If you read a variety of news sites, you'll see that/. is never first with the news, and not often even fast with the news. It's not unusual to see something here that I first read weeks ago elsewhere.
That's unavoidable, because/. is not a news reporting site, it's an aggragating site for news that was first reported elsewhere. The value of/. is not in being first with the news; the value of/. is in gathering a lot of news in one place for the convenience of trolls;-)
You've obviously never been to Asia, maybe never even met anyone who has.
I lived there for nine years, and I can tell you that divorce is not at all uncommon. Nor are single parents. I've met a great many divorced people there, and the single parents are almost always single mothers, with less financial resources than men. I knew a woman who was raising her daughter on such a tight budget that she couldn't even afford a refrigerator until last year.
Crushing poverty is common. Kids coming up to you on the street trying to sell you all kinds of things, and others just to bet. Amputees pushing along on hand carts, begging because no one will give a handicapped person a job.
Even in rich countries like Japan, homelessness has become an epidemic, and taxi drivers (mostly former corporate employees who were downsized and are now unemployable) are in such large numbers that it's become hard for them to make a living even at that because of excess competition. But that's just about the only thing left open to many downsized workers, so the ranks of the taxi drivers continue to grow.
Some safety net, huh? Keeping your head above water in Asia is just as hard as it is here, and often harder. Sure, there are some family safety nets, but there are here, too. You did notice the mention of people having to move in with their parents because they couldn't get any work, didn't you?
Please, someone offset the genius who modded the parent Insightful. The parent quite simply doesn't know what he's talking about.
Nice try, but asktog clearly only cares about supporting what Apple did, not about being right (at least WRT question 5.
The reason why having the menu bar at the top is so bad (the word "sucks" would not be too strong, really) is that you have to move the mouse and your eyes all the way up there, find what you want, then move them both *all the way back* to the window where you were originally operating. The amount of time you spend doing this, the amount of extra mouse hops you might make as a result, and the amount of extra risk of RSI from it are not insignificant. In fact, they make me cuss Apple out every time I use a Mac, for doing something so stupid on something that is in every other way but one a superior product.
To fully put it in perspective how much I hate the screen-top Window bar, I once worked at a company where the only computer available when I joined was a Mac, so for the first few months I worked there (this was my first use of a Mac), I get pretty used to the Mac. A lot things worked really well. There were, however, two things that I could never stomach: the mouse, and the screen-top menu bar. The menu bar continued to annoy me so much that a few months later when some new Windows machines were ordered and they asked me if I wanted one, I actually jumped at the chance (I was using Linux at home and was no fan of MS even then). The overall experience wasn't as good, but I was so glad to be rid of that top menu bar that it was worth all the other trade-downs that came with Windows.
At least Tog didn't try to claim that having a mouse with only one button is somehow more usable than a three-button mouse:-)
I'm glad we had this little talk. I remember now just how much I despise that menu bar. I guess I won't buy a PowerBook after all, unless my wife wants one.
But Apple, if you're reading this, choice is good. Give me an option to put the menu bar in the window and I'll be your products:-)
Well, yes, it is really that hard to move the mouse to the top of the screen.
I love Macs. They look good. They are well-built. The hardware design is fantastic (opening up a Mac is like opening up a SPARCstation after you've been used to PCs; you say "This hadware design is a thing of beauty!"). OS X the overall best consumer and corporate desktop OS on the market. Yes, I'm a Linux user and for me Linux is probably a better fit to my needs, but for most home and corporate users, I think Mac OS X stands far above everything else.
There are, however, two things about Macs that I find to be just awful (YMMV, obviously):
- One-button mice (but you can replace them, at least)
- The menu bar at the top of the screen
The menu bar at the top of the screen bothers me so much that it's the reason I don't own a Mac. True story. In every other respect, I like Macs so well that I would certainly buy them. All Apple has to do is change one thing: make the menu bar position an option: in the window or at the top, whichever you like best. Maybe even on the left or right; some people might like it that way.
I accept that Mac users are used to having it at the top and that like most people, they wouldn't much care for change in something they are used to, so of course, the default should remain menu-bar-at-the-top. Most Mac users seem to like it that way. For those of us who don't like it, being able to change it with a couple of clicks would be a bigger selling point for the Mac than maybe Apple realizes.
A dual-G5 Mac would be wonderful to have, but not if it makes me have the menu bar at the top of the screen. Apple, I do hope some of your design people read/.:-)
Re:This is news? Company A cares about smth strate
on
Microsoft's Strategy Memos
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· Score: 2, Interesting
While you raise an interesting point, it does not support your position. Rather, it tends to support the "mindshare is everything" argument.
