The most consistently annoying thing about the WoT (I kinda enjoy the superfluous prose, but I'm a fast reader) was the bad editing. I mean bad. Spelling errors, grammatical errors, and typographical too (at least in all the hardbound books). All this time I thought it was just inconsistent QC at Tor, or RJ not allowing editing of his type. Heh, learn something new every day.
No one serious is saying rip out your grandma's air conditioner. They are saying: "Lets keep our houses at 80F instead of 72F during that 115F heat wave in the summer." Or more importantly, lets have our local BigBoxMart run their air conditioner at 80F.
The whole "making the other side out to be the extremists" red herring is really counter-productive to intelligent discussion about a problem.
Remember, the only real power that the customer/consumer has is choice. I just sent this, and everyone else who is complaining should too.
To sales@blizzard.com:
Hello,
I've been a long time blizzard customer and have bought every game that
your company has produced since Warcraft was published back in '94,
sometimes even multiple copies for different platforms. Because of the
recent legal actions your company has taken against the developers of a
project called bnetd, particularly invoking the provisions of the DMCA, I am
no longer buying your games and will encourage all of my friends not to do so as
well. I will miss enjoying the high quality games that blizzard creates.
Remember, companies get away with these things mostly because we let them. If they knew that doing things like this would hurt their bottom line, you can be certain they would change their tune.
The ultimate value of a US dollar, anywhere in the world, comes from its power to buy goods and services from US businesses, period. Those dollars being spent overseas find their way back to the US. Perhaps indirectly, perhaps over many years, and perhaps passing through many hands (and foreign reserve banks) on the way. But if they weren't ultimately headed back into US pockets, nobody overseas would bother exchanging them.
Really? That doesn't make sense to me. If US goods and services were in high demand, why do we have such a large trade deficit?
The theory that I've always heard is that the international value of the USD was not what you could buy with it from the USA, but that it was a strong currency that wasn't subject to massive amounts of fluctuations, and therefore appropriate to use as a reserve currency. Another reason could be that the oil (and I imagine other commodity) markets traditionally use USD, so most oil buyers (like governments) keep USD reserves to cover fluctuations in oil price.
I agree with you completely. I think another big deal is the endless upgrade cycle of machines when you rely on packages and operating system maintainance. I take care of 50+ machines with more coming every day, and the ones that I have the most problems with are the grandfathered systems running out of date versions of redhat or mandrake. Most of the time it is difficult to patch these systems because the installed system packages are so heavily customized and integrated, with myriad dependencies. I stick with slackware wherever possible (though LFS is tempting, and we'll probably go that route in the future) because Patrick tries to stick with official versions wherever possible.
Also even a three year maintaince cycle (isn't that the longest right now -- RHEL?) is a big deal when you have large numbers of machines to maintain. I'd rather stick to one or two base installs and handle security, maintainance, and feature upgrades myself rather than to ALWAYS be going around upgrading machines to a supported version of the OS.
We don't love people who rant and rave and complain.
If the user interfaces are so poor, why don't you help fix them? Instead of approaching this in a manner designed to piss people off and create enemies, why don't you say things like:
"It seems to me that the cups configuration wizard could be a bit more intuitive. Specifically at these points..."
or (shockingly) even better:
"Here's a patch that I feel makes the cups configuration wizard more user friendly. I was able to have 10 of my non-linux friends successfully configure a networked printer from my wife's workstation with the patched version. Can anyone find a way to do things even better?"
More of us would listen to you if you stopped insulting people left and right. We might even take heart in your suggestions and join in the fun of making a better UI.
So that's wonderful... Here I am in my office which sits above some high voltage transformers which I know emits a field around 60Hz. I just had it measured and there are hot spots up to 700mG at floor level, and about 200mG at chest level. Sheesh... and I thought the monitors were the only things that were affected by this stuff.
This problem isn't new. In fact, it's far older than any computer technology. The Latin phrase Quis custodiet ipsos custodies, which translates to "Who will guard the guards?" shows that people have been struggling with the same problem for centuries. You can set up as many layers of security as you like, but at some point, you have to trust the layers themselves.
In short, open source free and low-cost software products are likely to be widely adopted in governments, where spending public money for licenses is a difficult justification. Inevitably, that choice will lead to security breaches that will cost those same governments (and ultimately you), huge amounts of money to rectify.
