Nope - the scandal is press scandal : when it was published by a magazine that former president Mitterrand had an illegitimate daughter most people found scandalous that press invaded privacy in such a way. Mind you - his former mistress and illegitimate daughter was at his funeral too, and nobody had any problem here.
Also nobody care if the environement minister smoked some pot, inhaled or not. That's not a problem for most people, they care more about ideas and facts than what leaders do in their home.
If ALL software went to open-source the whole industry would go down. Having a small percentage of open-source is fine, but somebody has to pay for the open-source hackers food and home, and I many company still earn money by SELLING software (and not just the media). Since software companies employ so many people, putting them all out of business would put the IT industry down, and put Open Source hackers into McDonald, which would hurt Open Source too.
I think a balance has to be found between all Open-source and all closed software, so that people can earn money and still have time to hack around.
What if the entire world was democratic like the United States? What then?
Suicide ? Moving to mars ? I certainly hope the world will NEVER have be democratic like the US. Think of this : a country where (lame and stupid) actors are elected (and re-elected). A country where you vote to somebody according to his sex life. Damn ! Not in my backyard;-)
Well, it least this is going to teach some modesty to the GPL or die crowed. Sure Microsoft sucks but it seems it doesn't sucks that much when it doesn't make a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death). Maybe it's time for the hackers here to try some more innovative designs instead of sticking to the same stuff that has been around in Unix for decades. For example why isn't Apache heavily multithreaded like IIS is ? This is much more effective with multiple CPUs.
Maybe it's the whole Unix thing that we should throw away and start from scratch a new OS. BeOS proved that starting from scratch brings good things, and speed is one of them. Unix is 30 yo... nothing is eternal, not even Linux. You can't upgrade the same technology forever.
The difference is with a private company, if their service is lousy I can switch to a different company.
Not always... look Microsoft. You can't push Bill Gates out... but you can change your president every 4 year if you don't like it. You can switch AS LONG AS a governement is there to stop big monopolies.
When you get government involved in things like schools where the budget has tripled in the past 20 years (so it's getting more money, not less) and the service is getting worse, what do you do?
Sounds more like a cultural problem to me... people want their diploma without studying, they want to go to school and HAVE FUN instead of learning something.
The purpose of government is to protect it's people from other governments.
Sounds like a paranoid definition to me... a governement would rather be an organisation whole goal is to manage common properties and services for a whole nation.
If you reduce competition (like government does) you reduce quality (see Microsoft)
The DOJ vs Microsoft trial sounds like a good counter-example. There is no competition between Bill Gates and somebody who grew in LA South Central, because they are born in different famillies. Education and welfare are here to level the competition by giving a chance to the poor to compete with the rich. If you think putting a lion and a deer in a cage is "competition", then yes, governement is against competetion. Justice is about giving everyone a chance, and that mean giving everyone education and healthcare. It is helping REAL competition.
Well - if you REALLY believe all the medias, you are not out of surprises. They especially like those tax subjects since it is so easy to attract some audience. Of course they could make a subject about lesbian orgies but not during prime time;-)
Show me a big organization (governement, company, non profit organization) that doesn't waste money somewhere...
The problem is - the governement sell services as a package. There is no tax for a specific service anymore. People would like to know that tax X is for service Y, but it doesn't work that way (whatever some politicians say). You might not go to college or drive but your tax will pay for teachers and roads anyway. In this aspect the governement is managed as a (very big) company. It takes taxes where it cans to fund its activities. I don't see what's wrong with that, it's part of the idea of "public service" : providing a group of services for everybody, no matter rich or poor you are, or if you personnaly need it or not.
Tax debate is always the same : people want everything for free. I got a bad news for you all : there's nothing free. Someone has to pay for education, roads, police, etc... Since most citizen use those services they pay for it, in the form of tax. Asking for no tax is like asking for free stuff in a store : it cost, so someone must pay.
Now the common answer is "but state services are loosy, and cost so much". That's wrong : they are loosy because you don't pay enough tax. You get what you pay for. The loosiest the service is, the more people whine at tax and the lower the tax are, and the loosier the service becomes because of budget shortage, and so on... up to the point where the US are : low tax (yes people : look in Europe before complaining), loosy state service, private company payed by citizen to do the governement job (private school, militia, etc...). Instead of tax, you receive bills - but in the end you end up paying for the sames services again. You still loose something : democracy. CEOs are NOT elected, they don't work for the customers, they work for the shareholders.
I still don't think spending billions of $ for a minority of Africans to give them net access is good when millions of other Africans don't even have enough to eat. It's not the question of "do you deserve or not net access", but "Is this really the best way to spend over a billion dollar in Africa". To me this project is like building a swimming pool in the middle of the desert. Will cost a lot and few people will enjoy what is an extravagant luxury for the numerous and less fortunate peoples around.