Consider: Apple fell to as little as 3% marketshare, and probably has no more than 5% right now. If it were not for Apple's powerful mindshare, they would likely not even exist today. How many companies can you think of, that, if driven down to only 3% marketshare and seeming to have no great product on the immediate horizon, would still be able to maintain a powerful base of utterly loyal customers who would see them through until the company got back on its feet. Then the company brings back the former CEO, gets some decent new product out the door, and is back on its feet and increasing marketshare.
If Microsoft is someday driven to 3% marketshare as a result of Linux and Apple eating its lunch (I'm not saying it's likely they'll go to that level, just for example), do you think that the remaining 3% of MS users would so fervently love Microsoft that they would refuse to switch to either Mac or Linux because they think MS products are so great that there simply is no alternative? I doubt it. There may be a few people like that, but Bill and Steve's families aren't big enough to keep Microsoft afloat by themselves:-)
WRT positive momentum, Apple has that. You might have heard of the iPod and OS X? OS X helped tremendously to save Apple, not only because it's good but because it proved that after failed attempts to do so in the past, they could finally get a replacement for the aging MacOS out the door. Now the iPod and iTunes are bringing Apple not just a lot of mindshare, but real sales and marketshare, too. Do you think a person who buys an iPod and is a first-time Apple buyer might not consider a Mac for his/her next computer if they love their iPod?
I'm even thinking possibly buying a Mac for my next notebook, and I was a DOS user, then a Desqview user, then a Windows user (starting with 3.0; I had Windows 286 and Windows 386, but they were so bad they were pretty much useless), and later became a Linux and FreeBSD user. I've never owned an Apple product, don't have an MP3 player and would probably never buy an iPod, but I may well buy a PowerBook or iBook next year.
That's how Apple translates mindshare to marketshare. Like many people, I once wrote them off as roadkill, now I'm considering buying one of their products for the first time ever.
There were radio stations referred to as pirate radio in the 1960s and 1970s. It was not, however, their playing of music without paying royalties (I don't know if they did or not, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn the didn't) for which it was called pirate radio. Rather, it was because they were operating without FCC licenses, commonly from just across the Mexican border, and broadcasting into border states such as Texas. A secondary contributor to the "pirate radio" monicker might have been the fact that these stations weren't much interested in the American Top 40 chart. They were playing by their own rules and airing whatever music they liked. Like the pirates who flew the Jolly Roger, they were operating outside the law, flamboyantly, and according to their own rules.
Copyright infringers may be operating outside the law, and in accordance with their own rules of what they consider IP rights, but there's nothing particularly flamboyant or daring about it. They are just too far from even the stretched "pirate radio" definition of "pirate" to be called such.
Let me get this straight. Because G & S wrote an operetta called "The Pirates of Penzance" (which was about pirates and not about copyright infringers) and there were coincidentally differences in copyright law between the UK and the US, that therefore that "Pirates of Penzance" is somehow a reference to copyright infringement?
What next? Finding out that it weighs the same as a duck and then declaring it to be a witch?
With all due respect, you have overturned nothing.
I'm a conservative, and I get points pretty often. I also despise MS and most of its products, and support *nix in general and Linux and *BSD in particular. I believe in gun ownership, I support President Bush (but wish he'd dump Cheney and put Rice on the ticket), and support taking the war on terrorism to the terrorists rather than letting them bring it here.
Also (and I know you're not gonna believe me b/c this is/.) I don't moderate based on whether or not I agree with the poster's opinion. You can be informative even if I don't like the information you're providing. You can be insightful even if I don't much care for your insight.
One thing I rarely do, though, is spend any points modding an AC up. I may mod an AC down for a genuine troll or flamebait if it hasn't already been hit, but if you want to benefit from my mod points, you're going to have to post logged-in.
This entire post has, of course, been off-topic, so feel free to mod me down:-)
Actually, TurboLinux is about burning through obscene amounts of venture capital in astonishingly short periods of time, and having the biggest display booth at Linux Expo in Tokyo, with the most mini-skirted "companion girls" attending it. I had a pretty good front row seat to that capital burn.
In two years, they moved office not once, but twice, and went from about a dozen employees to nearly a hundred. They actually weren't doing too badly in some areas, but also were by that time being run by VC people who just didn't get Linux or the broader FOSS movement, nor did they have much of a plan for how to deal with Red Hat's move into Japan. As a result, RH ate TL's lunch right there in their core market. I don't know how many people work there now, but I bet it's a lot closer to a dozen than a hundred.
