I missed the ad notation, and I was skimming for exactly something like that, which I expected to be on each entry. The idea is that users are used to filtering out tons of crap on the page, and neatly filter out the "FEATURED SITES" heading.
I don't think we need to worry about being misleading so much as the fact that MSN is simply less useful than google for exactly this reason. Google's ads are clearly marked and it's obvious where the regular listings are, which aren't very far down the page. This isn't the case for MSN.
I'm not so worried about Sun being a nice player. They've contributed some to GNOME development already.
The idea is to let Sun do the not-so-fun-but-profitable work of pulling people over to GNOME from Windows. Sun goes after Microsoft, and we get to keep making fun software.
A lot of the folks Sun's after aren't coders. There's lots of good software for coders out there, because OSS people like writing stuff that they can actually use themselves. Sun likes making money, so Sun does their thing.
I wish Sun had more of a Linux movement, but I suppose Solaris and BSD are really the only things out there that can compete with Linux and more, and Sun wants to keep their sunk investment in place.
First, we tend to focus on the flaws in Windows. Windows contains a lot of good ideas (which originated at many companies over many years...Apple, for instance, is a major contributor). Just because it isn't as good as it could be and isn't improving doesn't mean that it doesn't have value.
Second of all, many of the flaws in Windows are not UI-related. Windows has stupid file locking semantics...but that doesn't affect how you double click on an icon.
Third, even if Windows is a nonoptimal way to operate, many, many people know how to use Windows and Windows software. They're familiar with Windows interface conventions, and anything different from Windows will face an immediate barrier. Once folks are on Linux, we can continue working on making the environment better.
Fourth, many of the things that suck about Windows only affect folks that are writing software or do lots of network work. So Windows may be a poor OS choice for a typical Slashdot user, but that doesn't mean that its flaws are a big issue for a typical office user, which is who Sun is targetting.
Actually, I *still* haven't gotten over some genres that I think are fun but aren't produced much any more. Top-down shooters (1942ish ones) are fun, but not very common these days.
Most of people that are complaining about a lack of original content are the extremely hard-core gamers and the reviewers. Why? Because they've played everything out there. They find more of the same boring.
For the overwhelming majority of the population, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a game that adds nothing new to the genre. Nobody has time to keep up with the vast flood of game content being produced. If an idea's been done twenty times before and *you haven't played those*, why would you care?
So...say Warcraft III comes out. Well, the game reviewers have played a ton of games like this one. They've played the earlier games in the series. They know exactly what's going to happen in it. Sure enough, they're bored. The typical game player *hasn't* played all these. He sits down and decides that he likes the game and plays it.
Furthermore, there's a big dislike from many reviewers over clones of popular games. Why? Because they just *played* a flood of similar games. They end up writing reviews like "this is yet another unoriginal entry in the RTS field". The game may well be excellent, but it doesn't matter to them.
It's just a sign of the vast disconnect between game reviewers and almost all game players.
Shocking as this may be to you, some folks actually oppose marijuana legalization. I tend to support freedoms as much as possible, simply on the ground that limiting freedoms has difficult-to-measure and eventually economically expensive precedent-setting power. I really don't give a damn about freedom from an ideological perspective (though that can be a useful perspective). You want, very much, to prevent folks from limiting freedoms in ways that will hurt society, and a good way to do that is to simply prevent them from limiting freedoms at all, except in cases where there obviously isn't an option (jailing murderers is pretty much a given -- I doubt many people would want to live in a country where anyone could kill).
However, I really dislike marijuana. First, it's a form of entertainment. Entertainment is essentially a form of flushing economic power down the toilet. You consume the time spent on entertainment as well as the resources used to produce it. That's not a big deal -- we have plenty of forms of entertainment that are present, and certainly nobody wants to live a life without entertainment. It is, though, a negative in my mind. Second, marijuana, like (legal) smoked tobacco, produces negative network effects -- secondhand smoke affects even those who don't wish to use the product. Third, and the most damning in my eyes, is that the economic cost of THC (as in legal alcohol and other non-legal drugs) is both hidden and long-term. It's difficult for someone to weigh how much marijuana they're going to smoke when they start, and exactly how much impact in life it's going to have on them. If you're throwing quarters into an arcade machine, it's pretty easy to calculate the cost in time and quarters. Furthermore, the cost is bounded -- how many quarters you have at the moment. Marijuana poses the issues of long-term neurological damage (a la alcohol) and long-term cancer problems (a la tobacco).
