim with some numbers and quote a source?
In the 80's you saw a lot of creative programming come out of the Eastern Block, from what then still were Soviet satellite states. They had to squeeze all the functionality they could get out of bad/cheap/old hardware and therefore made software on a shoestring budget that really did interesting things. To this day you have very decent software development shops in unlikely places like Slovenia, Bulgaria and whatnot.
Then there are the "celebs". Linus Torvalds, as you might recall, is Finnish, "DVD" Jon Johansen is Norwegian and Matthias Ettrich of KDE Fame is German. I know a fair amount of Germans that did/do open source stuff, and Suse is originally German. Furthermore, Israel boasts a very high quality R&D community in both commercial and Open Software while Computer gaming was invented by a British professor with an overgrown oscilloscope and time to kill.
All in all I have to be a little bit skeptical about that post of yours. After all, Americans surely didn't invent cars and motorcycles, and to this day they can't build 'm properly either. I very much doubt they invented the Linux kernel.:-D
If only it were the Mafia, be it Russian, Japanese or Chinese. About the Italians I don't know, but I've never seen Mafia people indicating explicitly any of the following statements:
- they believe in the literal contents of the bible - God's will is involved in their crimes/policy - they are interested in exterminating polar bears - they are against gay marriage and abortion
Although, like Palin the Mafia typically likes the right to bear firearms and the right to self-determination to the highest degree.
To cut a long story short, Palin is more Bush than Bush himself and a right wing neo-conservative religious dumb fucknut to boot and all the American people can do is buy the same shoes and glasses and admire her hairstyle. At least, that is what newspapers across the world are writing about concerning the "Palinmania".
The way I see it, if said statement is true, that makes the American people as morally bankrupt as their financial institutes. Tee Hee.
Obviously the original poster had four left turns of 67.5 degrees each in mind, thus ending up with the 270 degree total which gives you a 90 degree right turn relative to your original heading.
It is precisely because of the fact that he called Muslims to a Jihad against the Americans that I tend to believe this statement. Mind you, Bin Laden doesn't say he didn't want to do this, he plainly states he was not allowed to carry this out by his Taliban hosts. Contrary to popular belief, there are plenty of Islamic clerics who adhere to strict morals and a relatively exhausting honor system. In many ways it reminds me of the Purists, the Calvinists and certain Roman Catholic factions we've had throughout history.
Just because someone has a different religion than yours and just because someone's honor system makes them want to wage holy war against what you stand for it does not render everything they say null and void. I would be much more worried about certain other parties that seem to wantonly install, sponsor, demonize and then eradicate all manner of regimes across the world to further their (financial) self interest or because they misguidedly think their right cause is furthered by those actions. Because the former group is predictable if you know their morals and their honor system while the latter group is totally unpredictable and hence dangerous as hell.
I don't "know" who the main planner of the 9/11 operation is, and probably no one ever really will, nor is it interesting. All I know is that the USSR, the USA and the world at large are partially responsible for the situation in Afghanistan after the Russian withdrawal, and we "corrected" that fuck up by invading that country and bombing it some more while we're at it. In the mean time half of Iraq is dead and/or injured and I'm sitting here wondering who the terrorists are, because I'm quite sure the crunch of army boots on gravel, the roar of jet engines and the crackle and static of radio transmissions between soldiers strike terror into the hearts of Afghan and Iraqi civilians by now.
Here in Israel I see a lot of this. The other party in the conflict is not "credible" because they've issued Fatwahs and called for Jihad. In the mean time, most of the people you talk to feel that this is their country because the Torah claims they once lived here and the death toll on the Islamic side outstrips the death toll on the Israeli side at least ten to one. Religious War, anyone? If I were living in an Arabic town here that doesn't get decent schools or even a closed sewage system from the federal government because the "municipality doesn't receive enough taxes", I'd bloody well declare a bit of a war too. And if it takes religion for people to join it.... You get the point.
If you (us Western nations) beat a dog (most of the rest of the world) long enough, it will bite.