"Cache" in the sense of "CPU cache" and "disk cache" is directly derived from the standard OED definition, and indeed, it fills the role in a computer that a cache of provisions filled for, for example, a miner in the Klondike. That meaning of the word cache is still alive and well in modern English, as any (educated, at least) native speaker could tell you. If you dig through a bunch of news articles about the war in Iraq, I am sure you will find it there.
In other words, the meaning hasn't been changed, merely extended to something that is conceptually the same but which did not exist at the time the word was borrowed into English from French.
In the case of using "piracy" to mean "copyright infringement," on the other hand, that is a complete break with the actual meaning, and was made up by RIAA and MPAA. It is not even an evolution; merely something they repeated and repeated until they got the press and politicians repeating it, but that doesn't make it true. Piracy remains the hijacking and robbery of vessels (and sometimes road vehicles; the meaning has been extended that far) by force of arms. And yes, pirates do exist today, in the places you mentioned, among others. I'm pretty sure they aren't copying DVDs.
Your claim that there are pirated clothes is as false as your claim regarding copyright infringement. Pirated CDs, DVDs, clothes, etc., are genuine articles which are stolen by pirates and subsequently resold (I haven't heard that pirates target that sort of thing much, so these are probably very rare, if not non-existent). A knock-off Rolex, on the other hand, is just what you properly named it as: a case of trademark infringement. If they copied the inside as well (not likely), then it would probably also be a case of patent infringement. None of copyright/trademark/patent infringement are acts of piracy. They are acts of infringement. That is the legal definition, and the only one that even RIAA can use in court. The legal system does not define "piracy" as the infringement of copyright, trademark, or patent. As one who hopes to take the bar exam in the future, I certainly hope it never does so and do not expect it will.
Piracy has not "evolved" to mean any kind of infringement. It is just a word stuck onto it by RIAA et al. That is the complete opposite of evolution, and something that is rejected by many people other than myself.
I used to live in SE Asia too, and yeah, you can walk into any video shop and buy a VCD for about a buck. But that's not piracy either; piracy is robbing ships by force of arms. What those shops are doing is copyright infringement.
What one guy in his house does (and there are many, many people who copy DVDs purely for fair use reasons, starting with all of us who have toddlers in the house:-) is not even copyright infringement, it really is fair use. Now, if you *distribute* a copy, that is infringement. Backing up your Disney DVDs so your kids don't destroy them, then playing the backups while the originals are kept under lock and key, is not infringement.
On the other hand, if you gave these notebooks to the teachers, every one of them would be ridden with viruses and spyware by the end of the first week. And so would the notebooks
Plus,the kids will think these things are cool, something they usually never think textbooks. However, the poster who mentioned that they may be easy marks for criminals has a very good point.
Finally, I have to wonder if this wouldn't be a better application for that new Sony ePaper (sorry, can't recall the exact name right now and I'm too lazy to look it up, so mod me down:-) book reader instead of a notebook computer. It costs less, doesn't have a lot of moving parts, fans, disks, etc., and is designed to be a book. I personally don't much care for reading books on a computer, I'd much rather have a dead tree edition or something electronic that really acts like a book. The book remains one of the great user interface success stories of all time.
Am I the only one who got this joke? You really should have posted it logged-in, it's pretty funny. If I'd had points I'd give you one, except my normal policy is to only mod things up if they were posted by logged-in users.
For everyone who didn't get it, look for the Project David story that was on/. yesterday, and if you don't mind modding up ACs, throw some mod points his/her way.
I looked into the specific reports to Spamcop that caused one of our hosts to be listed there. The number was pretty small, and everyone I could find was because some mental giants received bounce messages and submitted them to Spamcop as spam.
There is something deeply, seriously broken (read "Run by idiots") about a spam filtering system that will classify a host as a spam source because it bounced undeliverable messages in an RFC-compliant manner. My already-low level of respect for Spamcop has just dropped even lower.
Pardon me, I didn't realize I was addressing someone whose sense of humor was surgically removed, along with his sense of logical thought (trust me on this; no one engaging in logical thought writes the way you do).
I don't know what kind of people you interact with, but here in the corporate world, I do not find that having a penguin mascot increases the credibility of Linux. It would be an easier sell without Tux, I really think so.
However, Tux is way ahead of that horrid seagull. Yeesh. All I can say is "What were they thinking?" Not only because it's ugly, looks drug-crazed, and has hair (an odd attribute for a seagull), but because as someone mentioned in another post, the seagull is making what is considered an obscene gesture in some cultures (and a crude one, but with a non-sexual meaning, in a country where I lived for some years). They really ought to reconsider it. Or at least re-draw it.
