> The systems that Mozilla 1.4 work on are: Linux (all architectures), GNU/HURD, IRIX, Tru4, BSD/OS, Solaris
$./run-mozilla.sh
ld.so.1:./mozilla-bin: fatal: relocation error: file./mozilla-bin: symbol gtk_set_locale: referenced symbol not found
Really? Solaris?
Not yet. (Yeah, it's the goddamn GTK libraries, and which compiler they were built with this week. And which things you'll break if you replace 'em. And where the hell do you get 'em?)
Rant: Mozilla binary tarballs for Solaris 2.6/7/8 should just include a copy of the libraries as part of the bundle, compiled under whatever compiler works with the frickin' Mozilla binary. It's a binary, the whole point is so that you don't have to compile jack shit. Diskspace is cheap. The sysadmin's few remaining strands of hair are not.
This has only been an outstanding issue against Mozilla binaries for... what, three years now?
> Starts off well, but loses it long before the fairly disappointing conclusion. It didn't make me want to rush out and get Cryptonomicon, which I've never bothered to read.
Yeah, give Cryptonomicon a chance. After two or three novels, he's gotten to the point where he can end a novel in about 4-5 pages, rather than just a paragraph or two.
I'm a Stephenson fan, and Snow Crash is among my favorite reads, but I do feel your pain. It's as if the ending of most of his books is cut off in mid-
Re:Obviously fiction/fantasy
on
The Bug
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· Score: 2, Funny
> I happen to have a good fiancee' and, while we have certainly had some problems, these past 5 years have been great. She's into computers and video games, so maybe I'm just lucky, but I think it's sad th[snip]
Look, who cares about all that crap, what's important is have you fixed the damn bug or not?!?!?!?:)
> > As if the universe had something bad to eat the night before, we get a moon named PUCK circling 'funny' mods are not so much laughing with you as at you. Puck, like many of Uranus's satellites, is named after a Shakespearean character. Specifically, Puck is a character from
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
I dunno, I happen to think a fairy circling Uranus is pretty freakin' funny.
But since you bring up Shakespeare, so was Oberon the Fourth Moon, and since we've already got the King of the Fairies circling Uranus, what do you have against Puck? Really, what's one more fairy between friends?
(Now, a fairy circling my anus isn't funny at all, no sirree!)
> i haven't watched tv in months but that does sound at least worth having on in the background
Check it out. It aired in April of '02, was probably the best thing I saw on TV that year.
And yeah, it presents a pretty balanced view of both the "pro" and "con" aspects of globalized trade. The case studies of Argentina, Bolivia, Poland, former USSR, China, Japan, India, and of course, the US and UK, are the most in-depth I've ever seen on television.
There's also a book, which is also fantastic. (The TV series was based on the book, not the other way 'round, which is probably why the TV series works so well.)
> Let me put it this way I'd feel safe if they treated money like no object where my safety was
concerned. But at present they care more about their money than they do my life.
Have you ever flown on a commercial airliner?
If so, why?
Hint: If Boeing (or Airbus, or whoever) didn't care about passenger safety, airliners wouldn't buy those aircraft. Airlines flying unsafe aircraft would rapidly go out of business, because passengers would choose to travel on competing airlines.
If I could spend $1M to ride on the first test flight of Burt Rutan's first fully-orbital vehicle, versus $20M to ride on a NASA "We spend more on 'safety' before 6:00 am than Burt Rutan's spent in his life" Space Shuttle, I'd strap in with Burt in a heartbeat.
(Of course, I want to go to space badly enough I'd take either flight, but hey, this is Slashdot, I can dream;)
Re:Yes, It's Worth It.
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
> Assuming the U.S. dollar remains dominant, and inflation steady.
Hedge by purchasing gold, gold miners, or inflation-indexed bonds. And if you don't buy into the "gold will rule the world" scenario (and I don't:-), but you're still bearish on the greenback, buy ADRs of stocks in countries whose currencies you are bullish on.
> (Personally, I'm banking on traditional wealth not meaning much as we accelerate toward the technological Singularity over the next few decades.)
I'm not. But it'd be way cool if it we do. I like money, but only for the shiny toys and yummy food I can buy with it; I don't have any need for power. So if I could build my toys and food out of virtual reality, I'd also be happier than the proverbial pig in shit, or a brain in information, whichever metaphor is more appropriate;)
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
> Shit, a whole paragraph of ranting after I said I was done. I must belong here.
You and me both, brother. But thanks for reminding me about the Scorched Earthers. Now that's my kind of political pipe dreamin':)
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
> You might try reading sometime, the EIC is designed to be a refund for the regressive payroll taxes like social security and FICA.
So is SS a retirement plan or is it welfare?:)
Personally, I don't much care, because I don't expect to see a cent back on the taxes I've paid into it either way. The SSA is even kind enough to jab me in the side every year with a reminder of how much they've taken on "my" behalf and how much I "might, but we're not promising anything" get back, someday, if the Moon in the Ascending House of Gore.
