You may be proud to be a thief, but fortunately you are not the "majority" of slashdotters. Most of the people at this site actually have some moral conscience and switch to Linux or BSD rather than pay license fees to Microsoft.
You have no excuse to steal Windows. It's only benefit over OSS is it's game library. Then again, you probably steal those, too.
Has it ever dawned on any of you who advocate piracy that you're telling people to steal the same type of work you expect to make a living from? Or do you think whoever cuts your paycheque is going to keep doing so because you once worked on a product or tool that produces no revenue?
The obvious question is if you wanted to play videogames on your TV, why didn't you buy an actual console?
Granted, $60 for $10 worth of A/V adapter parts is pretty obscene, but what do you expect when you try to force-fit a product that wasn't designed for the home console market?
SCO is pushing for the case to be handled via AutoZone because then they're dealing with a company they might be able to out-stare in court.
IBM doesn't blink, and they have much deeper pockets than SCO. Here's hoping the judge recognizes SCO's request is the right approach, but that all the cases should be rolled in under IBM's.
SCO wanted to play hardball with the big boys, let the game proceed with the players they chose: SCO vs. IBM.
IBM never considered the "termination" valid because they didn't accept SCO's claims that they had violated the license.
If SCO has truly dropped their claims against Linux, they have no reason to break the contract granting IBM's in-perpetuity rights.
Even SCO's concrete-cranium management will eventually realize that they had no legal grounds to "terminate" IBM's license. Their case against Linux was partly to prove that SCO code had been illegally contributed by IBM. Once their Linux claims are officially denied by the courts, their reason for terminating the license is gone.
IBM will then be in a good position to turn the tables and have the entire SCO management and legal team charged with attempted extortion and fraud. Unfortunately for Darl & co., there is far too much public evidence of their behavior to hope they can escape conviction. Presuming, of course, that there is the slightest bit of justice left in the American legal system.
The judge doesn't care how long it takes, and isn't allowed to care. If the judge shows bias through a summary dismissal,the whole mess gets tossed right back into retrial because of their "bias" against greedy, self-serving corporate and legal vultures. Judges aren't allowed to summarily rule against festering scum, no matter how obvious the guilt may be. You could videotape a broad-daylight murder, and it would still have to go through "the system."
It's up to the lawyer to push for a quick decision, and it isn't in the lawyer's self interest to encourage a decision in reasonable time. The longer the lawsuit, the more the lawyer can bleed the client.
Do you think any individual could get away with refusing to provide evidence demanded by the courts, and not end up in jail for contempt? The entire SCO management team should be seeing fraud charges and jail time when this debacle is finally ended, but instead we'll just see a few lawyers walk off with another porsche or two, Darl will whine about how they mislead him, and the only ones who'll really pay will be the people and businesses impacted by the fraud.
It's the New American Way to "manage" the law. Companies like Microsoft and SCO build their very existence on treating the fines and penalties as the cost of doing business. It's not going to change until the lawyers, CEOs, and other corpororate officers are held personally responsible for their fraud and mismanagement, and jailed accordingly.
You may not like my opinions, but they're based on practical experience and sound business practices.
Of course I'm sure there are a fair number of so-called "business managers" who realize my opinions can mean their jobs if their boss sees such comments.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised they'd rather ignore the viewpoint as "trolling" rather than re-evaluating their unjustified decision to "save money" by using obsolete security hazards in their production environments.
Mathematics is involved in most aspects of computing, from the complex calculations of modelling and engineering systems (which includes video game models, movement skeletons, and physics models) to the set theory that drives RDBMS coding.
You don't need a math degree to program, but you do need an understanding of set theory, linear algebra, O(n) algorithmic efficiency, and boolean logic transforms.
At very least, you need to have an understanding of O(n) algorithmic efficiency to know when to use a particluar solution for a problem. Just because a hackjob from a coder works doesn't mean it's going to scale to solve the full problem set in production.
Without those basics, you aren't programming, you're just bodging code and probably causing more long-term issues and expense than your salary is worth.
Then you need to fix your machine -- something is badly broken.
PIII overclocked to 933 runing Mandrake 8.1 -- under 3 seconds startup. 512MB CAS2 with only 4MB free, though 150MB of that is currently being sucked up by disk cache.