Yeah, that happens pretty regularly where I work, too. We provide inbound and outbound mail service for corporate clients, but do not allow spamming. Nevertheless, it seems like all it takes is one dimbulb somewhere to decide (usually erroneously) that something is spam, and one of our hosts will wind up on the spamcop list. They've really gone around the bend.
There is one blacklist I trust day in and day out, though: ORDB. That's because ORDB will only list confirmed open relays. This is a conservative approach but it means that if a host is listed, there is no question of whether or not it belongs there. Also, there is an automated retest-and-removal system. I can't use ones like SPEWS because even though I mostly sympathize (although I think they are *way* too quick on the trigger), in my business that would block far too much legit mail and we just can't do that.
Thank you (and could someone please explain to me why the parent was moderated redundant when three different people all wrote that this isn't the mascot for all of OOo and were all modded interesting?)!
I don't see the need for mascots at all, and they are all so cutesy I could hurl. Tux, the BSD mascot, now this seagull which is the worst all all. Maybe the reason MS still owns the desktop and we don't is that they don't have a mascot, and the repulsive clippy is easily kept out of sight (in Japan, clippy is replaced by a Dolphin, which is less annoying but just as needless).
No doubt we'll both be modded down for daring to criticize open-source maskets as the disgusting, cutesy things they are, but I not only have karma to burn, I have a well-grounded grasp of the real-world value of/. karma: nothing.
OK, I know/. userids have been auctioned on eBay, but that doesn't prove karma has value, only that a low/. userid does. And that some people have way too much money and way too little clue.
I wish I had mod points today so I could spend some here. All the "If software was a car" bitching is at +5 Insightful and here you sit at only +2 for telling the truth.
The nearest computer equivalent to a car is an IBM mainframe. I was a mainframer in the 1980s, and 100% of the hardware in most shops was IBM. The OS was IBM. All of the software on the machines in every shop where I worked came from three sources: IBM, CA, or it was developed in-house to IBM APIs.
If you had a problem, you could get an IBM CE to come out and fix it, 24 x 7 (that support wasn't cheap, but neither would having a dealer mechanic come to your house to fix your car at 3:00 AM Sunday morning be cheap).
In the PC world, where the problems are just as you describe, that kind of near-equivalent of a car can never happen, especially in the Windows world. Things are somewhat better in the open source world because at least when you are writing to a given API, the whole API is definitely available to you, in source form, so you know exactly what you're writing to. Meanwhile, the fact that many of the drivers are either partly or wholly reverse-engineered does not seem to have made them any less reliable than a lot of vendor-written drivers for Windows.
Computers be as reliable as cars? I don't think that will ever happen. I don't think it's even reasonable to expect that, or to even make the comparison. As you say, a car has a pretty simple UI and is tested by the vendor and the stuff at least should all work together. Add to that the fact that even in the United States (which has the least technically competent drivers of any country I've lived in or visited - and yes, I'm American, so this isn't an anti-American troll), you have to get some training and pass a written test and a driving test in order to get a license to drive. No such standard exists for operating a computer, which is a far more complex device, although it's a lot harder to kill someone by being incompetent to use a computer.
There is one potential upside to this, even if it's still not a good deal over all: if they don't have to pay you overtime anymore where they did before, that takes away some of the cost advantage of sending your job to India, and you might be more likely to keep your job.
You're still getting the shaft, it's just a smaller shaft than you would have gotten.
The taxes aren't quite that bad, if only because the upside of not making a lot is that the dependent deductions you get with two adults and two children living on $45K help cut your taxes a good bit. When our kids are old enough to be in school my wife will probably go back to work and that will give us a lot of wiggle room because we will save and invest all of her salary, or nearly all. Right now it wouldn't be terribly cost effective to have her work only to pour the majority of her income straight into daycare, while losing a lot of our tax advantage - even if we wanted to do that to our kids, which we don't.
Our 17-month old can read and write some of the alphabet already, has a vocabulary like kids at least six months older than she is, and has memorized and can sing a few children's songs already. Somehow, I don't think she would be at that level if she were going to daycare instead of being with her mother all day. When she's old enough for pre-school, we may send her there. On the other hand, my wife teaches her so well that it may not be worth it. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read a variety of news sites, you'll see that /. is never first with the news, and not often even fast with the news. It's not unusual to see something here that I first read weeks ago elsewhere.