The funny thing is that I'm working on a shiny new HP 6910p laptop. The kind with ~6 hrs battery life, a good deal of memory, a fast CPU and even a decent GPU. Everyone goes on and on about how the "cost" to start different processes all the time is no longer significant, but I really noticed the difference. I run FireFox 3 with a whole bunch of plug-ins and a nice skin. That contraption, in spite of the plug-ins, feels quite a bit faster than the Chrome browser does out of the box. I've tested Chrome yesterday, and at the end of 6 hours of work (in which everything did work off the bat, even starting my Citrix apps from a web portal, kudos to that) I concluded that firefox feels leaner and meaner, and went back to it.
One of the major gripes I have is that it feels like FireFox is much quicker with regards to my proxy. We run a proxy configuration script which gives us different settings depending on which office we're in, and in Firefox I never notice the damn thing running. Now in Chrome, whenever I open a new tab, I see the damn thing executing. New process, sandbagging (or whatever you call it)... bah, humbug. I agree with the parent poster. I can count the times when that would have come in handy on the fingers of one hand after 3 versions of firefox on my system, and it makes the experience noticeably slower.
Cut a long story short: I appreciate it's a beta. Come release time I'll give it another whirr. But right now, I don't see what the big hubbub is about save the fact there's another Open Source competitor on the market, which is always good. What is funny is that when you de-install Chrome, a dialogue pops up asking "Are you sure you want to uninstall Google Chrome? - Was it something we said?"
Yes, cartel-forming is illegal in most European nations and the US as far as I'm aware. I don't know about the US, but where I'm from those 4 airlines that got together and made pricing arrangements had better not leave any trace of the fact that they had done so, because that would lead to hefty fines and potentially jail time.
The problem is not so much the nebulous items the RIAA deals in, it's more that the organizational and collaborative structure is such that it's nigh impossible to prove it's a cartel.
Now as a support technician I shudder at your post. It lacks any specific information and therefore relevance.
1) What version of FireFox are you talking about? 2) What plug-ins are you running? 3) What platform are you running it on? 4) How is that patched?
I'm running an updated FF3 on Vista (my employer makes me use the latter) and have IETabs, some skin, FireFTP, Downthemall, PDFDownload and Download Statusbar installed. This whole construction works flawlessly all day every day, and you could argue my browsing requirements are on the heavy side.
It's not a bug / class issue until many users report the behaviour under particular circumstances. So until a bug is found, the time is well spent on bolting a new JS interpreter onto the thing and tweaking the GUI.
I've been doing some reading lately, and if you'd read Lakoff's "Metaphors we live by" you'd be noticing that "Free will" and the "Soul" are linguistic concepts we cannot define or express properly. So at the end of the day these vague notions will be described in metaphors, meaning that we try to describe these notions as concepts derived from things that are more clear to us. The same would apply to the ever-fuzzy notions of love and hate. Now Lakoff would argue that Mathematics and Philosophy are not objective at all, and can never presume to be. He would argue that we use mathematics as a metaphor to make the world comply with our own physical condition and the way that condition predisposes our thought patterns.
Having said that, if you attribute the meaning of the ability to make choices to the concept of free will, you could argue that even in a largely deterministic universe, you can still make the odd choice to throw determinism out the window. I guess I'm trying to say that like "Free Will", Determinism is a construct we created so as to make sense of our universe, and I am not sure if it exists either. Who is trying to predict/pre-determine what and why? It makes no sense, unless we had a Prime Mover, a Mao Zhe Dong of the sky, as it were.
So the whole "Free will / Determinism" discussion is quite silly. Within certain parameters I am quite sure that our universe influences our thought patterns, but I'm also quite sure that our actions/choices are somewhat based on what we want for that moment. You could argue that Free Will and Determinism are two extremes of a spectrum, and that the truth probably lies in the middle.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not likely.
Assume Joe "The Plumber" drinks 2 beers every night when he comes home. Assume this is not lo-alcohol beer but regular plain old lager. If Joe Plumber is an American, it's a weaker, more tasteless beer regardless. But let's put Joe Plumber in the UK, Ireland or call 'm "Jan Loodgieter" (NL), "Calle Rörmokaren" (SE/NO) or "Hans Installateur" (GER) or "Tomàs Zednik" (Czech R). Let's assume he drinks beers in the same way his dad and granddad before him. Good, strong beers, fine, tasty beers in pints, boots, strange Belgian glasses and whatnot. Let's assume all of these people drink these beers anyway, with or without the chemical in it.