If SS truly is welfare - in that only the middle class pays in, and only the lower class collects - then Congress should have the brass ones to admit it.
> > Do you think JK Rowling should be able to write a Harry Potter novel, using in her favor the huge success of all the stories that came before that talk about magic, witchcraft, good, evil, etc., to boost the acceptability and profit potential of her derivative? > > The etc includes characters like "The reluctant hero", "The genius", "The member of a big family who feels overshadowed by siblings", "The elder", "The prankster", "The black sheep", "The fool who seeks status", "The bigot", "The victim of bigotry", "The power seeker" and so on.
Ahem: You've both forgotten something something:
"A method for entertaining consumers by means of a sequence of character strings, any of which, when taken in whole or part, describe reluctant heroes, geniuses, members of large families who feel overshaodwed by siblings, elders, pranksters, African-American sheep, Darl McBride, Sen. Robert Byrd, Sen. Trent Lott, and Sen. Hilary Clinton.
> need proof? ask your gov't they're the best working example > > they hold a gun to your head for welfare for medicaid for tax breaks for the already stinking rich etc etc
Right, and that is teh sux0r.
> How do you think America go to be where it is today? where do you suppose all of the things that allow for our quality of life comes from? that's right they come from other countries, so while you enjoy the availability (not that you necessarily have the means to buy them) of everything from cheap clothes to cheap food to cheap toys remember that almost all of that comes from countries where the people who make them are living well below your standard...
> > everything costs something at the expense of others,
With the exception of Chinese prison labor, those things do not come at the "expense" of others.
The people who make your Nikes for $5/d do not have guns to their heads. They line up outside of the factory, because working in the fields and villages pays $0.50/d.
They work in the factories instead of the farms for the same reason you work in a cubicle instead of a factory - because in their economy, that's where the money is.
(All the more ironic, then, that Russia has a flat tax, a lower tax, and a simpler tax system than the US of A - and gee, whose economy is growing by leaps and bounds these days? We showed them that capitalism was a better system than central planning, so they adopted capitalism at precisely the time when we've finally rejected it. To answer another Slashdot thread, now that's irony!:-)
> GUI utilities are $599.40+tax a dozen in Windows, and a dime of bandwidth a dozen in Linux.
Show me a Linux replacement for Adobe FrameMaker (or better yet, a port), and I'm there. Even at $599.40 or whatever Adobe's charging this week.
The original article was written from the point of view of a technical writer. IMO, any technical writer using MSTurd for documents over 100 pages in length needs to have his head examined. (Fuckin' Windows print drivers that won't print the same Word document the same way on two computers, meantime the FrameMaker d00dz are happily writing stuff in Frame on their Windoze laptops, then checking the files in to the source code control system at work, where they resume working on them from their Solaris and Windoze and Mac desktop boxen.)
I think FrameMaker's market share at the midrange of tech writers is pretty high, and for good reason. If you want to go beyond FrameMaker, you're talking even more money - Documentum-class document management systems, single sourcing from a big pile of XML into PDF, hardcopy, or HTML - but Linux ain't even in contention here.
It's sorta like Photoshop vs. The Gimp. The Gimp's great for Joe Tuxpack's vacation photos, but if you're doing color separations for inks that are requires to print on a billboard, and you wanna be damn sure it's the shade of puce that your Marketing department wast^H^H^H^Hpaid half a million bucks in researching, sorry kids, break out the Photoshop.
> Why would you want to inspire your children to be scientists, researchers and explorers? > >I thought the whole point to life was to get rich quick. Shouldn't they be legislators, lawyers, and entrepreneurs? I wonder how the average scientist, researcher and explorer are doing in today's world.
"Legislators, laywers and entrepreneurs"? One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong.
Entrepreneurs get rich slowly, and they do so by providing something new/innovative that others purchase freely.
Legislators and lawyers get rich quickly, because they produce nothing - they merely compel others to forfeit production.
Space, frankly, could use a few entrepreneurs. The legislators and lawyers (read: Congress and bureaucrats) that run NASA sure as hell ain't gonna get you or your children into space in their lifetimes.
> (Man on Mars)... "Well, I feel kinda lighter, place sure looks cold and desolate The sun's a lot dimmer. There's a lot of small to medium red boulders around the place... lets go for a drive! Oh , and I'll switch the probe on, too." > > (Probe on Mars)... "Gravity 0.4G , air pressure 15 millbar, temperature -14 deg C, solar radiation 22.5W/m2... (scans a rock) that rock over there.. it's a form of basalt, size 45x40x15cm, composition 45%Si 23%Al 14%Fe 5%Ca, and here's a picture for posterity."
Mission Control: "What's under that big rock over there? What's inside the rock with the cracks running through it? And what's up with those outflow-looking things Surveyor saw on crater rims?"