/. is not a news reporting site, it's an aggragating site for news that was first reported elsewhere. The value of /. is not in being first with the news; the value of /. is in gathering a lot of news in one place for the convenience of trolls ;-)
That's unavoidable, because
You've obviously never been to Asia, maybe never even met anyone who has.
I lived there for nine years, and I can tell you that divorce is not at all uncommon. Nor are single parents. I've met a great many divorced people there, and the single parents are almost always single mothers, with less financial resources than men. I knew a woman who was raising her daughter on such a tight budget that she couldn't even afford a refrigerator until last year.
Crushing poverty is common. Kids coming up to you on the street trying to sell you all kinds of things, and others just to bet. Amputees pushing along on hand carts, begging because no one will give a handicapped person a job.
Even in rich countries like Japan, homelessness has become an epidemic, and taxi drivers (mostly former corporate employees who were downsized and are now unemployable) are in such large numbers that it's become hard for them to make a living even at that because of excess competition. But that's just about the only thing left open to many downsized workers, so the ranks of the taxi drivers continue to grow.
Some safety net, huh? Keeping your head above water in Asia is just as hard as it is here, and often harder. Sure, there are some family safety nets, but there are here, too. You did notice the mention of people having to move in with their parents because they couldn't get any work, didn't you?
Please, someone offset the genius who modded the parent Insightful. The parent quite simply doesn't know what he's talking about.
Nice try, but asktog clearly only cares about supporting what Apple did, not about being right (at least WRT question 5.
:-)
:-)
The reason why having the menu bar at the top is so bad (the word "sucks" would not be too strong, really) is that you have to move the mouse and your eyes all the way up there, find what you want, then move them both *all the way back* to the window where you were originally operating. The amount of time you spend doing this, the amount of extra mouse hops you might make as a result, and the amount of extra risk of RSI from it are not insignificant. In fact, they make me cuss Apple out every time I use a Mac, for doing something so stupid on something that is in every other way but one a superior product.
To fully put it in perspective how much I hate the screen-top Window bar, I once worked at a company where the only computer available when I joined was a Mac, so for the first few months I worked there (this was my first use of a Mac), I get pretty used to the Mac. A lot things worked really well. There were, however, two things that I could never stomach: the mouse, and the screen-top menu bar. The menu bar continued to annoy me so much that a few months later when some new Windows machines were ordered and they asked me if I wanted one, I actually jumped at the chance (I was using Linux at home and was no fan of MS even then). The overall experience wasn't as good, but I was so glad to be rid of that top menu bar that it was worth all the other trade-downs that came with Windows.
At least Tog didn't try to claim that having a mouse with only one button is somehow more usable than a three-button mouse
I'm glad we had this little talk. I remember now just how much I despise that menu bar. I guess I won't buy a PowerBook after all, unless my wife wants one.
But Apple, if you're reading this, choice is good. Give me an option to put the menu bar in the window and I'll be your products
Well, yes, it is really that hard to move the mouse to the top of the screen.
/. :-)
I love Macs. They look good. They are well-built. The hardware design is fantastic (opening up a Mac is like opening up a SPARCstation after you've been used to PCs; you say "This hadware design is a thing of beauty!"). OS X the overall best consumer and corporate desktop OS on the market. Yes, I'm a Linux user and for me Linux is probably a better fit to my needs, but for most home and corporate users, I think Mac OS X stands far above everything else.
There are, however, two things about Macs that I find to be just awful (YMMV, obviously):
- One-button mice (but you can replace them, at least)
- The menu bar at the top of the screen
The menu bar at the top of the screen bothers me so much that it's the reason I don't own a Mac. True story. In every other respect, I like Macs so well that I would certainly buy them. All Apple has to do is change one thing: make the menu bar position an option: in the window or at the top, whichever you like best. Maybe even on the left or right; some people might like it that way.
I accept that Mac users are used to having it at the top and that like most people, they wouldn't much care for change in something they are used to, so of course, the default should remain menu-bar-at-the-top. Most Mac users seem to like it that way. For those of us who don't like it, being able to change it with a couple of clicks would be a bigger selling point for the Mac than maybe Apple realizes.
A dual-G5 Mac would be wonderful to have, but not if it makes me have the menu bar at the top of the screen. Apple, I do hope some of your design people read
While you raise an interesting point, it does not support your position. Rather, it tends to support the "mindshare is everything" argument.
:-)
Consider: Apple fell to as little as 3% marketshare, and probably has no more than 5% right now. If it were not for Apple's powerful mindshare, they would likely not even exist today. How many companies can you think of, that, if driven down to only 3% marketshare and seeming to have no great product on the immediate horizon, would still be able to maintain a powerful base of utterly loyal customers who would see them through until the company got back on its feet. Then the company brings back the former CEO, gets some decent new product out the door, and is back on its feet and increasing marketshare.