WinXP on a 2.4 GHz P4 takes almost 5 seconds if I try to start it while Windows is still initializing. Otherwise it's under 4.
The problem is between your PC's screen and your chair, not Mozilla.
For a new user, I'd recommend they use the same distro their friends have got working. If they don't know what they're looking for (configuration wise), users need someone to point them in the right direction.
While Mandrake, SuSE, and Fedora all have nice admin tools for the basics, they aren't identical. If your neighbour knows how to get DSL working with SuSE, don't get Mandrake just because someone says it's "better". They're all similar enough that a typical desktop user will find equally useful on a day-to-day basis.
I have reasons for preferring SuSE, but I usually recommend Mandrake to new users. My reasons for choosing SuSE aren't based on a desktop user's priorities. If they were, I'd be running Mandrake myself.
True enough -- except that the users of such systems typically expect to have a few applications open at a time. Internet Explorer, Word, Outlook, etc.
Even newbie home users often end up iconifying applications instead of closing them, whether intentionally or not.
I have also known several cases of Excel users who could not process certain sheets withou more than 512MB RAM.
Sure you can run NT 4.0 on 32MB of RAM -- but most people want to use the machine, not listen to it hum.
As long as you have the option of turning down the detail level on games to play them on older hardware, I don't think you have any cause for your whining.
It is not the industry's fault that you can't afford the latest and greatest bleeding edge hardware. I can't either.
Or do you bitch and whine that a 5 year old Ford Taurus can't keep up with a the latest Ferrari, either?
Machines that are running Win9x are typically home machines with limited memory, and owners who have no interest in buying more. Where WinNT needs 256M to run acceptably, that same hardware will run Win9x acceptably on only 128M.
Neither is suitable for current business applications or direct connections to the internet. Having WinNT or Win9x machines directly connected is about as responsible as the rustbucket driver with no brakes who gets out on the freeway.
Some "business owners" claim that they keep such old hardware around because it "does the job."
Didn't that hardware depreciate to a total value of $0 several years ago? The software (for the most part) can be reinstalled on a newer version of Windows, so there is no loss there. So rather than spend less than $1000/desk (a lot less!!!), such business owners would rather risk having those machines affect and impact their entire network, including the possible loss or corruption of business data.
I'm glad I don't have to work for such short-sighted management -- companies without proper disaster prevention and recovery plans are just waiting for statistics to force them out of business.
RedHat 7.2 was the last release I bought, downloaded, or installed.
I found the entire 7.x series to be an absolute disaster with an absolutely obscene number of patches/updates and hopelessly outdated packages.
Add in their outrageous price increases, and I jumped to Mandrake for a while, which I love on the desktop but not so much on the server side. Now that SuSE has pretty much caught up on the maintainability, I just run SuSE to keep it easy/simple.
The fact that most corporate sites I've dealt with recently are settling on SuSE just makes it all that much easier to choose a distro for doing custom software development.
Why in the world would I pay the obscene prices RedHat charges for an outdated "enterprise" server? I don't need their support, I just need the same distro my customers run.
Yes, I am aware of the developers version of the "enterprise" releases, but they are not identical. That makes it useless for debugging thorny problems, and you sure don't want to be dropping an enterprise license on every developer's desk anyhow.
I'm actually kind of confused about what RedHat thinks their business model is nowadays. They no longer target the desktop. They don't have a viable developer version of the enterprise editions.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that they've decided to target "bundled" enterprise RDBMS servers (e.g. Oracle on RedHat, DB/2 on RedHat, etc.) instead of "regular" developers. In other words, it looks like they only want to work with and support the "big dollar" product vendors.
Maybe they'll end up getting bought out by Oracle and shipped only as an "Oracle Server". Who knows, but I sure don't see them doing anything that will keep them profitable and independant.
Sun's biggest problem is that their CPU cores just don't provide the raw power that other vendors do, but their price isn't that much lower.
The base costs of SMP, hardware raid, hot-swap power supplies, etc. doesn't vary much from one vendor to the next for manufacturing costs. This prevents Sun from giving the kind of discounts that customers expect for the CPU performance lag, so they consider moving to other vendors.
