All the people saying this country is out for oil in the Iraq war are idiots.
Well if not for the oil, then what are they there for? Liberation? There are plenty of other areas in the world where injustice is going on but unfortunately they lack the natural resources to attract the attention of the US.
It doesn't come from Iraq (only a small portion does)
Perhaps not, but the war helps the US gain some influence in the region, and there sure is a decent amount of oil in that part of the world.
What is the deal with America not wanting to be dependent on foreign *anything*? Haven't you guys heard of trade? You know, you have some resources I want and I exchange them for some resources of equal value that you want (resources include money of course)? Some other countries are 100% dependent on trade. Take Japan for example, they have to import almost all of their *food*, let alone their oil.
Could someone please enlighten me why the US is so eager to become so self-sufficient?
Yes, but you can't develop commercial apps in Qt without shelling out tons of cash. If all there was was Qt, this would rule out many small developers who may like to release software for Linux.
Sure, it's great to have everything open source but having *some* commercial software available can only be a good thing, especially for business.
For instance, I very much doubt that the Japanese words for "Black" and "White" people are anything like the words for the colours black and white.
Actually, in Japanese "black person" and "white person" are written exactly like that - kokujin and hakujin (I would input the Japanese charatcers but Slashdot won't display them. Actually, why isn't Slashdot in UTF-8?). The first of the characters in each of these words means "black" and "white", and are the same characters used in the words for each colour. The second character means "person".
Yes I agree. The article had no substance, and now this Formitchev guy earns thousands of pageviews worth of ad revenue from all the Slashdot users expecting to see something new and interesting about Leopard. Seriously, what a scam. The editors are supposed to filter out submissions like this. How did this ever get through?
I've had with these editors. I'm assuming they get paid for their work, yet they can't even check articles like this for substance, or spot that the sumitter and blog owner are the same person and probabably looking to get some quick ad revenue.
And even if the editors work for free, you'd at least expect they had enough pride in their work to do a decent job.
Arrgh! I can't stand it when people refer to a company as a "shop" (especially when used to refer to software develeopment companies)! Really, it just sounds utterly stupid, like corporate trying so hard to be cool. I hear it all the time "oh, we we're a Java shop", "yeah, I hear they are an all Linux shop". It's irritating, unnessecary, not very descriptive and just plain stupid. Cut it out people!
Hmm... I didn't mention that I use OOo and think that the new V2 it is *excellent* - it looks good, and there's no need to pay hundreds for MS Office because of it. I *am* grateful for this. I just wanted to point out that I don't think the $10k price tag is worth the money, and what precious user donations they do get should be spent on something more useful. I think that Sun employs many of the developers, but even then, user donations could go to buying test equipment for the non-Sun volunteers, paying the non-Sun volunteers, placing bounties for bugs/features etc.
Really, US$10,000 could be better spent improving the product. There's no way I'd donate to something like this. It *might* improve awareness, but it sure as hell *will* provide the newspaper with a huge chunk of revenue. That's all I really see this doing.
Great software becomes popular because it is great. I've introduced a few people to OOo, some continue to use it and others went back to MS Office. Those I introduced to it who were students or employees using it at home generally stuck with it. Those who had MS Office on their work laptops or wanted to be sure they had 100% compatibility with office formats went back to office (I do realise this is MS's doing). If OOo could spend that money working through a few of it's problems then many of those people may stick with OOo. As others have mentioned, it's not easy getting users to switch from a product they already own and, for the most part, does what is advertised.
Firefox, on the other hand, I don't think there is anyone I have introduced that to that has later switched back to IE full-time. Firefox is clearly better than IE, even if all most people care about is the tabbed browsing.
Really I feel all of these open source projects that are spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising are totally misguided.
I don't understand why someone tagged this "obvious". I had no idea that adults, on average, are more immature now than they were in the past. It does sound reasonable, yes, but certainly not obvious.