Simply putting this chemical into the beer will not likely change the habits of all of these Joes. In France and the rest of the world, wine consumption didn't exactly triple when an article about the French paradox was published either. Partially because Joe might not read the newspaper because he's too busy in the pub. So having said that, how could this have an adverse affect?
By the way, I use a shaving soap which is older than your country. And I still use the old fashioned soap tablet and a brush to apply the lather.
Founded in 1552, this brand is still going strong with the same smell/feel/look my grandfather's grandfather used. Instead of ridiculing this, I would think it would be a sad day when this product would disappear. It is the oldest brand of shaving products known to me.
I always thought that was a Tom Waits song:
Licorice tattoo turned a gun metal blue
Scrawled across the shoulders of a dying town
But the one eyed jacks across the railroad tracks
And the scar on its belly pulled a stranger passing through
He's a juvenile delinquent never learned how to behave
But the cops would never think to look in, in Burma Shave
And the road was like a ribbon and the moon was like a bone
He didn't seem to be like any guy she'd ever known
He kinda looked like Farley Granger with his hair slicked back
She says I'm a sucker for a fella in a cowboy hat
How far are you going he said depends on what you mean
He says I'm only stopping here to get some gasoline
I'm guess I'm going thataway just as long as it's paved
I guess you'd say I'm on my way to Burma Shave
And with her knees up on the glove compartment
She took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
And she popped her gum and arched her back
Hell Marysville ain't nothing but a wide spot in the road
Some night my heart pounds like thunder
I don't know why it don't explode
cause everyone in this stinking town has got one foot in the grave
And I'd rather take my chances out in Burma Shave
Presley's what I go by, why don't you change the station
Count the grain elevators in the rearview mirror
She said Mister anywhere you point this thing
Has got to beat the hell out of the sting
Of going to bed with every dream that dies here every morning
And so drill me a hole with a barber pole
And I'm jumping my parole just like a fugitive tonight
Why don't you have another swig
And pass that car if you're so brave
I wanna get there before the sun comes up in Burma Shave
And the spider web crack and the Mustang screamed
Smoke from the tyres and the twisted machine
Just a nickel's worth of dreams and every wishbone that they saved
Lies swindled from them on the way to Burma Shave
And the sun hit the derrick and cast a bat wing shadow
Up against the car door on the shot gun side
And when they pulled her from the wreck
You know she still had on her shades
They say that dreams are growing wild just this side of Burma Shave
Why? Why do you think you need such a thing? What are you going to use it for?
There's a plethora of different media out there. Anything from Punch-cards to Single-reel tape to QIC, HDD with different interfaces, hell, even Magneto Opical/UDO and Microfilm or, God forbit, Floppy or even normal Casette Tapes (Remember MSX "DatRecorders"?)
Then there's a plethora of software used to write to these media. Any tape drive usually was written to with Networker, DataProtector/Omniback II, AMANDA, NetBackup or BackupExec, not to mention older iterations such as ArcServe and whatnot. The Harddisks can be formatted with the most wild versions of FAT, FAT16, 32, NTFS in various flavours, Ext*, Reiser and so on, while Casette tapes were written by a BASIC OS.
Then there's a plethora of software used to create the objects on those media. You have your CoDecs for rich media, your office formats of yore like WordPerfect 5.1... The list is nigh endless. When you say you want a media reading PC, you need to delimit your project somewhat, because you could end up with half a data center filled with machines for various purposes.
So, again:
- Why do you need it?
- What for?
Besides, if you still have floppies with your original copy of The Secret of Monkey Island on it, do you really need to be able to read those, or do you simply surf into a retro-gaming site to find the images and a suitable run-time environment for them?
What irks me is that I have a bluetooth hands-free set in the car that allows me to pick up the call at a minimum risk. The way I see it, a hands-free conversation is about the same distraction-level as talking to a passenger.
So if hands-free kit were simply mandatory, or if call handling were more standardized and well handled in cars (every car a bluetooth hands-free set by default, for instance??) you wouldn't need such tomfoolery.
In Italy and Israel everyone drives like a psycho beeyotch from hell. In France nobody cares about what the car looks like because after parking it in Paris three times it's gonna be dented and have other cars' lacquer all over it.
Now in Holland and Germany most people stick to the rules in a quite civilized manner, but not as civilized as in Sweden. In Sweden everyone drives huge ass (mostly) European cars (Saabs, Mercs, Beamers, Lexus, Jags, Volvo, whatnot) but the most of them are really nice about it. Almost like Canadians, as it were.
