Quite possibly the most effective means of addressing this latest move is to simply ban SuSE from the community.
You can't support free SuSE RPM distribution websites because you risk carrying some IP protected code. Much like you can't run a Gnutella server anymore because you might get sued for having it on, regardless of the content provided.
Similarly, I think it would benefit the community as a whole if those who do use SuSE made the effort to get away from SuSE and find an alternative that works. SuSE isn't so awesome that there is nothing to compare it with. Neither is RedHat for that matter. But RedHat might be an alternative. I'm not so sure how RH manages their support/stability compared to SuSE.
I am a Debian user and am so by choice. I spent a full year with both RedHat and then a full year with SuSE and found that I much preferred Debian over both of them. The simple reason is that Debian does what I expect it so, it works, and it's far easier to manage over the long haul than either one. But this is my experience and therefore my bias.
But I do believe that software is at such a point that the original concept of the Free Software zealots is actually possible. There is little that can be done today with software that actually requires you to shell out money to a software company. There may be exceptions, but they are fewer every year.
It is in everyone's best interest to simply stay away from Novell/SuSE products. They aren't going to be much better than Microsoft products in a few years anyways so don't waste your time with them.
If what you say is indeed true then this is the first time in some 20+ years that Microsoft is changing from Embrace/Extend/Extinguish to... Sorry, I don't believe it. There is not one company to have survived a partnership with Microsoft. In five years, if Zend is still Zend and PHP is still PHP and not some dot-net extension, you might have a point.
I view this as the end of Zend and the kiss of death to PHP. If PHP gets better under Windows then it will probably somehow get worse under Linux. Will that make people stop using Linux and switch to Windows? Don't bet on it...
There are some interesting features of RoR that do represent a shift. But there are some disadvantages to RoR as well.
It is important that people start rethinking the codebase for web sites and web applications to split the backend and frontend a little cleaner. This makes it easier for teams to develop and easier to debug. RoR makes this pretty much mandatory.
When it comes to their database practices - primary keys and such -- they pretty much suck. The approach they have here is one of over simplified database structures which means you can definitely create bad data and violate data integrity rules all over the place without knowing it.
It's extremely inefficient in database use because they do dumb things like test for a record before inserting a record. This allows me to insert the same record twice but with different primary key instead of making an intelligent primary key and handling the insert errors. There is no statement handle caching so all that execution plan development that real databases do to improve performance is wasted. Referential integrity rules are enforced through lots of SQL lookups and not by making actual referential integrity rules.
What all this comes down to is RoR is a competitor to PHP but in no way is it capable of operating in a real environment where data is the business and mistakes are limited to a misplaced BLOG but money or worse.
But you'll really have to explain the idea of RoR not encouraging you to use Session variables. When by default the marshall then entire session object and all it's variables -- it's too easy to use Session variables and actually requires some real effort not to. If you refer to the notion of a session variable only referring to a session_id in a table then all I can say is "well, duh! you aren't supposed to use sessions as a data store."
I think RoR is a step in the right direction, but the cost of performance is significant. But the cost of data integrity, integration, and robustness is ultimately insurmountable.
So both of these posts basically do the same thing. Use lots of hydrocarbon fuel to generate the hydrogen gas necessary to become a nation that isn't entirely dependent on hydrocarbon fuels and the single largest consumer of hydrocarbon energy in the world.
You are thinking about two different models of corporate survival.
I find it easier to think of these things in terms of biological and evolutionary survival techniques.
One option in surviving as a corporate body in the economic ecosystem is to do the Darwinian thing by evolving to become the most efficient and effective at what your niche is. An example of this is the shark. One of the finest hunting species known. Similarly the wild cats.
Another alternative is various molds. They emit a gas which is highly toxic to all other forms of competing mold, thereby carving out a space within which there can be no competition because of the toxic nature of the air. Another exeptional example is Caulerpa taxifolia which is a seaweed growing across the mediterranean seafloor at the expense of all other life. The animals cannot eat is for it too is toxic.
As a corporation, one much protect it's ecosystem space or territory to remove competition. One method is to continually adapt in a highy evolutionary manner, trying to address all the environmental conditions that arise by responding to the liabilities and assets that present themselves. The other methodology is the lock down the environment through aggressive tactics to kill the opposition rather then out-hunt it by means of USPTO litigation, copyright litigation, litagation in general, and supporting litigation of others where it is advantageous. And then there's marketing. How many studies are there showing Windows is superiour to everything else? The price of Coke/Pepsi products is >50% marketing expenses.