There is the occasional freak or two who insist on the original language with subtitles
Are you nuts? I always watch foreign language content in the original language with subtitles. Dubbing looses a lot of the subtlety present in the original language. Even if you can't understand it, it's great to see, for example, someone actually cursing in French rather than listen to the bland English translation (or Russian for that matter, I hear it's suitability for cursing is unparalleled). On top of this dubbing will always be out of sync with the mouths of the actors. If you are trying to learn the language the content is in, subtitling is a great way of both enjoying the content and being exposed to the language while reading a running translation.
In conclusion you, Mr. Coward, are nuts.
No it's not that simple. IE sometimes displays valid code incorrectly, so then it must be tweaked so it does look the same in IE and all the other browsers, without violating the standards in the process. For a clean information-centric web site like Slashdot, this is probably relatively easy, but some web sites have very complex visual layouts and their visual look is essential to get right. I've worked on a few and spent days tweaking for IE. It has to be the most frustrating thing about web development.
Practically, yes, but IE not the standard because of it's market share, it is the de facto standard because of it - and this is an important difference. Real web standards are developed so that their can be some level of guarantee that certain XHTML markup and CSS code will have a certain meaning and look a certain way on every browser. When developing a site there is little work involved in ensuring it looks right across standards compliant browsers but having to support IE often means violating the standard so that it works on IE. Every web developer will have experienced the frustration of applying a fix for IE only to see the site break in a standards complaint browser (it's important to note that IE is clearly at fault here). There are ways to make IE only fixes through creating special stylesheets for it and using IE's "if IE then" type statements or relying on browser parsing bugs that only exist on various versions of IE, but this clearly is not the point. Microsoft, as the de facto standard, really should be adhering to web standards because by not doing so they are costing web-based projects at least around 20% of their budget. In some cases the client foots the bill but in many cases it just means that the programmers will have to put in extra hours. Like you mentioned, you just can't not support the defacto standard. This is my main beef with Microsoft, and I'm sure most other web developers too.
Probably true... but at least he's a step up from ol' Bill. I'm always glad to see those with a software background have a major say in decision making in software companies, rather than yet another MBA. Although I wouldn't be surprised if Bill is still pulling the strings in the background, or at least being able to veto decisions he doesn't agree with etc. If you're listening Ray, please make IE standards compliant, so web-based projects don't have to add 20% or more to their budgets to allow for tweaking their sites to work in your browser. Thanks, that's all for now. I don't care so much of your OS is as secure as browsing the web with IE or as stable as Balmer with bad news about Google in a room full of chairs, since I haven't touched the thing in years.
Are women really so pathetic and helpless that they are incapable of doing exactly what you did?
That's a damn good point. The anecdotes I can remember from the study/article I read were more along the lines of the the first-year girls feeling overwhelmed because the guys had been hacking away on Linux/writing for obfuscated C contests/etc. in high school while they hadn't and eventually transferred to other majors... Perhaps I was saved by the fact that I used to copy the code listings from the back of magazines into my Commodore 64 when I was a kid (not that I really understood what I was doing). I still remember asking my mother to read out the machine code data segments while I typed them in (that lasted all of about two lines)!
I can't remember the name of that study, but anyway most articles brought up by a google search talk about these same things.
I think they do choose to... but some studies have shown that women who being a computer science major tend to transfer to other majors because of the geek culture in most CS departments alienates them (I can't remember which ones, but if you google for "computer science women study" you'll find plenty of interesting results). Hell, the geek culture in my CS department alienated me and I'm male... I just didn't want to smell from an all night session in the labs and spout Monty Python skits at people who had never heard of them when I emerged from them the next morning on a caffeine high. It took me a long time to realise that you could be a great computer scientist without taking part in this geek culture. What these women need is to feel free that they can choose to be a computer programmer if they have an interest, even if they are not a smelly geek, and encouragement/support programs/incentives like what GNOME is doing are a great idea.
I stand corrected:) I didn't realise the core OOo developers are paid to do their work, and I do appreciate what the NeoOffice developers are doing. Of course, not even knowing what's involved in integrating OpenOffice with with Mac OS X, I probably shouldn't be claiming it is easy! Thanks for the info.