Where exactly is the logic in this? In the open source world, at least there are "watchers", and you have the ability to "watch" yourself, or at least pay someone to review the code for you if you don't have the abilty. This isn't the case with almost all commercial software. This reeks of FUD and is poorly written.
8 eh, well I've got around 30:P
Just bought one of these because I want to use my new DVI KVM switch:
http://tinyurl.com/2yguf
What I'm really interested in doing is setting up an IBM model M to be wireless or bluetooth. That would be nice.:)
Whoa they have problems? Thanks for pointing that out. I thought they were perfect.:)
My last comment might be better phrased as they have better business strategy, rather than they know where to invest their money. Of course migration of any large source of income to other places can be an aggravating factor to any country's economy.
Jairam specializes in embedded systems software for handheld devices. She leaves her two children with a babysitter each morning, commutes an hour to the office, and spends her days attending meetings, perfecting her team's code, and emailing her main client, a utility company in the western US. Jairam's annual salary is about $11,000 - more than 22 times the per capita annual income in India.
I liked this bit... So basically Indian people get rich off of american companies.
An $11,000 salary in India is about a $700,000 US salary (based on 2001 statistics -- http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/regional/reis/). What a lot of american companies don't understand is that it pays to develop talent in house. What is going to happen when the management retires and there are no qualified people to manage the outsourcing of work because it has been outsourced so long? Pay an Indian $700,000 a year to come over here and manage the outsourcing?
Me, I look at Japanese companies to understand good business strategy. The Japanese seem to know how to invest their money for the long term.
Wow, you work over at the primate research center at UCD then? I went over there once when I first started working there to help a colleague, I figured that they were researching ABOUT monkeys, not researching ON monkeys... Then I saw the high security and no parking signs and figured it out...
It saddens me to see that you have voted 'Yea' on the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2003/roll649.xml
As you may know, this bill grants FBI powers to view the financial records of citizens without a court order from a judge, removing the checks and balances so important to our government. There is evidence that the FBI has abused other powers given to it by the much contested Patriot Act:
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/projects/libert y/story/7989769p-8926319c.html
I have spoken to many other citizens in our district who are also unhappy about your vote on this issue. Unless I see active action on your part in opposition of further such laws, I will be encouraging as many people as possible to vote for a candidate who will better represent our interests come election time.
Feel free to have your staff contact me if you have any questions.
One of the things that continuously bothers me about people who write about open source and even people who post here frequently is this whole "linux vs windows" talking about market shares, competition, and linux domination.
What people need to understand is that Linux wasn't created to be specifically an alternative to windows, it wasn't made to bring down the beast at redmond, and it wasn't created because BSD is dying or to be the one true OS. It wasn't created with hopes of making lots of engineers rich and lots of middlemen richer. It was created because it was fun and educational to do so at the time. Seems to me that all of these people who are trying to reconcile linux's role from a capitalist perspective are missing the boat. Linux isn't THE alternative or THE future, but it will be there along for the ride.
And the correct thing to do as a parent who has guns is not to lock them up from your kids, but teach them how to use them and what they are. Kids wouldn't be firing off guns in instances like this if they were properly taught by their parents about the responsibilities that go with when you pick up a firearm. The best protection is knowledge
On Friday, Jun 27 @ 21:53 BigBlockMopar insinuated that...
DO look for old* Creative Labs 16-bit ISA sound cards where the output amplifiers are in 8 pin DIP packages with "LM741" on them; in under 10 minutes you can bring them to almost the sound quality of the finest $2000 CD players.
Well now, are you going to tell us HOW to do such a COOL wonderful thing to such a glorious old ISA monster like the one that is sitting in front of me???
What is with it with all of these GPL rants! First off, someone can't steal your code, they can only copy it. Secondly, if you license your code under a free license, anyone can use it for free, not just cool people or the people that you like. Blaming the GPL is like blaming the computer for crashing instead of the engineers of the hardware/software.
Wouldn't help in this case but... Whenever I used to call @homeless/charter for tech support, as soon as I got a person on the phone I would say "Sorry, I was in the queue for level 2 support and I got disconnected." That would always save me at least 10 minutes.
Re:What happened to "information wants to be free"
on
Databases and Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Actually, yes, it wants to be free. FREE. Not paid for and not accessible only by people who are wealthy or powerful, or who work for the government and get special clearance to it. Here's an idea, lets set up our own free service/servers to host information and make it free to everyone, because that's the only way to fight the access controls that are being put on data.