With China being the point of growth on this ball of dirt, no one is going to dare piss them off. Even Microsoft has decided to let them steal software in China but in the USA you're doing 10-20 in the Pound You in the Ass Federal Prison.
I would not be surprised if the response from our government is to send the Chinese government a list of the root passwords to all our computers with a note attached, "So sorry for the inconvenience."
This is about the only practical solution I can see here. The notion of putting all this in a car is a joke. Everyone wants their own screen in their face.
When you purchase a license for C#, do you get the same Service Level Agreement that you get with one of those expensive OSS outfits? It's always been my experience that once I purchase a closed source solution I have no more support than some monkey telling me to reboot the machine and reinstall the software. I don't consider that to be support.
I think you have to consider the bigger picture and more difficult issue of Total Cost of Ownership. Right now there's a million websites that will tell you any answer you want to hear, so I won't pretend to know the answer for you.
Your own experience will be different from the person sitting next to you.
My experience has been that the initial investment in time for OSS is high but over time that investment is amoritized to become very inexpensive indeed. I am not more afflicted by hardware issues than software issues since I set up shop about 5 years ago. However, I'm also 99% of my own support, which is another TCO issue you must address. Do you have, or want to have, the knowledge in-house to do all your support or are you willing to pay someone (through the nose) for the real support to really get things going when they break?
I think most companies, even with 3 seats, will make this decision and either pay someone "too much" money to sit around and wait for the computers to break, meanwhile coming up with better ways of doing things or have no one in-house but pay to be able to bring someone in.
I think the more interesting question might be. How much would it cost you if you simply hired someone at $60,000 to come in every day and make the whole IT picture work and work better every day. The idea here is that you have a guy who just makes stuff up that makes your company work better, faster, cheaper, and also does all the support. What's that worth to your company?
Your points are absolutely valid. As the economic favor hits India and other nations, they will experience the same costs increases that have been experienced in the US over the last 40 years only in a fraction of the time. This makes the cost of doing business overseas less attractive than the cost of doing it internally. This explosive growth can become problematic if the area doing the growth (industry/country/region) can't handle it.
As long as there is a computer located in the US, there will be a need for someone with that knowledge to be able to walk up and touch it. Still to this day, not everything can be fixed over the wire. And there are times where it's just not cost effective to do so.
Generally speaking, outsourcing or overseas (similar enough) work only when you have a sufficiently mature product and business model that you can manage the business with a very slow development cycle with a high degree of confidence that the cycles will remain stable.
This works well for the steel industry because the products are specified by international standard specification and can be easily repeated and verified. These steel grades are very well established and a long ways from R&D materials. The R&D materials are still being developed in the labs which seem to still be largely in the US. How long is a different matter.
Similarly, the automotive industry is relatively stable and slow moving. This is especially true of the big three automotive companies in the US. How many years did it take for anyone to respond to the hybrid models? How long would this have taken if IT was met with a highly differentiated product from a vendor? Not years, that's for certain.
Overseas works if the variables are well established, well documented, verifiable, and stable. If you start an overseas venture on the latest IT conceptual product you will experience a world of hurt.
Years ago I worked in the metal stamping industry. Dies can be built overseas for a fraction of the cost in the US. But there were three problems that prevented the practice from being implimented.
Dies cannot be air shipped overnight. They can only move in a boat.
Dies, when they break, must be fixed ASAP so you need a local die shop to do the work.
Local die shops and the US die industry do things differently enough that foreign dies are difficult to work on, making fast repair turn around times high risk.
I thought everyone wanted to have a system with multiple screens supporting the same desktop, not one screen supporting multiple desktops. I don't see the advantage of this over a nice KVM.
Seems to me that it all comes down to a certain level of familiarity with the OS defines if XXX=Linux and YYY=Windows or the other way around. I think there is a fundamental difference in philosophy on how to manage an OS or how an OS should be structured to make it manageable.
Personally I think there is a much higher level of detail available in Linux than there is in Windows. But Windows tries to be more self configurable than Linux. Proof? The configuration tool for Linux is VIM. The configuration tool for Windows is... I don't know. I haven't used Windows in almost 10 years. But from what I remember, there wasn't a configuration tool. It was uninstall/reinstall and hope for the best.