Add in products like Oracle which have per-CPU license fees, and it makes less and less sense to buy another Sun box instead of, say, an IBM system that ends up delivering a lower final $/TPx cost for the data center. When your applications don't run on the RDBMS server, the migration is relatively painless and doesn't require any changes on the client other than pointing to a different database instance.
It's almost as bad for application servers where the customer has the source for their enterprise appliations. If it's been properly coded, it is trivial to migrate a typical business application from one vendor to another, except for the regression testing costs.
Sun has always been expensive, but they gained market because they originally ran BSD. Universities ran BSD. Therefore the new grads knew BSD, and had probably even worked on a Sun. Why do you think Microsoft gives such deep discounts to get into a university? They don't care about the cost, they care about the mindshare, and that's what Sun has really lost.
In a world of almost complete standardization of core *nix services behind POSIX APIs, the vendors are forced to compete on price/performance, and Sun's current hardware just doesn't compete.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to buy a "system chassis" like one does a standard rack, and be able to plug in industry-standard blades as easily as PC expansion cards?
Not just from a couple vendors, but from any major vendor.
With all the industry standards for memory interfaces, power interfaces, drives, etc. I'd think it would be a lot easier to do than the vendors would like.
Cross Platform Editors
on
JOE Hits 3.0
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There really is no shortage of cross-platform editors available -- it's mostly the IDE addicts that risk being locked into a platform-specific editor.
I use vi-derivatives like vim everywhere. There are no shortage of Win32-based implementations, both for text window and for GUI use.
GNU Emacs is also on any platform I've ever used, and MicroEmacs was almost as portable.
Then there are multi-platform IDE's like Eclipse or SunONE Studio.
I really don't understand why people lament when editors don't have more active support and new features. There just isn't much need for more editors unless someone comes up with a truly unique approach to manipulating text.
I agree that a degree doesn't matter much with people who have experience. It is not necessarily even programming experience, but business experience that can make them valuable.
One of the best DBA's I've ever worked with is Keith Grey, who up until his late thirties or early fourties was predominantly a welder who'd built up a good business doing custom signs. Then he got exposed to computers and got "the bug."
He's learned the skills to use the tools (mostly Oracle), but always from a business-need perspective. You have no idea how much difference that makes in the success of a project and the buy-in from the users -- he can talk to them, and honestly believes their problems are more important than the technical issues.
I've worked with other examples of stellar non-degreed consultants, and more than my fair share of "Masters" and "Doctorate" grads who couldn't program to save their lives. (The worst added "#include <stdio.h>" before every I/O function call -- stunning for "18 months" of C programming and a masters degree.)
A university degree tells you the junior candidate was able to not only put up with a bunch of coursework they weren't interested in, but that they did the job well enough to pass. If you've ever tried to get a prima-donna programmer to write documentation, you know how important it is that staff be willing to do the parts of the job they despise.
I find that a degree with 3 years experience is usually comparable to 5-6 years experience without a degree. I consider most certification and vendor-provided exams to be useless when selecting staff. Anyone who needs a cert to be confident in their skills doesn't know their stuff well enough.
Granted, that attitude won't get you past the resume skillset filters in an HR department, but they aren't the ones who'll be making a hiring decision. Better you should partner with a reputable consulting agency than try to pad your resume with certs -- a good agency gets candidates through the HR filter based on the reputation of their own screening process.
There are natural cycles that affect weather, no doubt of it.
But I look around and I see droughts in ever-rainy Florida, droughts in the midwest farmlands, severe water shortages in Pennsylvania including a consistently measured water table drop, and ever-milder winters as the decades have gone by.
Twenty years ago I'd have been shovelling snow at the beginning of April -- that hasn't happened in almost 10 years now.
I find it amazing that anyone can look back on the summers and winters of childhood, and not realize the weather is consistently warmer. What I can't believe is that so many people are wilfully blind to how that is affecting the agriculture that feeds us all!
Whether PNG compresses better than JPG or GIF depends on the image being compressed.
While JPEG does a better at natural image processing, I find that PNG is far better at compressing diagrams than JPEG, and the transparency support also makes it a useful icon format.
While I'm sure these endless cash-grab IP lawsuits are no end of stress for the American people, it's up to them to force a change. Or they can wait another 2-5 years before most of the smaller tech houses are obliterated by legal expenses that consume their profits.