Had we known of the massive cost to society tobacco would have had today, it's doubtful that we would have allowed it. In marijuana's case, we have the potential to avoid a severely damaging influence before it becomes entrenched.
I don't have any particular problems with the death penalty. The United States has an extremely exhaustive death penalty investigation system. In most countries with death penalties, a ten year period before being executed would hardly be considered acceptable. People being executed are those who have been deemed unrehabilatable. They would be spending life in prison otherwise, even in those European nations that you'd presumably consider more enlightened.
For similar reasons to those I gave for marijuana, I support at least the general concept of the War on Drugs, though I will admit that constant reexamination of the campaign is definitely necessary. Like other projects with large amounts of funding, there have certainly been abuses at points in the past.
Finally, I view NAFTA as essentially an eventual necessity. Eliminating free trade, and once again encumber exports and imports, subidizes failing US industries at the expense of more healthy ones. This was acceptable two hundred years ago when good transportation was cheaper. The world market was less internationally competitive. A successful industry could have funds sucked off of it since it had next to a local monopoly. However, that flexibility is no longer present. Unpleasant as it is, failing industries simply have to be let die. If the US steel industry is no longer competitive...then it must go away. Keeping it on life support for another twenty years and hurting other industries, when it's unlikely that the industry will recover, is of dubious value.
I'm in Pittsburgh, PA, and as of 6:17 PM EST, I can not reach cnn.com. Traceroutes die in a NY domain router. I was able to reach cnn.com up until at least 6:00 PM EST.
They'd be trying to kill us no matter what we did. If we withdrew from the Middle East they'd hate us for our cultural influence.
That's ridiculous. The French are probably the single nation most upset with our cultural influence . The French government constantly works to preserve French cultural purity. (Particularly annoying to me is their renaming of universal tech terms to better fit with their language.) The French are not suicide-bombing us.
You're right, that a withdrawal from Iraq wouldn't immediately stop anything. You have to work through another sixty years or so of hate, as the boys whose civilian parents you blew up with a bomb grow up and die, and their deep hatred of the US goes away.
But just because an impact takes sixty years to come to fruitition is no reason to exacerbate the problem and allow everything to be worse sixty *more* years down the road.
I certainly agree with the parent poster. The US *has* taken a high-handed approach, and *has* been able to convince its own citizens to ignore many of its own excesses and abuses.
What I get from this post is that you're upset at being presented with the fact that *you* may also be guilty of helping along the same killing of civilians that you find distasteful, and would be happier having it not brought up. You find it easier, more comfortable, to avoid it that way.
b) If you are going to maintain that one should not consider the morality of a technical device in 'every discussion', it is incumbant upon you to mention in what discussions such a consideration should take place. If it can't take place on slashdot, a - for better or for worse - bastion of strongly held beliefs and free expression, then where/when can it take place?
First, I disagree that there is any onus placed upon me to provide a precise definition. If I say "You shouldn't drink every night," I certainly am not required to also then tell you what nights you *should* drink on. In addition, I didn't say anything about a discussion on Slashdot. If you take a look at the post that I was responding to, the poster was saying that the article author should have been considering the consequences. Scientists, not Slashdotters. I was arguing that point, not anything regarding Slashdot posting. I certainly don't have a problem with Slashdot arguing about the morality of weaponry -- only them saying that the engineers working on the weaponry should be doing the same whenever discussing that weaponry.
Consider, when you've finished replying, how history may have been different if the scientists who worked on the original atom bomb projects (in the US and Nazi Germany) had to consider the morality of their work in every discussion.