If Microsoft is someday driven to 3% marketshare as a result of Linux and Apple eating its lunch (I'm not saying it's likely they'll go to that level, just for example), do you think that the remaining 3% of MS users would so fervently love Microsoft that they would refuse to switch to either Mac or Linux because they think MS products are so great that there simply is no alternative? I doubt it. There may be a few people like that, but Bill and Steve's families aren't big enough to keep Microsoft afloat by themselves
WRT positive momentum, Apple has that. You might have heard of the iPod and OS X? OS X helped tremendously to save Apple, not only because it's good but because it proved that after failed attempts to do so in the past, they could finally get a replacement for the aging MacOS out the door. Now the iPod and iTunes are bringing Apple not just a lot of mindshare, but real sales and marketshare, too. Do you think a person who buys an iPod and is a first-time Apple buyer might not consider a Mac for his/her next computer if they love their iPod?
I'm even thinking possibly buying a Mac for my next notebook, and I was a DOS user, then a Desqview user, then a Windows user (starting with 3.0; I had Windows 286 and Windows 386, but they were so bad they were pretty much useless), and later became a Linux and FreeBSD user. I've never owned an Apple product, don't have an MP3 player and would probably never buy an iPod, but I may well buy a PowerBook or iBook next year.
That's how Apple translates mindshare to marketshare. Like many people, I once wrote them off as roadkill, now I'm considering buying one of their products for the first time ever.
I agree. "Best installer" depends on your definition of "best" and Debian's works for me. And like tweakt said, you only have to do it once, anyway :-)
I want to add one note to this myself.
There were radio stations referred to as pirate radio in the 1960s and 1970s. It was not, however, their playing of music without paying royalties (I don't know if they did or not, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn the didn't) for which it was called pirate radio. Rather, it was because they were operating without FCC licenses, commonly from just across the Mexican border, and broadcasting into border states such as Texas. A secondary contributor to the "pirate radio" monicker might have been the fact that these stations weren't much interested in the American Top 40 chart. They were playing by their own rules and airing whatever music they liked. Like the pirates who flew the Jolly Roger, they were operating outside the law, flamboyantly, and according to their own rules.
Copyright infringers may be operating outside the law, and in accordance with their own rules of what they consider IP rights, but there's nothing particularly flamboyant or daring about it. They are just too far from even the stretched "pirate radio" definition of "pirate" to be called such.
Let me get this straight. Because G & S wrote an operetta called "The Pirates of Penzance" (which was about pirates and not about copyright infringers) and there were coincidentally differences in copyright law between the UK and the US, that therefore that "Pirates of Penzance" is somehow a reference to copyright infringement?
What next? Finding out that it weighs the same as a duck and then declaring it to be a witch?
With all due respect, you have overturned nothing.
I have in no way made an ad hominem attack. By saying so, you have established yourself as ignorant, a liar, or quite probably, both.
I'm a conservative, and I get points pretty often. I also despise MS and most of its products, and support *nix in general and Linux and *BSD in particular. I believe in gun ownership, I support President Bush (but wish he'd dump Cheney and put Rice on the ticket), and support taking the war on terrorism to the terrorists rather than letting them bring it here.
/.) I don't moderate based on whether or not I agree with the poster's opinion. You can be informative even if I don't like the information you're providing. You can be insightful even if I don't much care for your insight.
:-)
Also (and I know you're not gonna believe me b/c this is
One thing I rarely do, though, is spend any points modding an AC up. I may mod an AC down for a genuine troll or flamebait if it hasn't already been hit, but if you want to benefit from my mod points, you're going to have to post logged-in.
This entire post has, of course, been off-topic, so feel free to mod me down
Actually, TurboLinux is about burning through obscene amounts of venture capital in astonishingly short periods of time, and having the biggest display booth at Linux Expo in Tokyo, with the most mini-skirted "companion girls" attending it. I had a pretty good front row seat to that capital burn.
In two years, they moved office not once, but twice, and went from about a dozen employees to nearly a hundred. They actually weren't doing too badly in some areas, but also were by that time being run by VC people who just didn't get Linux or the broader FOSS movement, nor did they have much of a plan for how to deal with Red Hat's move into Japan. As a result, RH ate TL's lunch right there in their core market. I don't know how many people work there now, but I bet it's a lot closer to a dozen than a hundred.