Ah yes, the HTML entity for Euro. Would be nice if Slashcode could recognise the Euro symbol when entering in plain text (or Japanese/other language text as an earlier post mentioned)... It seems that Slashdot uses the iso-8859-1 charset.... Would be great if they switched to unicode... then users could comment in any language, or mix languages in the same post. Perhaps Slashdot wants to stay English only though for practical reasons, or the admins are just lazy, or both?
- the engine programmers, now they're the ones who should be getting any and all money for this.
I agree. I know someone who donated to NeoOffice, not really realising that it's the OpenOffice team that develops all the functionality, while the NeoOffice team (and I believe it's just two guys) just integrates it nicely with the Mac OS X GUI.
Of course the NeoOffice team do clearly point this out, but most non-technical users place far to much importance on the GUI. Sure, it's important, but so are all the other pieces of OOo that make it great. Or any piece of software for that matter... grrrr.. it's just a pet peeve I have.
That's still not a reason to take them seriously. They earn this money because PCs come bundled with Windows and people are unwilling or unable to switch to another operating system. They haven't updated their flagship product in six or seven years, and to date it's been a poor example of how to design an OS. I find it disgusting that a company producing such poor quality product can earn so much money and dominate the industry while their customers sound like battered housewives that are too frightened to switch o(seriously, have a conversation with an unhappy Windows user about switching and listen to their excuses...). It's about time that consumers stop taking them seriously, like you would any other company in any other industry which behaved in the same way.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if not for the oil, then what are they there for? Liberation? There are plenty of other areas in the world where injustice is going on but unfortunately they lack the natural resources to attract the attention of the US.
Perhaps not, but the war helps the US gain some influence in the region, and there sure is a decent amount of oil in that part of the world.
What is the deal with America not wanting to be dependent on foreign *anything*? Haven't you guys heard of trade? You know, you have some resources I want and I exchange them for some resources of equal value that you want (resources include money of course)? Some other countries are 100% dependent on trade. Take Japan for example, they have to import almost all of their *food*, let alone their oil.
Could someone please enlighten me why the US is so eager to become so self-sufficient?
Yes, but you can't develop commercial apps in Qt without shelling out tons of cash. If all there was was Qt, this would rule out many small developers who may like to release software for Linux. Sure, it's great to have everything open source but having *some* commercial software available can only be a good thing, especially for business.
I've always thought "A, B and C" is the correct way of doing it. The "A, B, and C" method is much easier to print out of for loops, however :)
I'd say it would just use the MP3 ID3 tags, like all the other apps do.
Yes, and with Web 2.0 being the load of hogwash that it is, I call this a feature, not a bug.
Ah, thanks for clearing that up. Well then... let the Slashdotting commence!
Yes I agree. The article had no substance, and now this Formitchev guy earns thousands of pageviews worth of ad revenue from all the Slashdot users expecting to see something new and interesting about Leopard. Seriously, what a scam. The editors are supposed to filter out submissions like this. How did this ever get through?
I've had with these editors. I'm assuming they get paid for their work, yet they can't even check articles like this for substance, or spot that the sumitter and blog owner are the same person and probabably looking to get some quick ad revenue.
And even if the editors work for free, you'd at least expect they had enough pride in their work to do a decent job.
Arrgh! I can't stand it when people refer to a company as a "shop" (especially when used to refer to software develeopment companies)! Really, it just sounds utterly stupid, like corporate trying so hard to be cool. I hear it all the time "oh, we we're a Java shop", "yeah, I hear they are an all Linux shop". It's irritating, unnessecary, not very descriptive and just plain stupid. Cut it out people!
Hmm... I didn't mention that I use OOo and think that the new V2 it is *excellent* - it looks good, and there's no need to pay hundreds for MS Office because of it. I *am* grateful for this. I just wanted to point out that I don't think the $10k price tag is worth the money, and what precious user donations they do get should be spent on something more useful. I think that Sun employs many of the developers, but even then, user donations could go to buying test equipment for the non-Sun volunteers, paying the non-Sun volunteers, placing bounties for bugs/features etc.