Well...I'd suspect that whether or not the Nazi scientists eventually decided not to complete their work would probably have had little impact.
The folks on the Manhattan Project...well, let's see. Japan still probably would have surrendered, possibly with some more loss on the US side. There probably would have been more miltary and less civilian deaths. Judging from how Berlin was treated by even US and British forces, there probably would have been looting, etc of civilians as the US occupied an enemy homeland, so more widespread, though less intense property damage. Perhaps the US would have suffered more losses. If the Japanese still surrendered at the same time, the US probably would have had less of a bargaining chip in splitting up island chains around Japan, and the post-war USSR would play a greater role in the area. Knowledge of nuclear power didn't come in time to sway the war in the west. There probably would have been major power differences after the war. If the Soviets made nuclear power and the United States didn't, probably the United States would be less influentially globally. If nobody did, there would be less push to avoid conventional war. The USSR and the United States might have started a conventional war eventually.
I don't quite see what the point of your argument is. Am I expected to change my viewpoint based on this?
Most likely, though, I will use Mac OS X for my 922 development. I'd prefer using Linux to Windows, but if I can use Mac OS X, I'd prefer that to Linux, if for no other reason than the fact that the clipboard works correctly, as well as that I could use CodeWarrior to edit my source.
You'd like the clipboard to work correctly? The issues with one-program-can't-copy-to-another are gone -- I haven't run into one for years. The old days, where Qt 2.x and below broke the X clipboard rules (and caused all kinds of mayhem) are also gone. Qt 3 has been out for ages, and uses the clipboard in the same way that all the other X11 software out there does. If you use Control-C and Control-V to do your copying and pasting, you get operating just as you do on the MacOS, and if you use a multi-clipboard program (klipper is pretty standard on KDE...I don't believe there's an equivalent included in GNOME, though there are a couple of WindowMaker-dock style programs) you don't lose clipboard contents when the original source program closes.
As for using CodeWarrior to do your embedded development, let me introduce you to Linux Solutions@Metrowerks.
Actually, I think it'd be damn cool if HTML had a sarcasm tag. It has an emphasis tag already, and sarcasm has traditionally been more difficult to get across in the printed word than verbally (since one relies on intonation).
Okay, a lot of pro-Linux studies have their own problems (frankly, I don't put much stock in "studies" any more, especially vendor-funded ones).
However, the numbers this one used are *ridiculous*. Total Cost of Development?
Okay, let's see. Of the parties surveyed, cancelled Linux projects cost more than CE projects. This Jerry guy (he's got a PhD, so he must just be dishonest, not stupid) then uses this as a basis to claim that Linux is more expensive than CE. He's got to be kidding me.
By the same metric, all C++ software should be replaced by bash equivalents. Why? Because the average cost of a bash-based project is much, much smaller than the average cost of a C++ project. Of course, there's the little additional detail that the sort of projects one uses bash on are much, much smaller and simpler. That is, of course, the factor that makes the huge difference. However, you can conveniently ignore that tidbit.
Somebody tried to do the same study with Windows and some Sun servers back in the day to show that Windows made a far cheaper server. Well...yes, but most of the servers being used to average out Windows cost in the study were small, departmental servers that nobody was spending much on. The Sun servers were the far more powerful and capable systems for things like eBay's back end that had technicians swarming all over 'em. Sure enough, the Windows boxes had a lower average maintenance cost.
Average total cost is *totally useless* without some additional constraints so that you're measuring average cost of *similar projects*. If you took all PVRs with roughly equivalent feature sets and examined cost based on embedded OS, *then* you might have a useful study. The current one is totally useless other than for FUD use.
You want a LUG to get on their ass? Are you *daft*?
Let's see what they're doing. They're making it easier to use Linux than to use Windows (solves complaint (a) of Linux folks, that Windows is "preinstalled" everywhere so people use it instead). So there is a chance that the person will end up using Linux. Suppose that person chooses to install Windows instead. There's a reasonable chance it's pirated. Ah hah! Big Bad Microsoft gets shafed on a license fee! That means smaller war chests to attack Linux, their primary competitor, with. We win *again*.