I don't know what's best. But I know what's best for me.
I would have to agree. How can you have a non-partisan political discussion? It's an oxymoron these days.
I suppose you could set up something of a debating blog on current issues. But how you would go about filtering out the political from the non-political opinions would itself be highly subjective. It's like legislating taste.
How would you defend the following: I publish an opinion/discussion about why I think abortion is evil. You block my post because you believe it is too partisan biased a discussion. I accuse you of being pro-abortion because you have denied my percieved right to publish my anti-abortion opinion on your website. Could you defend it as simply as saying, "It's my website. If you don't like it then so sad, too bad." By providing support/denial of articles you have yourself entered the arena of partisan opinion making.
Someone is always going to bitch about something. If you take a purely scientific point of view on a highly emotional topic like abortion you have already decided the bias of your website. Anti-abortionists have a tendency to be more emotionally and religiously driven then their counterparts on the pro-abortion arena. I won't say with certainty this is true, but my personal experience (which no one else can refute) leads me to that conclusion. Now, have I remained entirely unbiased in this discussion about abortion? I doubt it. You could probably guess my bias already. But I've never explicitly stated an opinion one way or the other. At the same time, I have made no specific arguements for or against either side.
Have I been non-partisan? Have I been reasonable in my post by avoiding typical rantings?
This is a rather stupid concept. Take a readily available, limited, and consumable product and turn it into another consumable prodect that has limited distribution and use. The whole point in pushing this hydrogen fuel cell economy isn't so that we can continue to invade middle easter oil rich countries for sources of hydrogen instead of oil, but that we don't have such a dependency upon them.
Think how the entire Middle East history of the last 100 years would be if there was no oil there? No one would care what they did and we wouldn't really care what they did to the Sunni's, Shiites, Jews... Don't believe me, look at Darfur. No oil, no one cares.
In the long run of human history, I think we would all be much better off if there was not the intense need for the oil resources of the middle east. At least not in most of the Western Civilisation and those countries attempting to modernize themselves into an industrial or technological nation. We would really benefit if we could simply find a practical replacement to all of the above. Right now, seriously, the best contender is bio-diesel. It comes from a dozen plants that can grow in just about every climatic zone on the planet and uses less energy to produce than it provides. A sure win over Ethanol, Hydrogen, Gasoline, Diesel, Nuclear... And it's effectively GREEN because the crap you release in the air, you trapped out of the air last year, not 50 million years ago.
Never seen that happen. They don't want the "good talking to". They just want their stuff to work the way they are used to seeing it.
Changing from MSIE to Firefox means you have to re-learn how to navigate around the browser. My wife went from Linux/Firefox to Apple/Safari and after a month she's bothered to figure out how to save bookmarks. She doesn't care about tabbed browsing settings or anything else. I think she's fairly typical in that she uses
I cite this as one example of many.
Not everyone is in love with their computer.
The conversion of my family hasn't been because of a good talking to. It's been because I simply won't allow a Windows machine in the house. They've learned how to use Linux and Apple nicely enough and in some cases prefer to do their school work on Linux/Apple.
Perhaps a solution can start with a simple process something like:
Development community identifies who they consider to be the top contributors. Perhaps Debians popularity contest software can help weigh in on what's most often installed on machines.
Users are given the opportunity to make donations (eg: via paypal) to the community in a general fund.
top contributors are given a strict percentage of the general fund (adding up to 100% of course)
Additionally, you can opt-in for specific projects/products/packages to get their contributions directly. In case you really like a specific project -- frozen bubbles!!
Probably not enough there to retire on. Probably some will feel they deserve more than the next guy. But the advantages are:
It's better than not getting anything at all
You know the rules before you begin -- everyone gets the same percentage.
Who gets the percentage is collectively determined and user installation base can be a factor.
Even if you aren't top dog on the porch, there is still a mechanism for you to get some contributions.
I have no doubt that it isn't going to be perfect. But it's an organized way of saying thank you to the developers and helping them to see the benefits. For most companies it would be far cheaper for them to simply make an annual donation to a tax deductable organization than it would to manage the contracts or employee benefits.
I was thinking more in terms of their migration from different VB's and such.