It's not aboot the car, it's aboot culture and psychology. Having said that, you project some properties on BMW owners that might ring true in some cases, but that might be simple projection and envy on your side.
Oh, and before some smart-ass comments: I know Lexus is a subsidiary of Toyota, Japan, and not European. THen again, it beats being a subsidiary of General Motors right now. :-D
So you disregard iTunes and use SharePod to copy content to and from the iPod.
Doesn't make the iPod a less great player. "locked down" in the 21st century doesn't mean anything, don't you know that? There's always some asshole somewhere that will hack / open it.
I see the same complaint about the iPhone and just shrug. It was supposed to be vendor locked. So the first thing that happened in Europe is that people hacked and opened it. There are millions of "open" iPhones in the EU.
I'm amazed nobody pointed this out on slashdot of all places. DOH!
I hate to say it, but I bought an iPod Classic 80 GB about a year ago. Before that I owned an iAudio 30GB XL player, but the screen broke on that one.
This iPod of mine is in use every day. I use it in the car (hooked up to the car stereo via a built in Aux Jack) for my 2.5 hours of commuting, I use it on planes, I hook it up to my home system to randomly meander through the 850 albums I ripped on it (it's too small though, it won't fit my entire collection). I use it at the office with my Altec Lansing travel speakers to provide me with tunes.
The battery still runs ~28 hours if I don't screw around with the screen too much, and the thing operates flawlessly. Plus, the fact that I got six ways of finding the same song (Search, Genre, Artist, Song, Album, Compilation browsing) and all the trimmings of cover information display and whatnot make it a pretty sweet device. Objectively speaking (and I didn't want to even like the iPod because I've never been a Mac fan with their closed platform bollocks), it is still the best player out there even if they're seeing competition from MicroSoft according to critics. But the market has voted with its wallet.
When this one does, I'm hoping I can replace it with the same device, except a ~250 GB Solid State version. So as long as they keep up with the Joneses, I don't see how Wozniak will be right in the foreseeable future. Then again, on a long enough time scale, and product/individual/company/society has a survival rate of zero, right? Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that axiom out.
> For starters, non-citizens have basically no rights and if they want in they have to do what we tell them.
Well, the other poster was right when he said you, sir, are a dick. Firstly, you are from an immigrant country which was built on the blood, sweat and tears of initial non-citizens, you insensitive clod! Secondly, I think it is only civilized to bestow rights on People regardless of creed, religion or ethnicity. Failing to do so makes you a barbarian.
Furthermore you'd be well advised to realize there are 6.7 Billion of "us" and ~300 Million of "you" on this planet. And given the state of your currency, government and financial institutions, I would be very careful with such statements. You might want "out" someday, and you might not be welcome. Matter of fact, you aren't already amongst many of "us".
A photographer always has the right to take the photo. But publication can't be done without the model's consent.
So if someone posts and tags a photo of you in particular (IANAL, but I think group / crowd photos are special here) and you're not happy with it, you can lawfully ask 'm to remove it.
Please, people! Could you quit calling it mathematics? I've looked at the site, and it offers you some basic arithmetic questions. I can do those after ~15 shots of whiskey and a doobie or two. And I suck at Maths.
When I read "mathematics", I think it would be more interesting if Google put some problems where you have to integrate functions with more than three variables, or differentiate functions or some such.
Hear Hear! Somebody give that man a blowjob! Or mod him up some more. Although I wouldn't call it programmer arrogance exclusively. I'd chuck in the words ignorance and incompetence too for good measure.
I don't even want to go into how many times I've had to battle my way through L3 support and Lab obstacles to convince everyone there was a bug in the code rather than the environment. If nobody will put programmers in tech support for a couple of years, the least they can do is teach 'm good and understandable English in speech and writing and send 'm off to a Kepner Tregoe troubleshooting training or two.
As an employee who started out by doing 3.5 years first level support for a host of products at first and then for particular larger accounts, I take offense.
After the first years I rolled into Consulting, meaning implementation, maintenance and enhancement of customers' infrastructure. Then I held a job as a Pre-Sales Consultant for two and a half years, and I was an EMEA Escalation Manager for a year, but in the end I decided I simply like Tech Support so I stepped back into Software L2 support for enterprise customers.