"Cache" in the sense of "CPU cache" and "disk cache" is directly derived from the standard OED definition, and indeed, it fills the role in a computer that a cache of provisions filled for, for example, a miner in the Klondike. That meaning of the word cache is still alive and well in modern English, as any (educated, at least) native speaker could tell you. If you dig through a bunch of news articles about the war in Iraq, I am sure you will find it there.
In other words, the meaning hasn't been changed, merely extended to something that is conceptually the same but which did not exist at the time the word was borrowed into English from French.
In the case of using "piracy" to mean "copyright infringement," on the other hand, that is a complete break with the actual meaning, and was made up by RIAA and MPAA. It is not even an evolution; merely something they repeated and repeated until they got the press and politicians repeating it, but that doesn't make it true. Piracy remains the hijacking and robbery of vessels (and sometimes road vehicles; the meaning has been extended that far) by force of arms. And yes, pirates do exist today, in the places you mentioned, among others. I'm pretty sure they aren't copying DVDs.
Your claim that there are pirated clothes is as false as your claim regarding copyright infringement. Pirated CDs, DVDs, clothes, etc., are genuine articles which are stolen by pirates and subsequently resold (I haven't heard that pirates target that sort of thing much, so these are probably very rare, if not non-existent). A knock-off Rolex, on the other hand, is just what you properly named it as: a case of trademark infringement. If they copied the inside as well (not likely), then it would probably also be a case of patent infringement. None of copyright/trademark/patent infringement are acts of piracy. They are acts of infringement. That is the legal definition, and the only one that even RIAA can use in court. The legal system does not define "piracy" as the infringement of copyright, trademark, or patent. As one who hopes to take the bar exam in the future, I certainly hope it never does so and do not expect it will.
Piracy has not "evolved" to mean any kind of infringement. It is just a word stuck onto it by RIAA et al. That is the complete opposite of evolution, and something that is rejected by many people other than myself.
I used to live in SE Asia too, and yeah, you can walk into any video shop and buy a VCD for about a buck. But that's not piracy either; piracy is robbing ships by force of arms. What those shops are doing is copyright infringement.
:-) is not even copyright infringement, it really is fair use. Now, if you *distribute* a copy, that is infringement.
What one guy in his house does (and there are many, many people who copy DVDs purely for fair use reasons, starting with all of us who have toddlers in the house
Backing up your Disney DVDs so your kids don't destroy them, then playing the backups while the originals are kept under lock and key, is not infringement.
On the other hand, if you gave these notebooks to the teachers, every one of them would be ridden with viruses and spyware by the end of the first week. And so would the notebooks
,the kids will think these things are cool, something they usually never think textbooks. However, the poster who mentioned that they may be easy marks for criminals has a very good point.
:-) book reader instead of a notebook computer. It costs less, doesn't have a lot of moving parts, fans, disks, etc., and is designed to be a book. I personally don't much care for reading books on a computer, I'd much rather have a dead tree edition or something electronic that really acts like a book. The book remains one of the great user interface success stories of all time.
Plus
Finally, I have to wonder if this wouldn't be a better application for that new Sony ePaper (sorry, can't recall the exact name right now and I'm too lazy to look it up, so mod me down
Am I the only one who got this joke? You really should have posted it logged-in, it's pretty funny. If I'd had points I'd give you one, except my normal policy is to only mod things up if they were posted by logged-in users.
/. yesterday, and if you don't mind modding up ACs, throw some mod points his/her way.
For everyone who didn't get it, look for the Project David story that was on
I looked into the specific reports to Spamcop that caused one of our hosts to be listed there. The number was pretty small, and everyone I could find was because some mental giants received bounce messages and submitted them to Spamcop as spam.
There is something deeply, seriously broken (read "Run by idiots") about a spam filtering system that will classify a host as a spam source because it bounced undeliverable messages in an RFC-compliant manner. My already-low level of respect for Spamcop has just dropped even lower.
Pardon me, I didn't realize I was addressing someone whose sense of humor was surgically removed, along with his sense of logical thought (trust me on this; no one engaging in logical thought writes the way you do).
I don't know what kind of people you interact with, but here in the corporate world, I do not find that having a penguin mascot increases the credibility of Linux. It would be an easier sell without Tux, I really think so.
However, Tux is way ahead of that horrid seagull. Yeesh. All I can say is "What were they thinking?" Not only because it's ugly, looks drug-crazed, and has hair (an odd attribute for a seagull), but because as someone mentioned in another post, the seagull is making what is considered an obscene gesture in some cultures (and a crude one, but with a non-sexual meaning, in a country where I lived for some years). They really ought to reconsider it. Or at least re-draw it.