Now, is this as good as it could be? Of course not. But it's a win-win situation for us.
If Linux is really so much better than Windows (and I believe it to be) then it's inevitable that it will push out Windows. It may take a bit, but these folks are helping spread it around. Sic your LUG on someone that just sells machines with Windows installed.
[Note: this is coming from an avid Red Hat user, so this certainly isn't a Gentoo troll].
Red Hat tries to sell up2date service with their distro -- it's one of the few ways they can make money off it. The problem is that up2date utterly sucks. It's slow, flaky, lacks features, and nothing but the stock Red Hat software is available via it. It's the single worst thing in Red Hat. Everyone using RH that's serious about automated download and install uses apt or (better, IMHO) yum. The average person using RH would be much happier using synaptic with a few preset distribution sites and a wide range of software than they would with the existing, rather lame package downloader and small selection of software.
I really hate the fuckers that have something break on them, buy a new one from a retailer (say...a PS2), and then keep the new one and return the broken one in the box. People like that should be casterated. It's a complete and utter pain in the ass for everyone else involved.
You know, I found it vaguely irritating back when people posted full text from somewhere like CNN in the article ("in case the article got slashdotted"). However, the article is dead. It's an entirely legitimate bit of work he did. I don't see the problem with him reaping a bloody three points of karma for doing this, you know?
Irritating as I find the "out of store check", I dislike shoplifting even more. The stores wouldn't do it if it didn't keep down their costs. I'd rather go through such a check than pay a 10% premium on everything, you know?
The real solution would be flogging for shoplifting, but I'm sure that'd never go through. Then I wouldn't hae to do the check *or* pay the premium. Singapore has it knocked.
Scientists are too busy wondering whether it can be done to consider whether it should be done;
This is nothing more than a buzzphrase. Let's look at what you're actually saying -- just that scientists should consider whether weapon manufacture is a good idea. For the sake of discussion, I'll give you that. That's hardly enough to warrent supporting the original poster's statement, which was that one should not be able to have a technical discussion about bombs without also mentioning morality. Considering at some point is quite different from infusing every discussion you've ever had.
2) Lyrics are there to sell songs, not to support arguments. There's nothing there, you know?
Slashdot Mirror
I missed the ad notation, and I was skimming for exactly something like that, which I expected to be on each entry. The idea is that users are used to filtering out tons of crap on the page, and neatly filter out the "FEATURED SITES" heading.
I don't think we need to worry about being misleading so much as the fact that MSN is simply less useful than google for exactly this reason. Google's ads are clearly marked and it's obvious where the regular listings are, which aren't very far down the page. This isn't the case for MSN.
I'm not so worried about Sun being a nice player. They've contributed some to GNOME development already.
The idea is to let Sun do the not-so-fun-but-profitable work of pulling people over to GNOME from Windows. Sun goes after Microsoft, and we get to keep making fun software.
A lot of the folks Sun's after aren't coders. There's lots of good software for coders out there, because OSS people like writing stuff that they can actually use themselves. Sun likes making money, so Sun does their thing.
I wish Sun had more of a Linux movement, but I suppose Solaris and BSD are really the only things out there that can compete with Linux and more, and Sun wants to keep their sunk investment in place.
There are a lot of good reasons.
First, we tend to focus on the flaws in Windows. Windows contains a lot of good ideas (which originated at many companies over many years...Apple, for instance, is a major contributor). Just because it isn't as good as it could be and isn't improving doesn't mean that it doesn't have value.
Second of all, many of the flaws in Windows are not UI-related. Windows has stupid file locking semantics...but that doesn't affect how you double click on an icon.
Third, even if Windows is a nonoptimal way to operate, many, many people know how to use Windows and Windows software. They're familiar with Windows interface conventions, and anything different from Windows will face an immediate barrier. Once folks are on Linux, we can continue working on making the environment better.