I do this job because I like it better than the others. Furthermore, I am damn good at diagnosing complex systems (I support Linux based GRID computing solutions at present), I excel at communicating with customers in different cultures and languages in such a way that "hot" sites cool down when I step in and I've been at this game for roughly 7 years if you take the above mentioned hiatus into account. I've been with my company for 13 years, and I can't see myself moving in many directions, because I simply don't like them.
This has nothing to do with a lack of ability, drive, work-ethic or poor communication skills. I speak 5 languages fluently, have forgotten more about mass storage devices, software and infrastructure than most of you on this forum will ever bother to learn, and have continuously harvested praise for my work, which I take seriously.
Now the person who posted the original question might have issues in selling himself to potential employers, this is true. But to say that the entire tech support community are Incompetent Disney-script Monkeys rubs me the wrong way. I double dare most developers to manage enterprise customer relationships in the face of critical system down cases with hordes of managers on their backs. I sincerely doubt many developers would have what it takes to perform that particular role, and I take offense at your snooty post.
Just a thought.
PS. No, I do not work for a mom-and-pop ISP that asks you to type cmd and ipconfig on your MacOS/X box.
Barring what Australian Users think of their ISP, I can't say "socialized" internet access is bad.
In Sweden, the government decided citizens of all ages must have access. So they subsidized an infrastructure that reaches every damn citizen, from city dwellers to deer-raising farmers at the polar circle. Then they oversaw the formation of a number of ISP's. The ISPs would offer packages that were unlimited with 5 IP's per household, 100 Mbit down, 10 Mbit up (nowadays 100), and all that for 30 Euros a month.
If new infrastructure is required, the government and ISPs do a joint subsidized venture, and Bob's yer uncle. Then the government mandated the creation of websites for all major municipalities, government services and institutions, so nowadays most people can do / find most things on the net.
Similarly, Swedes had way cooler cell phones and G3 before the rest of the world (barring Korea and Japan) had gotten so much as a pulse tone.
Tasmania has even worse problems
Tasmania always has worse problems. Nothing to do with duopolies. Move along.
Hehehehe... You're funny.
With what money would the US do that exactly? Damn, you can't even get a tank of gas in large parts of the States right now.
- Most of your banks are hemorrhaging cash like there's no tomorrow.
- Therefore the survival rate for said banks might suffer.
- Your biggest pension fund insurance company has been bought up internally so you can have an orderly bankruptcy.
- Two other financial institutes already nigh toppled completely.
- Your remaining financial institutes need a 700 billion dollar rescue venture which none of the European banks endorse.
- You are currently involved in two costly wars overseas.
So starting a war in your back yard because of the risk that the Evil European Union poses is a brilliant plan, Maestro!
Besides, why the hell would the US have something against an EU member state next door? What bloody incentive do we have to invade the United States? Although at the rate Induhviduals like yourself are going, you might indeed soon end up with no cash, no power and more enemies than you can shake a bloody stick at.
That argument can, as I'll demonstrate, be carried on ad infinitum and in absurdum:
GCC was written by Stallman, the C front end of which was derived from Bell Labs' C, which was based on B, which in term was a product of a Cambridge (England) Student called Martin Richards (no relation to Keith, I assume) in the sixties. His work was surely severely influenced by Alan Turing's work, who had been influenced by Einstein during the formation of his mathematical theories, who in turn probably owed a debt of gratitude to the likes of Pascal, Huygens, Newton and Leibniz.
All those were from the empirical / objectivist school of thinking which was arguably based on Platonic logic. Plato formulated his ideas long before Intellectual Property Laws/Rights ever existed. Therefore you could argue that Stallman would have been nowhere without Hellenistic culture which was open source in the sense that the notion of proprietary information didn't exist in the same form it does today. Plato, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Newton, Einstein, Turing and Richards were all European, by the way.
Having said that, the first Copyright law known in the Western world originated in 1710 in England, so you could argue that the notions of Free (as in beer) information and Closed (as in copyrighted / proprietary) information both originated in Europe, along with the ideals you hold dear. All this because the US simply hasn't been around long enough to originate anything save McDonalds, Starbucks and the aforementioned over-sized motorized vehicles that don't corner too well and consume too much fossil fuel for their own good. :-)
My original question still stands: Can you prove by numbers and source that most large Open Source Projects originated in the US?