I just can't understand the American mentality that judges it "acceptable" for stock and IP gamblers to destroy companies and damage the industry in order to line their pockets. So far, not one of these IP lawsuits has been be the creator or original owner of the IP -- it's always some vulture corp that bought up a dead or dying company just for the the potential licensing and lawsuit revenue for work they didn't do!!!
The patent process was to ensure the creator has a chance to earn a decent return on their invention -- these vulture corps didn't create the technologies involved, they don't maintain the technology, and the don't enhance the technology. They just buy the original creators IP rights as a "gambling stake" for a round of license and lawsuit poker.
Funny how no one ever seems to consider earning a living anymore.
Canada has similar royalties collected on CD and DVD media.
Still not satisfied, they've added another charge on devices which might possibly maybe perhaps contain an MP3, like hard drives and USB memory sticks.
The RIAA doesn't want compensation, it wants to steadily drain your pocket for each and every single time you listen to each and every track. They just haven't figured out how to force us to accept that model.
Flat taxes may end the home-run business that is operated by someone who doesn't do proper accounting in the first place, but most small businesses are still corporations, partnerships, etc. There is no reason a flat tax would deny a business the right to subtract expenses from revenue!
People should follow their conscience, but they shouldn't be surprised when their moral outrage is ignored by groups whose main focus isn't political activism.
While there are tech activists involved with LUGs, most are more interested in running install fests, sharing code/workarounds/patches, etc. They aren't there to be "fired up" over other political issues.
Bottom line is he tried to use the LUG as a platform for other issues, and the membership apparently had no interest in sharing his outrage. It's petulent and childish for him to imply it's the membership's fault for not sharing his views.
That quote reads more like he butted heads with other administrators/board members and decided to make his outrage as public as possible, without providing details.
"change and progress?"
"...country is doing in Iraq..."???
It's a [i]Linux User's Group[/i], bozo, not a political activist's group out to change American military policy. Get a grip!
Unfortunately the people you describe are the ones who make most purchasing decisions.
You go and evaluate the viable combinations of OS, critical business server software, and appropriate hardware options for each possible vendor.
You identify the patches that are going to be required for each product to work together.
Then upper management at the client site proceeds to order completely different hardware from an alternate supplier who can't even run the critical software. When the project is late and the heads start rolling, you can bet those original recommendations are long lost...
Slashdot Mirror
You may be proud to be a thief, but fortunately you are not the "majority" of slashdotters. Most of the people at this site actually have some moral conscience and switch to Linux or BSD rather than pay license fees to Microsoft.
You have no excuse to steal Windows. It's only benefit over OSS is it's game library. Then again, you probably steal those, too.
Has it ever dawned on any of you who advocate piracy that you're telling people to steal the same type of work you expect to make a living from? Or do you think whoever cuts your paycheque is going to keep doing so because you once worked on a product or tool that produces no revenue?
The obvious question is if you wanted to play videogames on your TV, why didn't you buy an actual console?
Granted, $60 for $10 worth of A/V adapter parts is pretty obscene, but what do you expect when you try to force-fit a product that wasn't designed for the home console market?
SCO is pushing for the case to be handled via AutoZone because then they're dealing with a company they might be able to out-stare in court.
IBM doesn't blink, and they have much deeper pockets than SCO. Here's hoping the judge recognizes SCO's request is the right approach, but that all the cases should be rolled in under IBM's.
SCO wanted to play hardball with the big boys, let the game proceed with the players they chose: SCO vs. IBM.
IBM never considered the "termination" valid because they didn't accept SCO's claims that they had violated the license.
If SCO has truly dropped their claims against Linux, they have no reason to break the contract granting IBM's in-perpetuity rights.
Even SCO's concrete-cranium management will eventually realize that they had no legal grounds to "terminate" IBM's license. Their case against Linux was partly to prove that SCO code had been illegally contributed by IBM. Once their Linux claims are officially denied by the courts, their reason for terminating the license is gone.
IBM will then be in a good position to turn the tables and have the entire SCO management and legal team charged with attempted extortion and fraud. Unfortunately for Darl & co., there is far too much public evidence of their behavior to hope they can escape conviction. Presuming, of course, that there is the slightest bit of justice left in the American legal system.