Really, US$10,000 could be better spent improving the product. There's no way I'd donate to something like this. It *might* improve awareness, but it sure as hell *will* provide the newspaper with a huge chunk of revenue. That's all I really see this doing. Great software becomes popular because it is great. I've introduced a few people to OOo, some continue to use it and others went back to MS Office. Those I introduced to it who were students or employees using it at home generally stuck with it. Those who had MS Office on their work laptops or wanted to be sure they had 100% compatibility with office formats went back to office (I do realise this is MS's doing). If OOo could spend that money working through a few of it's problems then many of those people may stick with OOo. As others have mentioned, it's not easy getting users to switch from a product they already own and, for the most part, does what is advertised. Firefox, on the other hand, I don't think there is anyone I have introduced that to that has later switched back to IE full-time. Firefox is clearly better than IE, even if all most people care about is the tabbed browsing. Really I feel all of these open source projects that are spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising are totally misguided.
I've got three words for ya - boring train commute.
I don't understand why someone tagged this "obvious". I had no idea that adults, on average, are more immature now than they were in the past. It does sound reasonable, yes, but certainly not obvious.
So what are you trying to say, that war is necessary for change to occur?
No it's not that simple. IE sometimes displays valid code incorrectly, so then it must be tweaked so it does look the same in IE and all the other browsers, without violating the standards in the process. For a clean information-centric web site like Slashdot, this is probably relatively easy, but some web sites have very complex visual layouts and their visual look is essential to get right. I've worked on a few and spent days tweaking for IE. It has to be the most frustrating thing about web development.
Practically, yes, but IE not the standard because of it's market share, it is the de facto standard because of it - and this is an important difference. Real web standards are developed so that their can be some level of guarantee that certain XHTML markup and CSS code will have a certain meaning and look a certain way on every browser. When developing a site there is little work involved in ensuring it looks right across standards compliant browsers but having to support IE often means violating the standard so that it works on IE. Every web developer will have experienced the frustration of applying a fix for IE only to see the site break in a standards complaint browser (it's important to note that IE is clearly at fault here). There are ways to make IE only fixes through creating special stylesheets for it and using IE's "if IE then" type statements or relying on browser parsing bugs that only exist on various versions of IE, but this clearly is not the point. Microsoft, as the de facto standard, really should be adhering to web standards because by not doing so they are costing web-based projects at least around 20% of their budget. In some cases the client foots the bill but in many cases it just means that the programmers will have to put in extra hours. Like you mentioned, you just can't not support the defacto standard. This is my main beef with Microsoft, and I'm sure most other web developers too.
I think they do choose to... but some studies have shown that women who being a computer science major tend to transfer to other majors because of the geek culture in most CS departments alienates them (I can't remember which ones, but if you google for "computer science women study" you'll find plenty of interesting results). Hell, the geek culture in my CS department alienated me and I'm male... I just didn't want to smell from an all night session in the labs and spout Monty Python skits at people who had never heard of them when I emerged from them the next morning on a caffeine high. It took me a long time to realise that you could be a great computer scientist without taking part in this geek culture. What these women need is to feel free that they can choose to be a computer programmer if they have an interest, even if they are not a smelly geek, and encouragement/support programs/incentives like what GNOME is doing are a great idea.
I stand corrected :) I didn't realise the core OOo developers are paid to do their work, and I do appreciate what the NeoOffice developers are doing. Of course, not even knowing what's involved in integrating OpenOffice with with Mac OS X, I probably shouldn't be claiming it is easy! Thanks for the info.
Ah yes, the HTML entity for Euro. Would be nice if Slashcode could recognise the Euro symbol when entering in plain text (or Japanese/other language text as an earlier post mentioned)... It seems that Slashdot uses the iso-8859-1 charset.... Would be great if they switched to unicode... then users could comment in any language, or mix languages in the same post. Perhaps Slashdot wants to stay English only though for practical reasons, or the admins are just lazy, or both?
I agree. I know someone who donated to NeoOffice, not really realising that it's the OpenOffice team that develops all the functionality, while the NeoOffice team (and I believe it's just two guys) just integrates it nicely with the Mac OS X GUI.
Of course the NeoOffice team do clearly point this out, but most non-technical users place far to much importance on the GUI. Sure, it's important, but so are all the other pieces of OOo that make it great. Or any piece of software for that matter... grrrr.. it's just a pet peeve I have.