Fourth, many of the things that suck about Windows only affect folks that are writing software or do lots of network work. So Windows may be a poor OS choice for a typical Slashdot user, but that doesn't mean that its flaws are a big issue for a typical office user, which is who Sun is targetting.
Actually, I *still* haven't gotten over some genres that I think are fun but aren't produced much any more. Top-down shooters (1942ish ones) are fun, but not very common these days.
Most of people that are complaining about a lack of original content are the extremely hard-core gamers and the reviewers. Why? Because they've played everything out there. They find more of the same boring.
For the overwhelming majority of the population, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a game that adds nothing new to the genre. Nobody has time to keep up with the vast flood of game content being produced. If an idea's been done twenty times before and *you haven't played those*, why would you care?
So...say Warcraft III comes out. Well, the game reviewers have played a ton of games like this one. They've played the earlier games in the series. They know exactly what's going to happen in it. Sure enough, they're bored. The typical game player *hasn't* played all these. He sits down and decides that he likes the game and plays it.
Furthermore, there's a big dislike from many reviewers over clones of popular games. Why? Because they just *played* a flood of similar games. They end up writing reviews like "this is yet another unoriginal entry in the RTS field". The game may well be excellent, but it doesn't matter to them.
It's just a sign of the vast disconnect between game reviewers and almost all game players.
Shocking as this may be to you, some folks actually oppose marijuana legalization. I tend to support freedoms as much as possible, simply on the ground that limiting freedoms has difficult-to-measure and eventually economically expensive precedent-setting power. I really don't give a damn about freedom from an ideological perspective (though that can be a useful perspective). You want, very much, to prevent folks from limiting freedoms in ways that will hurt society, and a good way to do that is to simply prevent them from limiting freedoms at all, except in cases where there obviously isn't an option (jailing murderers is pretty much a given -- I doubt many people would want to live in a country where anyone could kill).
However, I really dislike marijuana. First, it's a form of entertainment. Entertainment is essentially a form of flushing economic power down the toilet. You consume the time spent on entertainment as well as the resources used to produce it. That's not a big deal -- we have plenty of forms of entertainment that are present, and certainly nobody wants to live a life without entertainment. It is, though, a negative in my mind. Second, marijuana, like (legal) smoked tobacco, produces negative network effects -- secondhand smoke affects even those who don't wish to use the product. Third, and the most damning in my eyes, is that the economic cost of THC (as in legal alcohol and other non-legal drugs) is both hidden and long-term. It's difficult for someone to weigh how much marijuana they're going to smoke when they start, and exactly how much impact in life it's going to have on them. If you're throwing quarters into an arcade machine, it's pretty easy to calculate the cost in time and quarters. Furthermore, the cost is bounded -- how many quarters you have at the moment. Marijuana poses the issues of long-term neurological damage (a la alcohol) and long-term cancer problems (a la tobacco).
Had we known of the massive cost to society tobacco would have had today, it's doubtful that we would have allowed it. In marijuana's case, we have the potential to avoid a severely damaging influence before it becomes entrenched.
I don't have any particular problems with the death penalty. The United States has an extremely exhaustive death penalty investigation system. In most countries with death penalties, a ten year period before being executed would hardly be considered acceptable. People being executed are those who have been deemed unrehabilatable. They would be spending life in prison otherwise, even in those European nations that you'd presumably consider more enlightened.
For similar reasons to those I gave for marijuana, I support at least the general concept of the War on Drugs, though I will admit that constant reexamination of the campaign is definitely necessary. Like other projects with large amounts of funding, there have certainly been abuses at points in the past.
Finally, I view NAFTA as essentially an eventual necessity. Eliminating free trade, and once again encumber exports and imports, subidizes failing US industries at the expense of more healthy ones. This was acceptable two hundred years ago when good transportation was cheaper. The world market was less internationally competitive. A successful industry could have funds sucked off of it since it had next to a local monopoly. However, that flexibility is no longer present. Unpleasant as it is, failing industries simply have to be let die. If the US steel industry is no longer competitive...then it must go away. Keeping it on life support for another twenty years and hurting other industries, when it's unlikely that the industry will recover, is of dubious value.