It's up to the lawyer to push for a quick decision, and it isn't in the lawyer's self interest to encourage a decision in reasonable time. The longer the lawsuit, the more the lawyer can bleed the client.
Do you think any individual could get away with refusing to provide evidence demanded by the courts, and not end up in jail for contempt? The entire SCO management team should be seeing fraud charges and jail time when this debacle is finally ended, but instead we'll just see a few lawyers walk off with another porsche or two, Darl will whine about how they mislead him, and the only ones who'll really pay will be the people and businesses impacted by the fraud.
It's the New American Way to "manage" the law. Companies like Microsoft and SCO build their very existence on treating the fines and penalties as the cost of doing business. It's not going to change until the lawyers, CEOs, and other corpororate officers are held personally responsible for their fraud and mismanagement, and jailed accordingly.
You may not like my opinions, but they're based on practical experience and sound business practices.
Of course I'm sure there are a fair number of so-called "business managers" who realize my opinions can mean their jobs if their boss sees such comments.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised they'd rather ignore the viewpoint as "trolling" rather than re-evaluating their unjustified decision to "save money" by using obsolete security hazards in their production environments.
Mathematics is involved in most aspects of computing, from the complex calculations of modelling and engineering systems (which includes video game models, movement skeletons, and physics models) to the set theory that drives RDBMS coding.
You don't need a math degree to program, but you do need an understanding of set theory, linear algebra, O(n) algorithmic efficiency, and boolean logic transforms.
At very least, you need to have an understanding of O(n) algorithmic efficiency to know when to use a particluar solution for a problem. Just because a hackjob from a coder works doesn't mean it's going to scale to solve the full problem set in production.
Without those basics, you aren't programming, you're just bodging code and probably causing more long-term issues and expense than your salary is worth.
Then you need to fix your machine -- something is badly broken.
PIII overclocked to 933 runing Mandrake 8.1 -- under 3 seconds startup. 512MB CAS2 with only 4MB free, though 150MB of that is currently being sucked up by disk cache.
WinXP on a 2.4 GHz P4 takes almost 5 seconds if I try to start it while Windows is still initializing. Otherwise it's under 4.
The problem is between your PC's screen and your chair, not Mozilla.
For a new user, I'd recommend they use the same distro their friends have got working. If they don't know what they're looking for (configuration wise), users need someone to point them in the right direction.
While Mandrake, SuSE, and Fedora all have nice admin tools for the basics, they aren't identical. If your neighbour knows how to get DSL working with SuSE, don't get Mandrake just because someone says it's "better". They're all similar enough that a typical desktop user will find equally useful on a day-to-day basis.
I have reasons for preferring SuSE, but I usually recommend Mandrake to new users. My reasons for choosing SuSE aren't based on a desktop user's priorities. If they were, I'd be running Mandrake myself.
True enough -- except that the users of such systems typically expect to have a few applications open at a time. Internet Explorer, Word, Outlook, etc.
Even newbie home users often end up iconifying applications instead of closing them, whether intentionally or not.
I have also known several cases of Excel users who could not process certain sheets withou more than 512MB RAM.
Sure you can run NT 4.0 on 32MB of RAM -- but most people want to use the machine, not listen to it hum.
As long as you have the option of turning down the detail level on games to play them on older hardware, I don't think you have any cause for your whining.
It is not the industry's fault that you can't afford the latest and greatest bleeding edge hardware. I can't either.
Or do you bitch and whine that a 5 year old Ford Taurus can't keep up with a the latest Ferrari, either?
Machines that are running Win9x are typically home machines with limited memory, and owners who have no interest in buying more. Where WinNT needs 256M to run acceptably, that same hardware will run Win9x acceptably on only 128M.
Neither is suitable for current business applications or direct connections to the internet. Having WinNT or Win9x machines directly connected is about as responsible as the rustbucket driver with no brakes who gets out on the freeway.
Some "business owners" claim that they keep such old hardware around because it "does the job."
Didn't that hardware depreciate to a total value of $0 several years ago? The software (for the most part) can be reinstalled on a newer version of Windows, so there is no loss there. So rather than spend less than $1000/desk (a lot less!!!), such business owners would rather risk having those machines affect and impact their entire network, including the possible loss or corruption of business data.
I'm glad I don't have to work for such short-sighted management -- companies without proper disaster prevention and recovery plans are just waiting for statistics to force them out of business.