Man on Mars: [Picks up rock, smashes it against second rock, throws chunk into basket, walks a few feet down the edge of a crater, uses other chunk of rock to dig through the surface material near the crater wall outflow, jumps out of way as gush of water surges out and boils off en route to the crater floor.]
"Nothin' in the rocks but there's some weird green shit in the shadows underneath 'em, more weird green shit deep in the cracks of the rock, and I guess we know the outflows ain't CO2, 'cuz there's even more of the green shit in the water I just found!"
Probe on Mars: [Sits still.] "WTF d00d? Do what?! Do it where!?"
Yes, It's Worth It.
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
> Is it worth it? That's my question for all the geeks who work the incredible hours. I know, I was once there too. Luckily although my employer did not pay overtime, my supervisor did his best to reward it with food, (near-giveaway) employee auctions of obsolete but perfectly functional equipment, etc. So sure, we all worked 80, 90, even the occasioanl 100+ hour week.
If the business plan is fundamentally flawed, no amount of above-and-beyond effort will save the company. Take what you can, punch out, try again.
Eventually, you'll land at a company whose business model isn't fundamentally flawed, and where you still get most, if not all, of the perks of the fuckedcompany.com bait.
> Work/jobs basically are an agreement where you trade your time for money. I realized that by passing up on upgrading my machine every 12 months and buying all of the cds and movies I wanted, instead eating in more than going out, and driving an older car I could live quite well working only part time.
Extend and escape. You'll still work part-time for the rest of your life.
I've discovered the same thing, except that as long as times are good (and after a few jumps, I've been lucky enough to land in a pretty fucking nice niche in this here economy of ours:), stick around and make hay while the sun shines.
In 10 years, my skills will be obsolete. 15 if I really push at keeping up with my industry. Then I become unemployable.
But after about 10 years of work and living "beneath my means" (like you - limited system upgrades, drive the car until it falls apart, etc), I've accumulated about 5-10 years of savings. Good investments (yes, even during the bear market, one can make money) have added about two or three more years to that.
In short, if a girder fell on my head, nuking the part of my brain that I use for work, I could pull the plug on my job today and last a good 10 years, with no change in lifestyle, on what I've accumulated.
By the time my skills are well and truly obsolete, that figure will be "the rest of my probable lifespan".
And since I'm not in the game to rack up the highest score (Bill, for all his evil, has already done that. Larry was the only guy who could have come close, but the dot-com fiasco took Oracle down to the point that the best use of his capital is buying his competitors out of the market;), it'll be time to sit back, crack open a cold one, and figure out what to do with half a lifetime of freedom.
> Living on less is far more rewarding the getting caught up in life as a consumer where the only dominant more or social value is work more to buy more.
As you say - work is where you trade your time for money. Opting out is much easier when you trade that money back for time.
(We're doing the same thing - the only fundamental difference is that you're doing it a few hours a day, and I'm gambling that I won't get hit by a bus before I cash in a two-decade time card. To the reader - whichever option is "better" is up to you to figure out. IMO there's no right answer to this one; I'm just tossing out an alternative version of the same strategy.)
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
> The repubs - with passive acquiescence from the dems, I'm sorry to say - have been trying to feudalize society for years. Sometimes through legislation, sometimes through more subtle changes in rules and procedures, but always to the same end. That's why they like to keep their working-class constituency (!) drunk on other things, like religion (as always), war, flag-burning (!!), xenophobia, and the petty advantages that some other working stiff is getting.
Grok, but I'd hardly call the Dems' tactics passive acquiescence.
The Dem base is equally drunk on a religion (albeit one of social engineering - witness phrases like "diversity" and "fairness" being waved around in much the same way as 'pubs use "God" or "family"), war (class war), flag-burning (well, only to piss off Republicans;), xenophobia (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan do a great job of keeping 15% of the population drunk on race war, who then vote Dem, even though there is no, and never will be, a Dem equivalent to Condi Rice or Colin Powell - Condi for VP in '04 and Prez in '08. Hilary vs. Condi grudge match!:), and the petty advantages that some other working stiff is getting.
Anyways, back on track, I'm just saying get used to serfdom. It's not that bad. The Lords demand tribute, we pay tribute, and for the most part, if we keep our fucking mouths shut and fill out the forms when they tell us to, they leave us alone.
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
> and if you want to give a kickback then call it a kickback, not a "Tax Cut"
Yeah! Like the "Earned" Income Tax Credit! If you're poor enough not to pay taxes, you now get a refund on tax you never paid, on money you never earned! It's not welfare, it's a tax cut! Woohoo!
> [ poster's.sig ] Re-Appoint Bush! [gwbush.com] 4 More Wars!
Oh, wait, were you referring some other tax cut?:-)
> "explosions and skin" -- you say that like it's a bad thing. Seriously, is there anything anyone needs to know about Charlie's Angels besides explosions & skin?