Who cares ? Ever read the Fondation books from Asimov ? War is not the only way to invide a country - culture, religion or economy is a more effective one, albeit slower. They eat at McDonalds or KFC, watch Titanic and listen to M. Jackson... by the time they get powerfull enough they'll have the same crappy "culture" as the US and have no reason to fight anymore (especially if that means not seing the next Titanic : vangeance of the mutant fish).
Well, China has it's own money and telcos to take care of this stuff - as far as I know no foreign taxpayer is financing any network in China. Though China has its share of problems, I think it is much better than in an "average" African country (people are more educated, infrastructure is much better, governement is stable and economy is good enough to support the country). Though South Africa has some good chances to become a well developped and powerfull country in the next century (and hopefully stay a healthy democracy)
Sure - but what good is information if you don't have enough to eat, have aids and don't know how to read ? There are some basic humans needs that have to be satisfied before rolling out high bandwidth Internet access.
Re:For interchange, use a standard format
on
Feature:Geek Jobs
·
· Score: 1
Well I send my resume in HTML - much better than Word : byebye macrovirus ! And everybody as a web browser somewhere, whatever OS they use. And I can put it on the web too so that people not able to open an attachement can cut/paste the URL.
Forget proprietary format... HTML/XML is the way of the future.
Well, depends which way you look at it : - if you do real work, X-Windows is cool because of its client/server achitecture that allows you to run your program on a distant machine and see the results on your - if you do everything else (games/web/multimedia) it's a bloated piece of junk : it is very slow and inefficient at handling video cards for fast operations. It was made at a time when powerfull graphic chipset was almost sci-fi, so anything like accelerated 3D, accelerated video, etc... is not there. People try to correct that but it just adds more bloat...
To me the brain use some kind of "fractal" compression. When you remember an event, you don't have all the tiny details of a digital video, but you remember there was "a car" and "a big white house" and then your brain builds an image of the scene, using what it knows as "car" and "house" to have something close to what the scene was really, and adding the detail it remembers to get closer to the real scene. Then some memories judged "less important" have higher compression ratio (you just remember what it was about) while some other are less compressed (you remember perfectly a lot of details).
Well, as for home-user applications, most freeware/sharewares do the job. Sharewares are usually reasonably priced for home users. Why pirated Photoshop when all your home-user stuff can be done with Gimp or Paint Shop Pro ?
As for games, you are right, but why are games so expensives ? It sounds silly to me to ask over 50$ for a video game you are going to play 20-30 hours. Since these are mostly targetted at kids/students, these prices seems well to high.
When a standard game will cost 10$, most people will stop pirating it and go with a real one. Most people are ready to pay a little more to get a manual and all the videos and goodies you get with the real CD (not some shrunk down game on RAR archives).
Well - you make a good point here. I just noticed that just when Slobodan seems to want to make peace, some US places shot down Iraqui stuff. One enemy takes the place of another...
I really believe there are MUCH more pirated software than that. Almost all computers I have seen in my life had pirated software on it, and I have seen a lot ! Then I live in France so this might be more a problem here than in the US, but people who have NEVER used a pirated software probably have never used a computer either. And remember that using a shareware past its evalutation period is piracy too... Wonder why all those CD burner are selling like hotcakes... peoples seems to have such high backup needs;-)
Though it's stealing, there's one good thing about piracy : it makes computers more popular. If people had to pay for all their software most would probably not use a computer because Windows+Office+games+utils would cost way too much (way more than the computer itself). Yeah I know, Linux and free-software is "free", but most people started using computers with MS junk and games, then sometimes move to Linux or BeOS.
Some companies even take advantage of software (not only blank CDs manufacturer! ). If 3DS Max became so popular, isn't it because there are so many infographist that knows it, because they could get their on a pirated copy when they were student, learn with it and then choose it as their tool of choice when they get a job Y?
My thought : companies should pay for commercial software, individuals/student should be allowed to copy it. That's what some companies already do (StarOffice, Wordperfect, etc...).
Well, there are guns nuts here, so why not religious nuts ? I have always thought nerds were more open-minded and liberals than the average majority, but then it's wrong, some are plain old-fashionned religious nuts.
Yep, a good book about sex and violence : The Bible, available freely in most US households, many schools and given to kids who can read good stories about incest, rape, ultra-violent scenes, etc... This book should be R rated - but that won't happen since censorship is not about censoring immoral stuff, it's about censoring stuff deemed immoral by the christians standards.
Slashdot Mirror
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
:-)
OSCAR WILDE
(note that when you see a cup in the shape of Jar Jar head, you REALLY see what decadence is all about
Nope - the scandal is press scandal : when it was published by a magazine that former president Mitterrand had an illegitimate daughter most people found scandalous that press invaded privacy in such a way. Mind you - his former mistress and illegitimate daughter was at his funeral too, and nobody had any problem here.