RedHat 7.2 was the last release I bought, downloaded, or installed.
I found the entire 7.x series to be an absolute disaster with an absolutely obscene number of patches/updates and hopelessly outdated packages.
Add in their outrageous price increases, and I jumped to Mandrake for a while, which I love on the desktop but not so much on the server side. Now that SuSE has pretty much caught up on the maintainability, I just run SuSE to keep it easy/simple.
The fact that most corporate sites I've dealt with recently are settling on SuSE just makes it all that much easier to choose a distro for doing custom software development.
Why in the world would I pay the obscene prices RedHat charges for an outdated "enterprise" server? I don't need their support, I just need the same distro my customers run.
Yes, I am aware of the developers version of the "enterprise" releases, but they are not identical. That makes it useless for debugging thorny problems, and you sure don't want to be dropping an enterprise license on every developer's desk anyhow.
I'm actually kind of confused about what RedHat thinks their business model is nowadays. They no longer target the desktop. They don't have a viable developer version of the enterprise editions.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that they've decided to target "bundled" enterprise RDBMS servers (e.g. Oracle on RedHat, DB/2 on RedHat, etc.) instead of "regular" developers. In other words, it looks like they only want to work with and support the "big dollar" product vendors.
Maybe they'll end up getting bought out by Oracle and shipped only as an "Oracle Server". Who knows, but I sure don't see them doing anything that will keep them profitable and independant.
Sun's biggest problem is that their CPU cores just don't provide the raw power that other vendors do, but their price isn't that much lower.
The base costs of SMP, hardware raid, hot-swap power supplies, etc. doesn't vary much from one vendor to the next for manufacturing costs. This prevents Sun from giving the kind of discounts that customers expect for the CPU performance lag, so they consider moving to other vendors.
Add in products like Oracle which have per-CPU license fees, and it makes less and less sense to buy another Sun box instead of, say, an IBM system that ends up delivering a lower final $/TPx cost for the data center. When your applications don't run on the RDBMS server, the migration is relatively painless and doesn't require any changes on the client other than pointing to a different database instance.
It's almost as bad for application servers where the customer has the source for their enterprise appliations. If it's been properly coded, it is trivial to migrate a typical business application from one vendor to another, except for the regression testing costs.
Sun has always been expensive, but they gained market because they originally ran BSD. Universities ran BSD. Therefore the new grads knew BSD, and had probably even worked on a Sun. Why do you think Microsoft gives such deep discounts to get into a university? They don't care about the cost, they care about the mindshare, and that's what Sun has really lost.
In a world of almost complete standardization of core *nix services behind POSIX APIs, the vendors are forced to compete on price/performance, and Sun's current hardware just doesn't compete.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to buy a "system chassis" like one does a standard rack, and be able to plug in industry-standard blades as easily as PC expansion cards?
Not just from a couple vendors, but from any major vendor.
With all the industry standards for memory interfaces, power interfaces, drives, etc. I'd think it would be a lot easier to do than the vendors would like.
There really is no shortage of cross-platform editors available -- it's mostly the IDE addicts that risk being locked into a platform-specific editor.
I use vi-derivatives like vim everywhere. There are no shortage of Win32-based implementations, both for text window and for GUI use.
GNU Emacs is also on any platform I've ever used, and MicroEmacs was almost as portable.
Then there are multi-platform IDE's like Eclipse or SunONE Studio.
I really don't understand why people lament when editors don't have more active support and new features. There just isn't much need for more editors unless someone comes up with a truly unique approach to manipulating text.
I agree that a degree doesn't matter much with people who have experience. It is not necessarily even programming experience, but business experience that can make them valuable.
One of the best DBA's I've ever worked with is Keith Grey, who up until his late thirties or early fourties was predominantly a welder who'd built up a good business doing custom signs. Then he got exposed to computers and got "the bug."
He's learned the skills to use the tools (mostly Oracle), but always from a business-need perspective. You have no idea how much difference that makes in the success of a project and the buy-in from the users -- he can talk to them, and honestly believes their problems are more important than the technical issues.
I've worked with other examples of stellar non-degreed consultants, and more than my fair share of "Masters" and "Doctorate" grads who couldn't program to save their lives. (The worst added "#include <stdio.h>" before every I/O function call -- stunning for "18 months" of C programming and a masters degree.)