Deprecation is a necessary evil. Sometimes, and I'm sure both side of the Micorosft field would agree, it's a lot easier if you can do deprecation overnight.
It's nice to know that NOOBs now qualify as ten year users...
Gentoo is extremely painful. While capable, it's also capable of rendering the system unusable in a matter of minutes.
I think some of the experiences the article talks about are going to be typical under gentoo -- long compile times, and others related to his graphics is more common than anyone wants to admit. But I think there are some things that are so raw in gentoo that they are dangerous.
I think someone was looking into a debian/gentoo model of software where everything is compiled, but the package system was safer based on Debian. Considering the extremely high popularity of Debian, I'm surprised someone hasn't pushed this further. (note: ubuntu uses Debian so I'm including that)
Don't let him get his hands on the Mona Lisa. He'll probably add whitener to her teeth.
One of the things that I appreciate about these older shows is how much they are able to present of a story with such simple sets. All the glitz just leads to neoronic distractions. Of course some of the alien babes were a bit of a distraction too, but that's also part of the characters of the original show.
Go back and watch some of the pre-WWII movies and you'll find a fantastic lost technique in movie making. How to make a good movie without 50 gallons of blood, 5,000 gallons of gasoline, and 3 naked babes with 30% silicone by weight. Pretty cool stuff. Too bad people would rather watch digitized snakes on a plane than The Big Sleep.
And that is precisely why we are going to initiate a pre-emptive strike against the United Kingdom to prevent such behavior from getting out of control. Imagine the balls they must have to think for an instant that another sovereign nation can ignore anything the comes from the United States Rule of Law. I'm sure they have WMD's over there someplace.
They probably owe us War Restitutions from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 too.
And look what they did to our language. They talk so funny you can hardly understand a word they say.
They drive on the LEFT.
We have no choice but to vaporize their whole bitty little island in the name of Democracy!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
you would be home by now...
I agree.
Quite possibly the most effective means of addressing this latest move is to simply ban SuSE from the community.
You can't support free SuSE RPM distribution websites because you risk carrying some IP protected code. Much like you can't run a Gnutella server anymore because you might get sued for having it on, regardless of the content provided.
Similarly, I think it would benefit the community as a whole if those who do use SuSE made the effort to get away from SuSE and find an alternative that works. SuSE isn't so awesome that there is nothing to compare it with. Neither is RedHat for that matter. But RedHat might be an alternative. I'm not so sure how RH manages their support/stability compared to SuSE.
I am a Debian user and am so by choice. I spent a full year with both RedHat and then a full year with SuSE and found that I much preferred Debian over both of them. The simple reason is that Debian does what I expect it so, it works, and it's far easier to manage over the long haul than either one. But this is my experience and therefore my bias.
But I do believe that software is at such a point that the original concept of the Free Software zealots is actually possible. There is little that can be done today with software that actually requires you to shell out money to a software company. There may be exceptions, but they are fewer every year.
It is in everyone's best interest to simply stay away from Novell/SuSE products. They aren't going to be much better than Microsoft products in a few years anyways so don't waste your time with them.
Debian will always be in the Linux business.
So will Slackware.
Yeah, but PHP isn't all that great when you compare it to mod_perl or rails (different extremes)
yer a nut!
If what you say is indeed true then this is the first time in some 20+ years that Microsoft is changing from Embrace/Extend/Extinguish to... Sorry, I don't believe it. There is not one company to have survived a partnership with Microsoft. In five years, if Zend is still Zend and PHP is still PHP and not some dot-net extension, you might have a point.
I view this as the end of Zend and the kiss of death to PHP. If PHP gets better under Windows then it will probably somehow get worse under Linux. Will that make people stop using Linux and switch to Windows? Don't bet on it...
There are some interesting features of RoR that do represent a shift. But there are some disadvantages to RoR as well.
It is important that people start rethinking the codebase for web sites and web applications to split the backend and frontend a little cleaner. This makes it easier for teams to develop and easier to debug. RoR makes this pretty much mandatory.
When it comes to their database practices - primary keys and such -- they pretty much suck. The approach they have here is one of over simplified database structures which means you can definitely create bad data and violate data integrity rules all over the place without knowing it.