For that matter, is there anything we want to know about the T3 movie other than explosions and hot robot skin?:)
> So why Mercury? Especially considering the difference between the hottest daytime temps and the coldest night temps... > > This has me on curiosity alone.
I think you just answered your own question: Curiosity alone.
Off the top of my head, the insane spread between day/night temperatures would probably allow us to learn a lot about Mercury's composition by watching the rocks cool.
I'd imagine they can also learn a lot about the sun during the approach and insertion/landing phase.
Not do diss astrobiologists, but hey, there's more to space science than astrobiology.
For instance, if I could break any law of physics I wanted to, I'd take a vacation to admire the view from any planet (not that any planets are likely to have remained in orbit!) around this star... as it dives to within 17 light-hours of a 2.6-million-solar-mass black hole at 2.5% of the speed of light?
> Why click in the URL bar anyway? Just hit CTRL-L and type away, since you're going to use the keyboard anyway.
1) Surf to some.fuckedupsite
2) Click on a product or article link: http://some.fuckedupsite/show.pl?foo=bar&baz=bat&p roduct=widget&page=1
Often, I want to do one of the following:
3.a) Crap! This is a 7-page article! I want the "one page version" with less banners that I can read with one slow drag on the mousewheel, but the link to "print me" is a Javashite function that says "printarticle.pl?...samestuff". So gimme the printable version already, even if I'm too lazy to enable Javascript!
3.b) I'm in a hurry and want to get to the analysis and conclusions on "page=7" without forward-clicking through pages 2 through 6 which are just gonna be 2 lines of text and 20 screenshots of benchmarks each. (Doofus webmaster didn't put a drop-down menu - just forward/back buttons - so even with Javascript on, I'm screwed without the ability to modify a portion of the URL)
3.c) I want to go to "product=wodgit", because I just realized I don't want a new widget, I want a wodgit! (Particularly handy if we're talking stock charts - just change the stock symbol in the URL that points to the 8K.GIF of the stock chart, rather than realoading 100K of HTML forms!)
So I...
4) Mouse up to the location bar, and then...
I want to:
5.a) Click before the word "show", drag over the next four characters, selecting them, and type "printarticle" to overwrite them with what I hope will be the URL to the script that generates the printable version
5.b) Go to page 7: Click between "=" and "1", drag the mouse over the "1", selecting the "1", which I overwrite by and typing "7", then hit ENTER.
5.c) Click between "w" and "i" in "product=widget", drag over the next four characters, and type "odgi", and hit ENTER to get the same product page for "wodgit", without having to jump through half a dozen "Hi, are you a small business consumer, or a home consumer?(Click...wait) Are you in the US or Europe? (Click...wait) Now that you've jumped through our marketing department's hoops, were you interested in learning about Widgets or Wodgits? (Click, finally!)" hoops that some e-commerce wannabe got paid to annoy his customers with.
I'm sure there are other cases where manually editing mouse-selected portions of the URL bar are useful, but those are the ones that come to mind most readily.
To summarize:
Single-clicking the URL bar should display a cursor *in* the URL bar at the place where the click took place.
To enable drag-select operations like those outlined above, the cursor must appear in the URL bar on mouse-button-down, not on mouse-button-release.
Double-clicking the URL bar should select the entire URL so that the user may type a brand new URL overtop of the current one. (e.g. "I'm done with fuckedupsite, gimme Slashdot", as if we didn't already have Slashdot as our home page:)
>today's high-end business software is bloated, buggy, and too expensive - no surprise to those of us who have paid our bills by adding pointless features to some piece of software arbitrarily priced at $100k. Evidently, firms are now re-evaluating their software purchases, and finding that they're not working out the way the sales guys told them they
would."
There's an old saying in the automobile and housing markets - if you have to ask how much it costs, you probably can't afford it.
I think the same applies to software - if you can't find out, on the website, how much it costs - that is, if you have to deal with a salesweasel, not just to buy the damn thing, but just to find out how much it's gonna cost to buy the damn thing, you can't afford it.
Honestly, how many of you would buy a game for your PC if the price was listed as "Contact Your MegaGalacticGames Sales Rep for pricing." (Whereupon your MGGSR will promptly ask you what kind of car you drive, and charge you $49.99 plus $10/month if you drive a Ford, and $69.99 plus $12.99 a month if you drive a Boxster.) And in either case, you're going to be calling him back next week to find out how much the map editor and the multiplayer option costs. (The answer, of course, is that the add-on cost depends on whether you use a Bic pen or a Montblanc when you signed the check for the initial purchase.)
If you make purchasing decisions for your own company, don't you have an ethical obligation to handle your employer's money with the same sort of care you would your own? If you wouldn't trust a company like MGGSR with your $49.99 gaming dollar, why should you trust them with $499,999 of your boss' money?
Personally, I take the old rule one step further.