When was the last time you saw a person honor a label that said "Use only as directed"? :-p
Yeah, that happens pretty regularly where I work, too. We provide inbound and outbound mail service for corporate clients, but do not allow spamming. Nevertheless, it seems like all it takes is one dimbulb somewhere to decide (usually erroneously) that something is spam, and one of our hosts will wind up on the spamcop list. They've really gone around the bend.
There is one blacklist I trust day in and day out, though: ORDB. That's because ORDB will only list confirmed open relays. This is a conservative approach but it means that if a host is listed, there is no question of whether or not it belongs there. Also, there is an automated retest-and-removal system. I can't use ones like SPEWS because even though I mostly sympathize (although I think they are *way* too quick on the trigger), in my business that would block far too much legit mail and we just can't do that.
Thank you (and could someone please explain to me why the parent was moderated redundant when three different people all wrote that this isn't the mascot for all of OOo and were all modded interesting?)!
/. karma: nothing.
/. userids have been auctioned on eBay, but that doesn't prove karma has value, only that a low /. userid does. And that some people have way too much money and way too little clue.
I don't see the need for mascots at all, and they are all so cutesy I could hurl. Tux, the BSD mascot, now this seagull which is the worst all all. Maybe the reason MS still owns the desktop and we don't is that they don't have a mascot, and the repulsive clippy is easily kept out of sight (in Japan, clippy is replaced by a Dolphin, which is less annoying but just as needless).
No doubt we'll both be modded down for daring to criticize open-source maskets as the disgusting, cutesy things they are, but I not only have karma to burn, I have a well-grounded grasp of the real-world value of
OK, I know
I wish I had mod points today so I could spend some here. All the "If software was a car" bitching is at +5 Insightful and here you sit at only +2 for telling the truth.
The nearest computer equivalent to a car is an IBM mainframe. I was a mainframer in the 1980s, and 100% of the hardware in most shops was IBM. The OS was IBM. All of the software on the machines in every shop where I worked came from three sources: IBM, CA, or it was developed in-house to IBM APIs.
If you had a problem, you could get an IBM CE to come out and fix it, 24 x 7 (that support wasn't cheap, but neither would having a dealer mechanic come to your house to fix your car at 3:00 AM Sunday morning be cheap).
In the PC world, where the problems are just as you describe, that kind of near-equivalent of a car can never happen, especially in the Windows world. Things are somewhat better in the open source world because at least when you are writing to a given API, the whole API is definitely available to you, in source form, so you know exactly what you're writing to. Meanwhile, the fact that many of the drivers are either partly or wholly reverse-engineered does not seem to have made them any less reliable than a lot of vendor-written drivers for Windows.
Computers be as reliable as cars? I don't think that will ever happen. I don't think it's even reasonable to expect that, or to even make the comparison. As you say, a car has a pretty simple UI and is tested by the vendor and the stuff at least should all work together. Add to that the fact that even in the United States (which has the least technically competent drivers of any country I've lived in or visited - and yes, I'm American, so this isn't an anti-American troll), you have to get some training and pass a written test and a driving test in order to get a license to drive. No such standard exists for operating a computer, which is a far more complex device, although it's a lot harder to kill someone by being incompetent to use a computer.
There is one potential upside to this, even if it's still not a good deal over all: if they don't have to pay you overtime anymore where they did before, that takes away some of the cost advantage of sending your job to India, and you might be more likely to keep your job.
You're still getting the shaft, it's just a smaller shaft than you would have gotten.
The taxes aren't quite that bad, if only because the upside of not making a lot is that the dependent deductions you get with two adults and two children living on $45K help cut your taxes a good bit. When our kids are old enough to be in school my wife will probably go back to work and that will give us a lot of wiggle room because we will save and invest all of her salary, or nearly all. Right now it wouldn't be terribly cost effective to have her work only to pour the majority of her income straight into daycare, while losing a lot of our tax advantage - even if we wanted to do that to our kids, which we don't.
Our 17-month old can read and write some of the alphabet already, has a vocabulary like kids at least six months older than she is, and has memorized and can sing a few children's songs already. Somehow, I don't think she would be at that level if she were going to daycare instead of being with her mother all day. When she's old enough for pre-school, we may send her there. On the other hand, my wife teaches her so well that it may not be worth it. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.
We own *one* five year old, four-cylinder car. I wouldn't much want an SUV even if I could afford one.
Isn't that "synergizing core energies?" How do you expect to make PHB with a vocabulary like yours? ;-)