Europeans caring more about the source code is not such a silly notion if you take into account the laws surrounding Openness of Government in countries such as Germany, Sweden, Denmark et al. After all, it was the openness of government that prompted the German state to go for open document standards and Linux in general. If I may speak for my fellow Europeans here, I can say that we don't care so much about the Source code in and of itself, but we do care about information that concerns citizens and governments not being tied into (foreign) corporations' good will and cash register.
The only silly part of that statement was the European bit in the sense that there is no typical "European" yet. The Spaniard might have very, very different views from the Dutchman, Swede, Greek, Serb, Bulgarian or Englishman.
Are you sure about that? Can you substantiate that claim with some numbers and quote a source?
In the 80's you saw a lot of creative programming come out of the Eastern Block, from what then still were Soviet satellite states. They had to squeeze all the functionality they could get out of bad/cheap/old hardware and therefore made software on a shoestring budget that really did interesting things. To this day you have very decent software development shops in unlikely places like Slovenia, Bulgaria and whatnot.
Then there are the "celebs". Linus Torvalds, as you might recall, is Finnish, "DVD" Jon Johansen is Norwegian and Matthias Ettrich of KDE Fame is German. I know a fair amount of Germans that did/do open source stuff, and Suse is originally German. Furthermore, Israel boasts a very high quality R&D community in both commercial and Open Software while Computer gaming was invented by a British professor with an overgrown oscilloscope and time to kill.
All in all I have to be a little bit skeptical about that post of yours. After all, Americans surely didn't invent cars and motorcycles, and to this day they can't build 'm properly either. I very much doubt they invented the Linux kernel. :-D
If only it were the Mafia, be it Russian, Japanese or Chinese. About the Italians I don't know, but I've never seen Mafia people indicating explicitly any of the following statements:
- they believe in the literal contents of the bible
- God's will is involved in their crimes/policy
- they are interested in exterminating polar bears
- they are against gay marriage and abortion
Although, like Palin the Mafia typically likes the right to bear firearms and the right to self-determination to the highest degree.
To cut a long story short, Palin is more Bush than Bush himself and a right wing neo-conservative religious dumb fucknut to boot and all the American people can do is buy the same shoes and glasses and admire her hairstyle. At least, that is what newspapers across the world are writing about concerning the "Palinmania".
The way I see it, if said statement is true, that makes the American people as morally bankrupt as their financial institutes. Tee Hee.
Now, now, you are assuming 90 degree lefts.
Obviously the original poster had four left turns of 67.5 degrees each in mind, thus ending up with the 270 degree total which gives you a 90 degree right turn relative to your original heading.
It is precisely because of the fact that he called Muslims to a Jihad against the Americans that I tend to believe this statement. Mind you, Bin Laden doesn't say he didn't want to do this, he plainly states he was not allowed to carry this out by his Taliban hosts. Contrary to popular belief, there are plenty of Islamic clerics who adhere to strict morals and a relatively exhausting honor system. In many ways it reminds me of the Purists, the Calvinists and certain Roman Catholic factions we've had throughout history.
Just because someone has a different religion than yours and just because someone's honor system makes them want to wage holy war against what you stand for it does not render everything they say null and void. I would be much more worried about certain other parties that seem to wantonly install, sponsor, demonize and then eradicate all manner of regimes across the world to further their (financial) self interest or because they misguidedly think their right cause is furthered by those actions. Because the former group is predictable if you know their morals and their honor system while the latter group is totally unpredictable and hence dangerous as hell.
I don't "know" who the main planner of the 9/11 operation is, and probably no one ever really will, nor is it interesting. All I know is that the USSR, the USA and the world at large are partially responsible for the situation in Afghanistan after the Russian withdrawal, and we "corrected" that fuck up by invading that country and bombing it some more while we're at it. In the mean time half of Iraq is dead and/or injured and I'm sitting here wondering who the terrorists are, because I'm quite sure the crunch of army boots on gravel, the roar of jet engines and the crackle and static of radio transmissions between soldiers strike terror into the hearts of Afghan and Iraqi civilians by now.