It's extremely inefficient in database use because they do dumb things like test for a record before inserting a record. This allows me to insert the same record twice but with different primary key instead of making an intelligent primary key and handling the insert errors. There is no statement handle caching so all that execution plan development that real databases do to improve performance is wasted. Referential integrity rules are enforced through lots of SQL lookups and not by making actual referential integrity rules.
What all this comes down to is RoR is a competitor to PHP but in no way is it capable of operating in a real environment where data is the business and mistakes are limited to a misplaced BLOG but money or worse.
But you'll really have to explain the idea of RoR not encouraging you to use Session variables. When by default the marshall then entire session object and all it's variables -- it's too easy to use Session variables and actually requires some real effort not to. If you refer to the notion of a session variable only referring to a session_id in a table then all I can say is "well, duh! you aren't supposed to use sessions as a data store."
I think RoR is a step in the right direction, but the cost of performance is significant. But the cost of data integrity, integration, and robustness is ultimately insurmountable.
If you used BioDiesel as a fuel you wouldn't have to rely on the technology curve.
It's over 100 years old, proven, affordable, reliable, and can be ported from homes to cars with a MUCH higher factor of safety than hydrogen gas.
It's already has a distribution system infrastructure.
You can create BioDiesel from a wide range of plants that grow in all but one or two agricultural zones.
So both of these posts basically do the same thing. Use lots of hydrocarbon fuel to generate the hydrogen gas necessary to become a nation that isn't entirely dependent on hydrocarbon fuels and the single largest consumer of hydrocarbon energy in the world.
Works for me!
You are thinking about two different models of corporate survival.
I find it easier to think of these things in terms of biological and evolutionary survival techniques.
One option in surviving as a corporate body in the economic ecosystem is to do the Darwinian thing by evolving to become the most efficient and effective at what your niche is. An example of this is the shark. One of the finest hunting species known. Similarly the wild cats.
Another alternative is various molds. They emit a gas which is highly toxic to all other forms of competing mold, thereby carving out a space within which there can be no competition because of the toxic nature of the air. Another exeptional example is Caulerpa taxifolia which is a seaweed growing across the mediterranean seafloor at the expense of all other life. The animals cannot eat is for it too is toxic.
As a corporation, one much protect it's ecosystem space or territory to remove competition. One method is to continually adapt in a highy evolutionary manner, trying to address all the environmental conditions that arise by responding to the liabilities and assets that present themselves. The other methodology is the lock down the environment through aggressive tactics to kill the opposition rather then out-hunt it by means of USPTO litigation, copyright litigation, litagation in general, and supporting litigation of others where it is advantageous. And then there's marketing. How many studies are there showing Windows is superiour to everything else? The price of Coke/Pepsi products is >50% marketing expenses.
With China being the point of growth on this ball of dirt, no one is going to dare piss them off. Even Microsoft has decided to let them steal software in China but in the USA you're doing 10-20 in the Pound You in the Ass Federal Prison.
I would not be surprised if the response from our government is to send the Chinese government a list of the root passwords to all our computers with a note attached, "So sorry for the inconvenience."
This is about the only practical solution I can see here. The notion of putting all this in a car is a joke. Everyone wants their own screen in their face.
When you purchase a license for C#, do you get the same Service Level Agreement that you get with one of those expensive OSS outfits? It's always been my experience that once I purchase a closed source solution I have no more support than some monkey telling me to reboot the machine and reinstall the software. I don't consider that to be support.
I think you have to consider the bigger picture and more difficult issue of Total Cost of Ownership. Right now there's a million websites that will tell you any answer you want to hear, so I won't pretend to know the answer for you.
Your own experience will be different from the person sitting next to you.
My experience has been that the initial investment in time for OSS is high but over time that investment is amoritized to become very inexpensive indeed. I am not more afflicted by hardware issues than software issues since I set up shop about 5 years ago. However, I'm also 99% of my own support, which is another TCO issue you must address. Do you have, or want to have, the knowledge in-house to do all your support or are you willing to pay someone (through the nose) for the real support to really get things going when they break?
I think most companies, even with 3 seats, will make this decision and either pay someone "too much" money to sit around and wait for the computers to break, meanwhile coming up with better ways of doing things or have no one in-house but pay to be able to bring someone in.
I think the more interesting question might be. How much would it cost you if you simply hired someone at $60,000 to come in every day and make the whole IT picture work and work better every day. The idea here is that you have a guy who just makes stuff up that makes your company work better, faster, cheaper, and also does all the support. What's that worth to your company?