Also nobody care if the environement minister smoked some pot, inhaled or not. That's not a problem for most people, they care more about ideas and facts than what leaders do in their home.
If ALL software went to open-source the whole industry would go down. Having a small percentage of open-source is fine, but somebody has to pay for the open-source hackers food and home, and I many company still earn money by SELLING software (and not just the media). Since software companies employ so many people, putting them all out of business would put the IT industry down, and put Open Source hackers into McDonald, which would hurt Open Source too.
I think a balance has to be found between all Open-source and all closed software, so that people can earn money and still have time to hack around.
What if the entire world was democratic like the United States? What then?
;-)
Suicide ? Moving to mars ? I certainly hope the world will NEVER have be democratic like the US. Think of this : a country where (lame and stupid) actors are elected (and re-elected). A country where you vote to somebody according to his sex life. Damn ! Not in my backyard
Well, it least this is going to teach some modesty to the GPL or die crowed. Sure Microsoft sucks but it seems it doesn't sucks that much when it doesn't make a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death). Maybe it's time for the hackers here to try some more innovative designs instead of sticking to the same stuff that has been around in Unix for decades. For example why isn't Apache heavily multithreaded like IIS is ? This is much more effective with multiple CPUs.
Maybe it's the whole Unix thing that we should throw away and start from scratch a new OS. BeOS proved that starting from scratch brings good things, and speed is one of them. Unix is 30 yo... nothing is eternal, not even Linux. You can't upgrade the same technology forever.
The difference is with a private company, if their service is lousy I can switch to a different company.
Not always... look Microsoft. You can't push Bill Gates out... but you can change your president every 4 year if you don't like it. You can switch AS LONG AS a governement is there to stop big monopolies.
When you get government involved in things like schools where the budget has tripled in the past 20 years (so it's getting more money, not less) and the service is getting worse, what do you do?
Sounds more like a cultural problem to me... people want their diploma without studying, they want to go to school and HAVE FUN instead of learning something.
The purpose of government is to protect it's people from other governments.
Sounds like a paranoid definition to me... a governement would rather be an organisation whole goal is to manage common properties and services for a whole nation.
If you reduce competition (like government does) you reduce quality (see Microsoft)
The DOJ vs Microsoft trial sounds like a good counter-example. There is no competition between Bill Gates and somebody who grew in LA South Central, because they are born in different famillies. Education and welfare are here to level the competition by giving a chance to the poor to compete with the rich. If you think putting a lion and a deer in a cage is "competition", then yes, governement is against competetion. Justice is about giving everyone a chance, and that mean giving everyone education and healthcare. It is helping REAL competition.
Well - if you REALLY believe all the medias, you are not out of surprises. They especially like those tax subjects since it is so easy to attract some audience. Of course they could make a subject about lesbian orgies but not during prime time ;-)
Show me a big organization (governement, company, non profit organization) that doesn't waste money somewhere...
The problem is - the governement sell services as a package. There is no tax for a specific service anymore. People would like to know that tax X is for service Y, but it doesn't work that way (whatever some politicians say). You might not go to college or drive but your tax will pay for teachers and roads anyway. In this aspect the governement is managed as a (very big) company. It takes taxes where it cans to fund its activities. I don't see what's wrong with that, it's part of the idea of "public service" : providing a group of services for everybody, no matter rich or poor you are, or if you personnaly need it or not.
Tax debate is always the same : people want everything for free. I got a bad news for you all : there's nothing free. Someone has to pay for education, roads, police, etc... Since most citizen use those services they pay for it, in the form of tax. Asking for no tax is like asking for free stuff in a store : it cost, so someone must pay.
Now the common answer is "but state services are loosy, and cost so much". That's wrong : they are loosy because you don't pay enough tax. You get what you pay for. The loosiest the service is, the more people whine at tax and the lower the tax are, and the loosier the service becomes because of budget shortage, and so on... up to the point where the US are : low tax (yes people : look in Europe before complaining), loosy state service, private company payed by citizen to do the governement job (private school, militia, etc...). Instead of tax, you receive bills - but in the end you end up paying for the sames services again. You still loose something : democracy. CEOs are NOT elected, they don't work for the customers, they work for the shareholders.
I still don't think spending billions of $ for a minority of Africans to give them net access is good when millions of other Africans don't even have enough to eat. It's not the question of "do you deserve or not net access", but "Is this really the best way to spend over a billion dollar in Africa". To me this project is like building a swimming pool in the middle of the desert. Will cost a lot and few people will enjoy what is an extravagant luxury for the numerous and less fortunate peoples around.