Here in Israel I see a lot of this. The other party in the conflict is not "credible" because they've issued Fatwahs and called for Jihad. In the mean time, most of the people you talk to feel that this is their country because the Torah claims they once lived here and the death toll on the Islamic side outstrips the death toll on the Israeli side at least ten to one. Religious War, anyone? If I were living in an Arabic town here that doesn't get decent schools or even a closed sewage system from the federal government because the "municipality doesn't receive enough taxes", I'd bloody well declare a bit of a war too. And if it takes religion for people to join it.... You get the point.
If you (us Western nations) beat a dog (most of the rest of the world) long enough, it will bite.
Mazaltov! We've reached that stage.
The funny thing is that I'm working on a shiny new HP 6910p laptop. The kind with ~6 hrs battery life, a good deal of memory, a fast CPU and even a decent GPU. Everyone goes on and on about how the "cost" to start different processes all the time is no longer significant, but I really noticed the difference. I run FireFox 3 with a whole bunch of plug-ins and a nice skin. That contraption, in spite of the plug-ins, feels quite a bit faster than the Chrome browser does out of the box. I've tested Chrome yesterday, and at the end of 6 hours of work (in which everything did work off the bat, even starting my Citrix apps from a web portal, kudos to that) I concluded that firefox feels leaner and meaner, and went back to it.
One of the major gripes I have is that it feels like FireFox is much quicker with regards to my proxy. We run a proxy configuration script which gives us different settings depending on which office we're in, and in Firefox I never notice the damn thing running. Now in Chrome, whenever I open a new tab, I see the damn thing executing. New process, sandbagging (or whatever you call it)... bah, humbug. I agree with the parent poster. I can count the times when that would have come in handy on the fingers of one hand after 3 versions of firefox on my system, and it makes the experience noticeably slower.
Cut a long story short: I appreciate it's a beta. Come release time I'll give it another whirr. But right now, I don't see what the big hubbub is about save the fact there's another Open Source competitor on the market, which is always good. What is funny is that when you de-install Chrome, a dialogue pops up asking "Are you sure you want to uninstall Google Chrome? - Was it something we said?"
Yes, cartel-forming is illegal in most European nations and the US as far as I'm aware. I don't know about the US, but where I'm from those 4 airlines that got together and made pricing arrangements had better not leave any trace of the fact that they had done so, because that would lead to hefty fines and potentially jail time.
The problem is not so much the nebulous items the RIAA deals in, it's more that the organizational and collaborative structure is such that it's nigh impossible to prove it's a cartel.
Now as a support technician I shudder at your post. It lacks any specific information and therefore relevance.
1) What version of FireFox are you talking about?
2) What plug-ins are you running?
3) What platform are you running it on?
4) How is that patched?
I'm running an updated FF3 on Vista (my employer makes me use the latter) and have IETabs, some skin, FireFTP, Downthemall, PDFDownload and Download Statusbar installed. This whole construction works flawlessly all day every day, and you could argue my browsing requirements are on the heavy side.
It's not a bug / class issue until many users report the behaviour under particular circumstances. So until a bug is found, the time is well spent on bolting a new JS interpreter onto the thing and tweaking the GUI.
I've been doing some reading lately, and if you'd read Lakoff's "Metaphors we live by" you'd be noticing that "Free will" and the "Soul" are linguistic concepts we cannot define or express properly. So at the end of the day these vague notions will be described in metaphors, meaning that we try to describe these notions as concepts derived from things that are more clear to us. The same would apply to the ever-fuzzy notions of love and hate. Now Lakoff would argue that Mathematics and Philosophy are not objective at all, and can never presume to be. He would argue that we use mathematics as a metaphor to make the world comply with our own physical condition and the way that condition predisposes our thought patterns.
Having said that, if you attribute the meaning of the ability to make choices to the concept of free will, you could argue that even in a largely deterministic universe, you can still make the odd choice to throw determinism out the window. I guess I'm trying to say that like "Free Will", Determinism is a construct we created so as to make sense of our universe, and I am not sure if it exists either. Who is trying to predict/pre-determine what and why? It makes no sense, unless we had a Prime Mover, a Mao Zhe Dong of the sky, as it were.
So the whole "Free will / Determinism" discussion is quite silly. Within certain parameters I am quite sure that our universe influences our thought patterns, but I'm also quite sure that our actions/choices are somewhat based on what we want for that moment. You could argue that Free Will and Determinism are two extremes of a spectrum, and that the truth probably lies in the middle.