If I have to ask how much a piece of software costs (because the vendor gives me no other way to find out, short of calling his salesweasels) not only can I probably not afford it, but odds are pretty good the software isn't worth it, even if I could afford it.
Whoah Tackhead, it wasn't a troll. > Part of my post was to point out that the FBI's priorities are screwed up, and part was to float a reminder about Charter's interesting security issue. The proxies I spoke of aren't open SMTP relays being run by clueless subscribers (though that's a problem too) but rather hijacked DNS servers.
Grok. On both points - Charter's negligence on the DNS-hijacking is even worse than their open proxy negligence.
My point wasn't to accuse you of trolling; it was that it would be wonderful to live in a world where the FBI's priorities weren't so screwed up, and the price of us both being modded as Trolls is one I'd be happy to bear:)
Sadly, the FBI's priorities (and residential broadband service providers' security practices) are indeed that screwed up, and as such, no matter how hard anybody flames them for being a bunch of mindless jerks who deserve to be first against the router racks when the DDOS attack comes, said flames are more likely to be moderated (+1, Informative) than (-1, OK, they suck, but not that hard, man! You must be trolling).
Kinda like the old joke - how can you tell your sysadmin has a real Verisign rep on the phone? You can hear your sysadmin screaming "you bunch of useless cocksuckers!" from ten cubicles away, not the usual five.
Re:It's TRUE !!!!
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 0, Redundant
> It may be a great computer, but Jobs has lost his fucking mind.
> So I say to all you ass-raping monkey shit eaters who drive in the car pool lane because you have to
move your land yacht faster, go fuck yourself!
> > Take a fucking bus!
Dude, plenty of us are trying, but the largest vehicle we can afford is a Hummer H2!
Slashdot Mirror
$ ./run-mozilla.sh ./mozilla-bin: fatal: relocation error: file ./mozilla-bin: symbol gtk_set_locale: referenced symbol not found
ld.so.1:
Really? Solaris?
Not yet. (Yeah, it's the goddamn GTK libraries, and which compiler they were built with this week. And which things you'll break if you replace 'em. And where the hell do you get 'em?)
Rant: Mozilla binary tarballs for Solaris 2.6/7/8 should just include a copy of the libraries as part of the bundle, compiled under whatever compiler works with the frickin' Mozilla binary. It's a binary, the whole point is so that you don't have to compile jack shit. Diskspace is cheap. The sysadmin's few remaining strands of hair are not.
This has only been an outstanding issue against Mozilla binaries for... what, three years now?
Yeah, give Cryptonomicon a chance. After two or three novels, he's gotten to the point where he can end a novel in about 4-5 pages, rather than just a paragraph or two.
I'm a Stephenson fan, and Snow Crash is among my favorite reads, but I do feel your pain. It's as if the ending of most of his books is cut off in mid-
Look, who cares about all that crap, what's important is have you fixed the damn bug or not?!?!?!? :)
I dunno, I happen to think a fairy circling Uranus is pretty freakin' funny.
But since you bring up Shakespeare, so was Oberon the Fourth Moon, and since we've already got the King of the Fairies circling Uranus, what do you have against Puck? Really, what's one more fairy between friends?
(Now, a fairy circling my anus isn't funny at all, no sirree!)
Check it out. It aired in April of '02, was probably the best thing I saw on TV that year.
And yeah, it presents a pretty balanced view of both the "pro" and "con" aspects of globalized trade. The case studies of Argentina, Bolivia, Poland, former USSR, China, Japan, India, and of course, the US and UK, are the most in-depth I've ever seen on television.
There's also a book, which is also fantastic. (The TV series was based on the book, not the other way 'round, which is probably why the TV series works so well.)
Have you ever flown on a commercial airliner?
If so, why?
Hint: If Boeing (or Airbus, or whoever) didn't care about passenger safety, airliners wouldn't buy those aircraft. Airlines flying unsafe aircraft would rapidly go out of business, because passengers would choose to travel on competing airlines.
If I could spend $1M to ride on the first test flight of Burt Rutan's first fully-orbital vehicle, versus $20M to ride on a NASA "We spend more on 'safety' before 6:00 am than Burt Rutan's spent in his life" Space Shuttle, I'd strap in with Burt in a heartbeat.
(Of course, I want to go to space badly enough I'd take either flight, but hey, this is Slashdot, I can dream ;)
Hedge by purchasing gold, gold miners, or inflation-indexed bonds. And if you don't buy into the "gold will rule the world" scenario (and I don't :-), but you're still bearish on the greenback, buy ADRs of stocks in countries whose currencies you are bullish on.
> (Personally, I'm banking on traditional wealth not meaning much as we accelerate toward the technological Singularity over the next few decades.)