I still can't reach cnn.com from multiple machines in Pittsburgh. I can do so from a machine in West Virginia.
You'll also notice a couple of backbone routers in Michigan and NYC are down, looking at Internet health pages...
I'm in Pittsburgh, PA, and as of 6:17 PM EST, I can not reach cnn.com. Traceroutes die in a NY domain router. I was able to reach cnn.com up until at least 6:00 PM EST.
They'd be trying to kill us no matter what we did. If we withdrew from the Middle East they'd hate us for our cultural influence.
That's ridiculous. The French are probably the single nation most upset with our cultural influence . The French government constantly works to preserve French cultural purity. (Particularly annoying to me is their renaming of universal tech terms to better fit with their language.) The French are not suicide-bombing us.
You're right, that a withdrawal from Iraq wouldn't immediately stop anything. You have to work through another sixty years or so of hate, as the boys whose civilian parents you blew up with a bomb grow up and die, and their deep hatred of the US goes away.
But just because an impact takes sixty years to come to fruitition is no reason to exacerbate the problem and allow everything to be worse sixty *more* years down the road.
I certainly agree with the parent poster. The US *has* taken a high-handed approach, and *has* been able to convince its own citizens to ignore many of its own excesses and abuses.
What I get from this post is that you're upset at being presented with the fact that *you* may also be guilty of helping along the same killing of civilians that you find distasteful, and would be happier having it not brought up. You find it easier, more comfortable, to avoid it that way.
b) If you are going to maintain that one should not consider the morality of a technical device in 'every discussion', it is incumbant upon you to mention in what discussions such a consideration should take place. If it can't take place on slashdot, a - for better or for worse - bastion of strongly held beliefs and free expression, then where/when can it take place?
First, I disagree that there is any onus placed upon me to provide a precise definition. If I say "You shouldn't drink every night," I certainly am not required to also then tell you what nights you *should* drink on. In addition, I didn't say anything about a discussion on Slashdot. If you take a look at the post that I was responding to, the poster was saying that the article author should have been considering the consequences. Scientists, not Slashdotters. I was arguing that point, not anything regarding Slashdot posting. I certainly don't have a problem with Slashdot arguing about the morality of weaponry -- only them saying that the engineers working on the weaponry should be doing the same whenever discussing that weaponry.
Consider, when you've finished replying, how history may have been different if the scientists who worked on the original atom bomb projects (in the US and Nazi Germany) had to consider the morality of their work in every discussion.
Well...I'd suspect that whether or not the Nazi scientists eventually decided not to complete their work would probably have had little impact.
The folks on the Manhattan Project...well, let's see. Japan still probably would have surrendered, possibly with some more loss on the US side. There probably would have been more miltary and less civilian deaths. Judging from how Berlin was treated by even US and British forces, there probably would have been looting, etc of civilians as the US occupied an enemy homeland, so more widespread, though less intense property damage. Perhaps the US would have suffered more losses. If the Japanese still surrendered at the same time, the US probably would have had less of a bargaining chip in splitting up island chains around Japan, and the post-war USSR would play a greater role in the area. Knowledge of nuclear power didn't come in time to sway the war in the west. There probably would have been major power differences after the war. If the Soviets made nuclear power and the United States didn't, probably the United States would be less influentially globally. If nobody did, there would be less push to avoid conventional war. The USSR and the United States might have started a conventional war eventually.
I don't quite see what the point of your argument is. Am I expected to change my viewpoint based on this?
Most likely, though, I will use Mac OS X for my 922 development. I'd prefer using Linux to Windows, but if I can use Mac OS X, I'd prefer that to Linux, if for no other reason than the fact that the clipboard works correctly, as well as that I could use CodeWarrior to edit my source.