Slashdot Mirror
NPACI Rocks is probably your best bet. http://rocksclusters.org/
This seems like a less-crappy version of about.com and not anything at all like Wikipedia. Perhaps that's who Google is really "competing" with?
The most consistently annoying thing about the WoT (I kinda enjoy the superfluous prose, but I'm a fast reader) was the bad editing. I mean bad. Spelling errors, grammatical errors, and typographical too (at least in all the hardbound books). All this time I thought it was just inconsistent QC at Tor, or RJ not allowing editing of his type. Heh, learn something new every day.
No one serious is saying rip out your grandma's air conditioner. They are saying: "Lets keep our houses at 80F instead of 72F during that 115F heat wave in the summer." Or more importantly, lets have our local BigBoxMart run their air conditioner at 80F. The whole "making the other side out to be the extremists" red herring is really counter-productive to intelligent discussion about a problem.
Here's a flame:
You know its logic like yours that I don't understand.
You complain at repressions US citizens suffer... take a look at $wherever, there its much worse.
You complain about lack of freedom of speech, well in $wherever, you'd be killed for expressing dissent.
or...
You're complaining about working at walmart? People in $wherever would kill to have a job like that.
You had to stand outside in the rain until 4am to vote? Well in $wherever you can't even vote, so be thankful.
Just because there's someplace that's worse isn't an excuse to not strive to make things better here.
To sales@blizzard.com:
- Hello,
I've been a long time blizzard customer and have bought every game that
your company has produced since Warcraft was published back in '94,
sometimes even multiple copies for different platforms. Because of the
recent legal actions your company has taken against the developers of a
project called bnetd, particularly invoking the provisions of the DMCA, I am
no longer buying your games and will encourage all of my friends not to do so as
well. I will miss enjoying the high quality games that blizzard creates.
Remember, companies get away with these things mostly because we let them. If they knew that doing things like this would hurt their bottom line, you can be certain they would change their tune.The ultimate value of a US dollar, anywhere in the world, comes from its power to buy goods and services from US businesses, period. Those dollars being spent overseas find their way back to the US. Perhaps indirectly, perhaps over many years, and perhaps passing through many hands (and foreign reserve banks) on the way. But if they weren't ultimately headed back into US pockets, nobody overseas would bother exchanging them.
Really? That doesn't make sense to me. If US goods and services were in high demand, why do we have such a large trade deficit?
The theory that I've always heard is that the international value of the USD was not what you could buy with it from the USA, but that it was a strong currency that wasn't subject to massive amounts of fluctuations, and therefore appropriate to use as a reserve currency. Another reason could be that the oil (and I imagine other commodity) markets traditionally use USD, so most oil buyers (like governments) keep USD reserves to cover fluctuations in oil price.
I agree with you completely. I think another big deal is the endless upgrade cycle of machines when you rely on packages and operating system maintainance. I take care of 50+ machines with more coming every day, and the ones that I have the most problems with are the grandfathered systems running out of date versions of redhat or mandrake. Most of the time it is difficult to patch these systems because the installed system packages are so heavily customized and integrated, with myriad dependencies. I stick with slackware wherever possible (though LFS is tempting, and we'll probably go that route in the future) because Patrick tries to stick with official versions wherever possible. Also even a three year maintaince cycle (isn't that the longest right now -- RHEL?) is a big deal when you have large numbers of machines to maintain. I'd rather stick to one or two base installs and handle security, maintainance, and feature upgrades myself rather than to ALWAYS be going around upgrading machines to a supported version of the OS.
If the user interfaces are so poor, why don't you help fix them? Instead of approaching this in a manner designed to piss people off and create enemies, why don't you say things like:
- "It seems to me that the cups configuration wizard could be a bit more intuitive. Specifically at these points..."
or (shockingly) even better:- "Here's a patch that I feel makes the cups configuration wizard more user friendly. I was able to have 10 of my non-linux friends successfully configure a networked printer from my wife's workstation with the patched version. Can anyone find a way to do things even better?"
More of us would listen to you if you stopped insulting people left and right. We might even take heart in your suggestions and join in the fun of making a better UI.So that's wonderful... Here I am in my office which sits above some high voltage transformers which I know emits a field around 60Hz. I just had it measured and there are hot spots up to 700mG at floor level, and about 200mG at chest level. Sheesh... and I thought the monitors were the only things that were affected by this stuff.