I'm not. But it'd be way cool if it we do. I like money, but only for the shiny toys and yummy food I can buy with it; I don't have any need for power. So if I could build my toys and food out of virtual reality, I'd also be happier than the proverbial pig in shit, or a brain in information, whichever metaphor is more appropriate ;)
You and me both, brother. But thanks for reminding me about the Scorched Earthers. Now that's my kind of political pipe dreamin' :)
So is SS a retirement plan or is it welfare? :)
Personally, I don't much care, because I don't expect to see a cent back on the taxes I've paid into it either way. The SSA is even kind enough to jab me in the side every year with a reminder of how much they've taken on "my" behalf and how much I "might, but we're not promising anything" get back, someday, if the Moon in the Ascending House of Gore.
If SS truly is welfare - in that only the middle class pays in, and only the lower class collects - then Congress should have the brass ones to admit it.
>
> The etc includes characters like "The reluctant hero", "The genius", "The member of a big family who feels overshadowed by siblings", "The elder", "The prankster", "The black sheep", "The fool who seeks status", "The bigot", "The victim of bigotry", "The power seeker" and so on.
Ahem: You've both forgotten something something:
BOTH of you owe Jeff Bezos a quadrillion dollars.
>
> they hold a gun to your head for welfare for medicaid for tax breaks for the already stinking rich etc etc
Right, and that is teh sux0r.
> How do you think America go to be where it is today? where do you suppose all of the things that allow for our quality of life comes from? that's right they come from other countries, so while you enjoy the availability (not that you necessarily have the means to buy them) of everything from cheap clothes to cheap food to cheap toys remember that almost all of that comes from countries where the people who make them are living well below your standard...
>
> everything costs something at the expense of others,
With the exception of Chinese prison labor, those things do not come at the "expense" of others.
The people who make your Nikes for $5/d do not have guns to their heads. They line up outside of the factory, because working in the fields and villages pays $0.50/d. They work in the factories instead of the farms for the same reason you work in a cubicle instead of a factory - because in their economy, that's where the money is.
(All the more ironic, then, that Russia has a flat tax, a lower tax, and a simpler tax system than the US of A - and gee, whose economy is growing by leaps and bounds these days? We showed them that capitalism was a better system than central planning, so they adopted capitalism at precisely the time when we've finally rejected it. To answer another Slashdot thread, now that's irony! :-)
I'd strongly encourage you to watch the fantastic PBS documentary Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. It's probably airing on your local PBS affiliate this week.
(Worth seeing, if for no other reason than that it makes macroeconomics seem fascinating, at least for the six hours the series lasts :)
If you do nothing else, at least glance over this Washington Post review of the series.
The episode on the reform of India (Episode 3, I believe) should also prove useful. But I don't want to give any spoilers ;)
Show me a Linux replacement for Adobe FrameMaker (or better yet, a port), and I'm there. Even at $599.40 or whatever Adobe's charging this week.
The original article was written from the point of view of a technical writer. IMO, any technical writer using MSTurd for documents over 100 pages in length needs to have his head examined. (Fuckin' Windows print drivers that won't print the same Word document the same way on two computers, meantime the FrameMaker d00dz are happily writing stuff in Frame on their Windoze laptops, then checking the files in to the source code control system at work, where they resume working on them from their Solaris and Windoze and Mac desktop boxen.)
I think FrameMaker's market share at the midrange of tech writers is pretty high, and for good reason. If you want to go beyond FrameMaker, you're talking even more money - Documentum-class document management systems, single sourcing from a big pile of XML into PDF, hardcopy, or HTML - but Linux ain't even in contention here.
It's sorta like Photoshop vs. The Gimp. The Gimp's great for Joe Tuxpack's vacation photos, but if you're doing color separations for inks that are requires to print on a billboard, and you wanna be damn sure it's the shade of puce that your Marketing department wast^H^H^H^Hpaid half a million bucks in researching, sorry kids, break out the Photoshop.
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>I thought the whole point to life was to get rich quick. Shouldn't they be legislators, lawyers, and entrepreneurs? I wonder how the average scientist, researcher and explorer are doing in today's world.
"Legislators, laywers and entrepreneurs"? One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong.
Entrepreneurs get rich slowly, and they do so by providing something new/innovative that others purchase freely.
Legislators and lawyers get rich quickly, because they produce nothing - they merely compel others to forfeit production.
Space, frankly, could use a few entrepreneurs. The legislators and lawyers (read: Congress and bureaucrats) that run NASA sure as hell ain't gonna get you or your children into space in their lifetimes.
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> (Probe on Mars)... "Gravity 0.4G , air pressure 15 millbar, temperature -14 deg C, solar radiation 22.5W/m2... (scans a rock) that rock over there.. it's a form of basalt, size 45x40x15cm, composition 45%Si 23%Al 14%Fe 5%Ca, and here's a picture for posterity."
Mission Control: "What's under that big rock over there? What's inside the rock with the cracks running through it? And what's up with those outflow-looking things Surveyor saw on crater rims?"