Your points are absolutely valid. As the economic favor hits India and other nations, they will experience the same costs increases that have been experienced in the US over the last 40 years only in a fraction of the time. This makes the cost of doing business overseas less attractive than the cost of doing it internally. This explosive growth can become problematic if the area doing the growth (industry/country/region) can't handle it.
As long as there is a computer located in the US, there will be a need for someone with that knowledge to be able to walk up and touch it. Still to this day, not everything can be fixed over the wire. And there are times where it's just not cost effective to do so.
Generally speaking, outsourcing or overseas (similar enough) work only when you have a sufficiently mature product and business model that you can manage the business with a very slow development cycle with a high degree of confidence that the cycles will remain stable.
This works well for the steel industry because the products are specified by international standard specification and can be easily repeated and verified. These steel grades are very well established and a long ways from R&D materials. The R&D materials are still being developed in the labs which seem to still be largely in the US. How long is a different matter.
Similarly, the automotive industry is relatively stable and slow moving. This is especially true of the big three automotive companies in the US. How many years did it take for anyone to respond to the hybrid models? How long would this have taken if IT was met with a highly differentiated product from a vendor? Not years, that's for certain.
Overseas works if the variables are well established, well documented, verifiable, and stable. If you start an overseas venture on the latest IT conceptual product you will experience a world of hurt.
Years ago I worked in the metal stamping industry. Dies can be built overseas for a fraction of the cost in the US. But there were three problems that prevented the practice from being implimented.
- Dies cannot be air shipped overnight. They can only move in a boat.
- Dies, when they break, must be fixed ASAP so you need a local die shop to do the work.
- Local die shops and the US die industry do things differently enough that foreign dies are difficult to work on, making fast repair turn around times high risk.
So the dies stay in the US and so does the work.I thought everyone wanted to have a system with multiple screens supporting the same desktop, not one screen supporting multiple desktops. I don't see the advantage of this over a nice KVM.
Seems to me that it all comes down to a certain level of familiarity with the OS defines if XXX=Linux and YYY=Windows or the other way around. I think there is a fundamental difference in philosophy on how to manage an OS or how an OS should be structured to make it manageable.
Personally I think there is a much higher level of detail available in Linux than there is in Windows. But Windows tries to be more self configurable than Linux. Proof? The configuration tool for Linux is VIM. The configuration tool for Windows is... I don't know. I haven't used Windows in almost 10 years. But from what I remember, there wasn't a configuration tool. It was uninstall/reinstall and hope for the best.
I don't know what's best. But I know what's best for me.
I would have to agree. How can you have a non-partisan political discussion? It's an oxymoron these days.
I suppose you could set up something of a debating blog on current issues. But how you would go about filtering out the political from the non-political opinions would itself be highly subjective. It's like legislating taste.
How would you defend the following: I publish an opinion/discussion about why I think abortion is evil. You block my post because you believe it is too partisan biased a discussion. I accuse you of being pro-abortion because you have denied my percieved right to publish my anti-abortion opinion on your website. Could you defend it as simply as saying, "It's my website. If you don't like it then so sad, too bad." By providing support/denial of articles you have yourself entered the arena of partisan opinion making.
Someone is always going to bitch about something. If you take a purely scientific point of view on a highly emotional topic like abortion you have already decided the bias of your website. Anti-abortionists have a tendency to be more emotionally and religiously driven then their counterparts on the pro-abortion arena. I won't say with certainty this is true, but my personal experience (which no one else can refute) leads me to that conclusion. Now, have I remained entirely unbiased in this discussion about abortion? I doubt it. You could probably guess my bias already. But I've never explicitly stated an opinion one way or the other. At the same time, I have made no specific arguements for or against either side.
Have I been non-partisan? Have I been reasonable in my post by avoiding typical rantings?
Would you consider this post to be worth keeping?
This is a rather stupid concept. Take a readily available, limited, and consumable product and turn it into another consumable prodect that has limited distribution and use. The whole point in pushing this hydrogen fuel cell economy isn't so that we can continue to invade middle easter oil rich countries for sources of hydrogen instead of oil, but that we don't have such a dependency upon them.