A university degree tells you the junior candidate was able to not only put up with a bunch of coursework they weren't interested in, but that they did the job well enough to pass. If you've ever tried to get a prima-donna programmer to write documentation, you know how important it is that staff be willing to do the parts of the job they despise.
I find that a degree with 3 years experience is usually comparable to 5-6 years experience without a degree. I consider most certification and vendor-provided exams to be useless when selecting staff. Anyone who needs a cert to be confident in their skills doesn't know their stuff well enough.
Granted, that attitude won't get you past the resume skillset filters in an HR department, but they aren't the ones who'll be making a hiring decision. Better you should partner with a reputable consulting agency than try to pad your resume with certs -- a good agency gets candidates through the HR filter based on the reputation of their own screening process.
And thus in willful blind ignorance the human race committed mass suicide rather than accept the limits imposed by a finite environment...
There are natural cycles that affect weather, no doubt of it.
But I look around and I see droughts in ever-rainy Florida, droughts in the midwest farmlands, severe water shortages in Pennsylvania including a consistently measured water table drop, and ever-milder winters as the decades have gone by.
Twenty years ago I'd have been shovelling snow at the beginning of April -- that hasn't happened in almost 10 years now.
I find it amazing that anyone can look back on the summers and winters of childhood, and not realize the weather is consistently warmer. What I can't believe is that so many people are wilfully blind to how that is affecting the agriculture that feeds us all!
Whether PNG compresses better than JPG or GIF depends on the image being compressed.
While JPEG does a better at natural image processing, I find that PNG is far better at compressing diagrams than JPEG, and the transparency support also makes it a useful icon format.
While I'm sure these endless cash-grab IP lawsuits are no end of stress for the American people, it's up to them to force a change. Or they can wait another 2-5 years before most of the smaller tech houses are obliterated by legal expenses that consume their profits.
I just can't understand the American mentality that judges it "acceptable" for stock and IP gamblers to destroy companies and damage the industry in order to line their pockets. So far, not one of these IP lawsuits has been be the creator or original owner of the IP -- it's always some vulture corp that bought up a dead or dying company just for the the potential licensing and lawsuit revenue for work they didn't do!!!
The patent process was to ensure the creator has a chance to earn a decent return on their invention -- these vulture corps didn't create the technologies involved, they don't maintain the technology, and the don't enhance the technology. They just buy the original creators IP rights as a "gambling stake" for a round of license and lawsuit poker.
Funny how no one ever seems to consider earning a living anymore.
Canada has similar royalties collected on CD and DVD media.
Still not satisfied, they've added another charge on devices which might possibly maybe perhaps contain an MP3, like hard drives and USB memory sticks.
The RIAA doesn't want compensation, it wants to steadily drain your pocket for each and every single time you listen to each and every track. They just haven't figured out how to force us to accept that model.
Flat taxes may end the home-run business that is operated by someone who doesn't do proper accounting in the first place, but most small businesses are still corporations, partnerships, etc. There is no reason a flat tax would deny a business the right to subtract expenses from revenue!
People should follow their conscience, but they shouldn't be surprised when their moral outrage is ignored by groups whose main focus isn't political activism.
While there are tech activists involved with LUGs, most are more interested in running install fests, sharing code/workarounds/patches, etc. They aren't there to be "fired up" over other political issues.
Bottom line is he tried to use the LUG as a platform for other issues, and the membership apparently had no interest in sharing his outrage. It's petulent and childish for him to imply it's the membership's fault for not sharing his views.
That quote reads more like he butted heads with other administrators/board members and decided to make his outrage as public as possible, without providing details.
"change and progress?"
"...country is doing in Iraq..."???
It's a [i]Linux User's Group[/i], bozo, not a political activist's group out to change American military policy. Get a grip!
Unfortunately the people you describe are the ones who make most purchasing decisions.
You go and evaluate the viable combinations of OS, critical business server software, and appropriate hardware options for each possible vendor.
You identify the patches that are going to be required for each product to work together.
Then upper management at the client site proceeds to order completely different hardware from an alternate supplier who can't even run the critical software. When the project is late and the heads start rolling, you can bet those original recommendations are long lost...