Man on Mars: [Picks up rock, smashes it against second rock, throws chunk into basket, walks a few feet down the edge of a crater, uses other chunk of rock to dig through the surface material near the crater wall outflow, jumps out of way as gush of water surges out and boils off en route to the crater floor.]
"Nothin' in the rocks but there's some weird green shit in the shadows underneath 'em, more weird green shit deep in the cracks of the rock, and I guess we know the outflows ain't CO2, 'cuz there's even more of the green shit in the water I just found!"
Probe on Mars: [Sits still.] "WTF d00d? Do what?! Do it where!?"
If the business plan is fundamentally flawed, no amount of above-and-beyond effort will save the company. Take what you can, punch out, try again.
Eventually, you'll land at a company whose business model isn't fundamentally flawed, and where you still get most, if not all, of the perks of the fuckedcompany.com bait.
> Work/jobs basically are an agreement where you trade your time for money. I realized that by passing up on upgrading my machine every 12 months and buying all of the cds and movies I wanted, instead eating in more than going out, and driving an older car I could live quite well working only part time.
Extend and escape. You'll still work part-time for the rest of your life.
I've discovered the same thing, except that as long as times are good (and after a few jumps, I've been lucky enough to land in a pretty fucking nice niche in this here economy of ours :), stick around and make hay while the sun shines.
In 10 years, my skills will be obsolete. 15 if I really push at keeping up with my industry. Then I become unemployable.
But after about 10 years of work and living "beneath my means" (like you - limited system upgrades, drive the car until it falls apart, etc), I've accumulated about 5-10 years of savings. Good investments (yes, even during the bear market, one can make money) have added about two or three more years to that.
In short, if a girder fell on my head, nuking the part of my brain that I use for work, I could pull the plug on my job today and last a good 10 years, with no change in lifestyle, on what I've accumulated.
By the time my skills are well and truly obsolete, that figure will be "the rest of my probable lifespan".
And since I'm not in the game to rack up the highest score (Bill, for all his evil, has already done that. Larry was the only guy who could have come close, but the dot-com fiasco took Oracle down to the point that the best use of his capital is buying his competitors out of the market ;), it'll be time to sit back, crack open a cold one, and figure out what to do with half a lifetime of freedom.
> Living on less is far more rewarding the getting caught up in life as a consumer where the only dominant more or social value is work more to buy more.
As you say - work is where you trade your time for money. Opting out is much easier when you trade that money back for time.
(We're doing the same thing - the only fundamental difference is that you're doing it a few hours a day, and I'm gambling that I won't get hit by a bus before I cash in a two-decade time card. To the reader - whichever option is "better" is up to you to figure out. IMO there's no right answer to this one; I'm just tossing out an alternative version of the same strategy.)
Grok, but I'd hardly call the Dems' tactics passive acquiescence.
The Dem base is equally drunk on a religion (albeit one of social engineering - witness phrases like "diversity" and "fairness" being waved around in much the same way as 'pubs use "God" or "family"), war (class war), flag-burning (well, only to piss off Republicans ;), xenophobia (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan do a great job of keeping 15% of the population drunk on race war, who then vote Dem, even though there is no, and never will be, a Dem equivalent to Condi Rice or Colin Powell - Condi for VP in '04 and Prez in '08. Hilary vs. Condi grudge match! :), and the petty advantages that some other working stiff is getting.
Anyways, back on track, I'm just saying get used to serfdom. It's not that bad. The Lords demand tribute, we pay tribute, and for the most part, if we keep our fucking mouths shut and fill out the forms when they tell us to, they leave us alone.
Yeah! Like the "Earned" Income Tax Credit! If you're poor enough not to pay taxes, you now get a refund on tax you never paid, on money you never earned! It's not welfare, it's a tax cut! Woohoo!
> [ poster's .sig ] Re-Appoint Bush! [gwbush.com] 4 More Wars!
Oh, wait, were you referring some other tax cut? :-)
For that matter, is there anything we want to know about the T3 movie other than explosions and hot robot skin? :)
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> This has me on curiosity alone.
I think you just answered your own question: Curiosity alone.
Off the top of my head, the insane spread between day/night temperatures would probably allow us to learn a lot about Mercury's composition by watching the rocks cool.
I'd imagine they can also learn a lot about the sun during the approach and insertion/landing phase.
Not do diss astrobiologists, but hey, there's more to space science than astrobiology.
For instance, if I could break any law of physics I wanted to, I'd take a vacation to admire the view from any planet (not that any planets are likely to have remained in orbit!) around this star... as it dives to within 17 light-hours of a 2.6-million-solar-mass black hole at 2.5% of the speed of light?
WTF? I thought the Army had a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. How'd that guy with the Lisp get in?