Who cares ? Ever read the Fondation books from Asimov ? War is not the only way to invide a country - culture, religion or economy is a more effective one, albeit slower. They eat at McDonalds or KFC, watch Titanic and listen to M. Jackson... by the time they get powerfull enough they'll have the same crappy "culture" as the US and have no reason to fight anymore (especially if that means not seing the next Titanic : vangeance of the mutant fish).
Don't forget an hyperdermic with some nutritive liquid - why waste some time eating ;-)
Well, China has it's own money and telcos to take care of this stuff - as far as I know no foreign taxpayer is financing any network in China. Though China has its share of problems, I think it is much better than in an "average" African country (people are more educated, infrastructure is much better, governement is stable and economy is good enough to support the country). Though South Africa has some good chances to become a well developped and powerfull country in the next century (and hopefully stay a healthy democracy)
Sure - but what good is information if you don't have enough to eat, have aids and don't know how to read ? There are some basic humans needs that have to be satisfied before rolling out high bandwidth Internet access.
Well I send my resume in HTML - much better than Word : byebye macrovirus ! And everybody as a web browser somewhere, whatever OS they use. And I can put it on the web too so that people not able to open an attachement can cut/paste the URL.
Forget proprietary format... HTML/XML is the way of the future.
Well, depends which way you look at it :
- if you do real work, X-Windows is cool because of its client/server achitecture that allows you to run your program on a distant machine and see the results on your
- if you do everything else (games/web/multimedia) it's a bloated piece of junk : it is very slow and inefficient at handling video cards for fast operations. It was made at a time when powerfull graphic chipset was almost sci-fi, so anything like accelerated 3D, accelerated video, etc... is not there. People try to correct that but it just adds more bloat...
To me the brain use some kind of "fractal" compression. When you remember an event, you don't have all the tiny details of a digital video, but you remember there was "a car" and "a big white house" and then your brain builds an image of the scene, using what it knows as "car" and "house" to have something close to what the scene was really, and adding the detail it remembers to get closer to the real scene. Then some memories judged "less important" have higher compression ratio (you just remember what it was about) while some other are less compressed (you remember perfectly a lot of details).
Your gf was stolen by a French guy, right ?
Yep - Delphi is my dream-dev tool, I fear this mean we will see Delphi leaving and Visual Basic coming :-( .
"All resistance is futile, you'll be bought"
Well, as for home-user applications, most freeware/sharewares do the job. Sharewares are usually reasonably priced for home users. Why pirated Photoshop when all your home-user stuff can be done with Gimp or Paint Shop Pro ?
As for games, you are right, but why are games so expensives ? It sounds silly to me to ask over 50$ for a video game you are going to play 20-30 hours. Since these are mostly targetted at kids/students, these prices seems well to high.
When a standard game will cost 10$, most people will stop pirating it and go with a real one. Most people are ready to pay a little more to get a manual and all the videos and goodies you get with the real CD (not some shrunk down game on RAR archives).
Well - you make a good point here. I just noticed that just when Slobodan seems to want to make peace, some US places shot down Iraqui stuff. One enemy takes the place of another...
I really believe there are MUCH more pirated software than that. Almost all computers I have seen in my life had pirated software on it, and I have seen a lot ! Then I live in France so this might be more a problem here than in the US, but people who have NEVER used a pirated software probably have never used a computer either. And remember that using a shareware past its evalutation period is piracy too... Wonder why all those CD burner are selling like hotcakes... peoples seems to have such high backup needs ;-)
Though it's stealing, there's one good thing about piracy : it makes computers more popular. If people had to pay for all their software most would probably not use a computer because Windows+Office+games+utils would cost way too much (way more than the computer itself). Yeah I know, Linux and free-software is "free", but most people started using computers with MS junk and games, then sometimes move to Linux or BeOS.
Some companies even take advantage of software (not only blank CDs manufacturer! ). If 3DS Max became so popular, isn't it because there are so many infographist that knows it, because they could get their on a pirated copy when they were student, learn with it and then choose it as their tool of choice when they get a job Y?
My thought : companies should pay for commercial software, individuals/student should be allowed to copy it. That's what some companies already do (StarOffice, Wordperfect, etc...).
Let's ban all Play-boy centerfold girls first names... that should block about 90% of the Web content.
Well, there are guns nuts here, so why not religious nuts ? I have always thought nerds were more open-minded and liberals than the average majority, but then it's wrong, some are plain old-fashionned religious nuts.
Yep, a good book about sex and violence : The Bible, available freely in most US households, many schools and given to kids who can read good stories about incest, rape, ultra-violent scenes, etc... This book should be R rated - but that won't happen since censorship is not about censoring immoral stuff, it's about censoring stuff deemed immoral by the christians standards.