:(
Needless to say... I'm moving
Where exactly is the logic in this? In the open source world, at least there are "watchers", and you have the ability to "watch" yourself, or at least pay someone to review the code for you if you don't have the abilty. This isn't the case with almost all commercial software. This reeks of FUD and is poorly written.
8 eh, well I've got around 30 :P
Just bought one of these because I want to use my new DVI KVM switch:
http://tinyurl.com/2yguf
What I'm really interested in doing is setting up an IBM model M to be wireless or bluetooth. That would be nice. :)
Whoa they have problems? Thanks for pointing that out. I thought they were perfect. :)
My last comment might be better phrased as they have better business strategy, rather than they know where to invest their money. Of course migration of any large source of income to other places can be an aggravating factor to any country's economy.
I liked this bit... So basically Indian people get rich off of american companies.
An $11,000 salary in India is about a $700,000 US salary (based on 2001 statistics -- http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/regional/reis/).
What a lot of american companies don't understand is that it pays to develop talent in house. What is going to happen when the management retires and there are no qualified people to manage the outsourcing of work because it has been outsourced so long? Pay an Indian $700,000 a year to come over here and manage the outsourcing?
Me, I look at Japanese companies to understand good business strategy. The Japanese seem to know how to invest their money for the long term.
Wow, you work over at the primate research center at UCD then? I went over there once when I first started working there to help a colleague, I figured that they were researching ABOUT monkeys, not researching ON monkeys... Then I saw the high security and no parking signs and figured it out...
Just sent to my congresscritter:
t y/story/7989769p-8926319c.html
Mr. Ose,
It saddens me to see that you have voted 'Yea' on the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2003/roll649.xml
As you may know, this bill grants FBI powers to view the financial records of citizens without a court order from a judge, removing the checks and balances so important to our government. There is evidence that the FBI has abused other powers given to it by the much contested Patriot Act:
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/projects/liber
I have spoken to many other citizens in our district who are also unhappy about your vote on this issue. Unless I see active action on your part in opposition of further such laws, I will be encouraging as many people as possible to vote for a candidate who will better represent our interests come election time.
Feel free to have your staff contact me if you have any questions.
One of the things that continuously bothers me about people who write about open source and even people who post here frequently is this whole "linux vs windows" talking about market shares, competition, and linux domination.
What people need to understand is that Linux wasn't created to be specifically an alternative to windows, it wasn't made to bring down the beast at redmond, and it wasn't created because BSD is dying or to be the one true OS. It wasn't created with hopes of making lots of engineers rich and lots of middlemen richer. It was created because it was fun and educational to do so at the time. Seems to me that all of these people who are trying to reconcile linux's role from a capitalist perspective are missing the boat. Linux isn't THE alternative or THE future, but it will be there along for the ride.
And the correct thing to do as a parent who has guns is not to lock them up from your kids, but teach them how to use them and what they are. Kids wouldn't be firing off guns in instances like this if they were properly taught by their parents about the responsibilities that go with when you pick up a firearm. The best protection is knowledge
Really? Where can you download SuSe enterprise? I've been looking at it for evaluation purposes...
Don't worry about the errors in the code, I'm sure the apache developers will listen to Reason.
On Friday, Jun 27 @ 21:53 BigBlockMopar insinuated that...
:)
DO look for old* Creative Labs 16-bit ISA sound cards where the output amplifiers are in 8 pin DIP packages with "LM741" on them; in under 10 minutes you can bring them to almost the sound quality of the finest $2000 CD players.
Well now, are you going to tell us HOW to do such a COOL wonderful thing to such a glorious old ISA monster like the one that is sitting in front of me???
Inquiring minds want to know...
What is with it with all of these GPL rants! First off, someone can't steal your code, they can only copy it. Secondly, if you license your code under a free license, anyone can use it for free, not just cool people or the people that you like. Blaming the GPL is like blaming the computer for crashing instead of the engineers of the hardware/software.
Yeah, but the GPL doesn't restrict the people you distribute it to not give it away.
Wouldn't help in this case but...
Whenever I used to call @homeless/charter for tech support, as soon as I got a person on the phone I would say "Sorry, I was in the queue for level 2 support and I got disconnected." That would always save me at least 10 minutes.
Actually, yes, it wants to be free. FREE. Not paid for and not accessible only by people who are wealthy or powerful, or who work for the government and get special clearance to it. Here's an idea, lets set up our own free service/servers to host information and make it free to everyone, because that's the only way to fight the access controls that are being put on data.