Think how the entire Middle East history of the last 100 years would be if there was no oil there? No one would care what they did and we wouldn't really care what they did to the Sunni's, Shiites, Jews... Don't believe me, look at Darfur. No oil, no one cares.
In the long run of human history, I think we would all be much better off if there was not the intense need for the oil resources of the middle east. At least not in most of the Western Civilisation and those countries attempting to modernize themselves into an industrial or technological nation. We would really benefit if we could simply find a practical replacement to all of the above. Right now, seriously, the best contender is bio-diesel. It comes from a dozen plants that can grow in just about every climatic zone on the planet and uses less energy to produce than it provides. A sure win over Ethanol, Hydrogen, Gasoline, Diesel, Nuclear... And it's effectively GREEN because the crap you release in the air, you trapped out of the air last year, not 50 million years ago.
Never seen that happen. They don't want the "good talking to". They just want their stuff to work the way they are used to seeing it.
Changing from MSIE to Firefox means you have to re-learn how to navigate around the browser. My wife went from Linux/Firefox to Apple/Safari and after a month she's bothered to figure out how to save bookmarks. She doesn't care about tabbed browsing settings or anything else. I think she's fairly typical in that she uses
I cite this as one example of many.
Not everyone is in love with their computer.
The conversion of my family hasn't been because of a good talking to. It's been because I simply won't allow a Windows machine in the house. They've learned how to use Linux and Apple nicely enough and in some cases prefer to do their school work on Linux/Apple.
Perhaps a solution can start with a simple process something like:
- Development community identifies who they consider to be the top contributors. Perhaps Debians popularity contest software can help weigh in on what's most often installed on machines.
- Users are given the opportunity to make donations (eg: via paypal) to the community in a general fund.
- top contributors are given a strict percentage of the general fund (adding up to 100% of course)
- Additionally, you can opt-in for specific projects/products/packages to get their contributions directly. In case you really like a specific project -- frozen bubbles!!
Probably not enough there to retire on. Probably some will feel they deserve more than the next guy. But the advantages are:I have no doubt that it isn't going to be perfect. But it's an organized way of saying thank you to the developers and helping them to see the benefits. For most companies it would be far cheaper for them to simply make an annual donation to a tax deductable organization than it would to manage the contracts or employee benefits.
I was thinking more in terms of their migration from different VB's and such.
Deprecation is a necessary evil. Sometimes, and I'm sure both side of the Micorosft field would agree, it's a lot easier if you can do deprecation overnight.
It's nice to know that NOOBs now qualify as ten year users...
Gentoo is extremely painful. While capable, it's also capable of rendering the system unusable in a matter of minutes.
I think some of the experiences the article talks about are going to be typical under gentoo -- long compile times, and others related to his graphics is more common than anyone wants to admit. But I think there are some things that are so raw in gentoo that they are dangerous.
I think someone was looking into a debian/gentoo model of software where everything is compiled, but the package system was safer based on Debian. Considering the extremely high popularity of Debian, I'm surprised someone hasn't pushed this further. (note: ubuntu uses Debian so I'm including that)
My answer is to give them an allowance. Tell them to save their money. Get a job.
Don't let him get his hands on the Mona Lisa. He'll probably add whitener to her teeth.
One of the things that I appreciate about these older shows is how much they are able to present of a story with such simple sets. All the glitz just leads to neoronic distractions. Of course some of the alien babes were a bit of a distraction too, but that's also part of the characters of the original show.
Go back and watch some of the pre-WWII movies and you'll find a fantastic lost technique in movie making. How to make a good movie without 50 gallons of blood, 5,000 gallons of gasoline, and 3 naked babes with 30% silicone by weight. Pretty cool stuff. Too bad people would rather watch digitized snakes on a plane than The Big Sleep.
No argument there, but you just can't deprecate everything overnight either.
Bullshit! I see Microsoft do it all the time...
And that is precisely why we are going to initiate a pre-emptive strike against the United Kingdom to prevent such behavior from getting out of control. Imagine the balls they must have to think for an instant that another sovereign nation can ignore anything the comes from the United States Rule of Law. I'm sure they have WMD's over there someplace.
They probably owe us War Restitutions from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 too.
And look what they did to our language. They talk so funny you can hardly understand a word they say.
They drive on the LEFT.
We have no choice but to vaporize their whole bitty little island in the name of Democracy!!!!