(Sorry, really bad Lisp joke. I'm an incorrigible punster; you shouldn't incorrige me like that. OK, OK, I'll shut up and go away now :)
1) Surf to some.fuckedupsitep roduct=widget&page=1
2) Click on a product or article link: http://some.fuckedupsite/show.pl?foo=bar&baz=bat&
Often, I want to do one of the following:
3.a) Crap! This is a 7-page article! I want the "one page version" with less banners that I can read with one slow drag on the mousewheel, but the link to "print me" is a Javashite function that says "printarticle.pl?...samestuff". So gimme the printable version already, even if I'm too lazy to enable Javascript!
3.b) I'm in a hurry and want to get to the analysis and conclusions on "page=7" without forward-clicking through pages 2 through 6 which are just gonna be 2 lines of text and 20 screenshots of benchmarks each. (Doofus webmaster didn't put a drop-down menu - just forward/back buttons - so even with Javascript on, I'm screwed without the ability to modify a portion of the URL)
3.c) I want to go to "product=wodgit", because I just realized I don't want a new widget, I want a wodgit! (Particularly handy if we're talking stock charts - just change the stock symbol in the URL that points to the 8K .GIF of the stock chart, rather than realoading 100K of HTML forms!)
So I...
4) Mouse up to the location bar, and then...
I want to:
5.a) Click before the word "show", drag over the next four characters, selecting them, and type "printarticle" to overwrite them with what I hope will be the URL to the script that generates the printable version
5.b) Go to page 7: Click between "=" and "1", drag the mouse over the "1", selecting the "1", which I overwrite by and typing "7", then hit ENTER.
5.c) Click between "w" and "i" in "product=widget", drag over the next four characters, and type "odgi", and hit ENTER to get the same product page for "wodgit", without having to jump through half a dozen "Hi, are you a small business consumer, or a home consumer?(Click...wait) Are you in the US or Europe? (Click...wait) Now that you've jumped through our marketing department's hoops, were you interested in learning about Widgets or Wodgits? (Click, finally!)" hoops that some e-commerce wannabe got paid to annoy his customers with.
I'm sure there are other cases where manually editing mouse-selected portions of the URL bar are useful, but those are the ones that come to mind most readily.
To summarize:
Single-clicking the URL bar should display a cursor *in* the URL bar at the place where the click took place.
To enable drag-select operations like those outlined above, the cursor must appear in the URL bar on mouse-button-down, not on mouse-button-release.
Double-clicking the URL bar should select the entire URL so that the user may type a brand new URL overtop of the current one. (e.g. "I'm done with fuckedupsite, gimme Slashdot", as if we didn't already have Slashdot as our home page :)
There's an old saying in the automobile and housing markets - if you have to ask how much it costs, you probably can't afford it.
I think the same applies to software - if you can't find out, on the website, how much it costs - that is, if you have to deal with a salesweasel, not just to buy the damn thing, but just to find out how much it's gonna cost to buy the damn thing, you can't afford it.
Honestly, how many of you would buy a game for your PC if the price was listed as "Contact Your MegaGalacticGames Sales Rep for pricing." (Whereupon your MGGSR will promptly ask you what kind of car you drive, and charge you $49.99 plus $10/month if you drive a Ford, and $69.99 plus $12.99 a month if you drive a Boxster.) And in either case, you're going to be calling him back next week to find out how much the map editor and the multiplayer option costs. (The answer, of course, is that the add-on cost depends on whether you use a Bic pen or a Montblanc when you signed the check for the initial purchase.)
If you make purchasing decisions for your own company, don't you have an ethical obligation to handle your employer's money with the same sort of care you would your own? If you wouldn't trust a company like MGGSR with your $49.99 gaming dollar, why should you trust them with $499,999 of your boss' money?
Personally, I take the old rule one step further.
If I have to ask how much a piece of software costs (because the vendor gives me no other way to find out, short of calling his salesweasels) not only can I probably not afford it, but odds are pretty good the software isn't worth it, even if I could afford it.
Grok. On both points - Charter's negligence on the DNS-hijacking is even worse than their open proxy negligence.
My point wasn't to accuse you of trolling; it was that it would be wonderful to live in a world where the FBI's priorities weren't so screwed up, and the price of us both being modded as Trolls is one I'd be happy to bear :)
Sadly, the FBI's priorities (and residential broadband service providers' security practices) are indeed that screwed up, and as such, no matter how hard anybody flames them for being a bunch of mindless jerks who deserve to be first against the router racks when the DDOS attack comes, said flames are more likely to be moderated (+1, Informative) than (-1, OK, they suck, but not that hard, man! You must be trolling).
Kinda like the old joke - how can you tell your sysadmin has a real Verisign rep on the phone? You can hear your sysadmin screaming "you bunch of useless cocksuckers!" from ten cubicles away, not the usual five.
(1, Redundant). Twice. :)
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> Take a fucking bus!
Dude, plenty of us are trying, but the largest vehicle we can afford is a Hummer H2!