You'd like the clipboard to work correctly? The issues with one-program-can't-copy-to-another are gone -- I haven't run into one for years. The old days, where Qt 2.x and below broke the X clipboard rules (and caused all kinds of mayhem) are also gone. Qt 3 has been out for ages, and uses the clipboard in the same way that all the other X11 software out there does. If you use Control-C and Control-V to do your copying and pasting, you get operating just as you do on the MacOS, and if you use a multi-clipboard program (klipper is pretty standard on KDE...I don't believe there's an equivalent included in GNOME, though there are a couple of WindowMaker-dock style programs) you don't lose clipboard contents when the original source program closes.
As for using CodeWarrior to do your embedded development, let me introduce you to Linux Solutions@Metrowerks.
Actually, I think it'd be damn cool if HTML had a sarcasm tag. It has an emphasis tag already, and sarcasm has traditionally been more difficult to get across in the printed word than verbally (since one relies on intonation).
You didn't get Slashdotted if the server was still operating normally. You just had some people from Slashdot visit.
Okay, a lot of pro-Linux studies have their own problems (frankly, I don't put much stock in "studies" any more, especially vendor-funded ones).
However, the numbers this one used are *ridiculous*. Total Cost of Development?
Okay, let's see. Of the parties surveyed, cancelled Linux projects cost more than CE projects. This Jerry guy (he's got a PhD, so he must just be dishonest, not stupid) then uses this as a basis to claim that Linux is more expensive than CE. He's got to be kidding me.
By the same metric, all C++ software should be replaced by bash equivalents. Why? Because the average cost of a bash-based project is much, much smaller than the average cost of a C++ project. Of course, there's the little additional detail that the sort of projects one uses bash on are much, much smaller and simpler. That is, of course, the factor that makes the huge difference. However, you can conveniently ignore that tidbit.
Somebody tried to do the same study with Windows and some Sun servers back in the day to show that Windows made a far cheaper server. Well...yes, but most of the servers being used to average out Windows cost in the study were small, departmental servers that nobody was spending much on. The Sun servers were the far more powerful and capable systems for things like eBay's back end that had technicians swarming all over 'em. Sure enough, the Windows boxes had a lower average maintenance cost.
Average total cost is *totally useless* without some additional constraints so that you're measuring average cost of *similar projects*. If you took all PVRs with roughly equivalent feature sets and examined cost based on embedded OS, *then* you might have a useful study. The current one is totally useless other than for FUD use.
I guarantee you, if the store didn't derive any competitive advantage from hiring more employes, they would not be hiring said employees.
Sure, but who cares what the majority of other people today do, as long as we Linuxfolk can get machines without the Windows tax, you know?
You want a LUG to get on their ass? Are you *daft*?
Let's see what they're doing. They're making it easier to use Linux than to use Windows (solves complaint (a) of Linux folks, that Windows is "preinstalled" everywhere so people use it instead). So there is a chance that the person will end up using Linux. Suppose that person chooses to install Windows instead. There's a reasonable chance it's pirated. Ah hah! Big Bad Microsoft gets shafed on a license fee! That means smaller war chests to attack Linux, their primary competitor, with. We win *again*.
Now, is this as good as it could be? Of course not. But it's a win-win situation for us.
If Linux is really so much better than Windows (and I believe it to be) then it's inevitable that it will push out Windows. It may take a bit, but these folks are helping spread it around. Sic your LUG on someone that just sells machines with Windows installed.
[Note: this is coming from an avid Red Hat user, so this certainly isn't a Gentoo troll].
Red Hat tries to sell up2date service with their distro -- it's one of the few ways they can make money off it. The problem is that up2date utterly sucks. It's slow, flaky, lacks features, and nothing but the stock Red Hat software is available via it. It's the single worst thing in Red Hat. Everyone using RH that's serious about automated download and install uses apt or (better, IMHO) yum. The average person using RH would be much happier using synaptic with a few preset distribution sites and a wide range of software than they would with the existing, rather lame package downloader and small selection of software.
Unless SCO manages to literally kill millions of Linux users, which is a little unlikely.
The Linux Holocaust is coming, but take heart -- Nuremberg will be brutal.
I really hate the fuckers that have something break on them, buy a new one from a retailer (say...a PS2), and then keep the new one and return the broken one in the box. People like that should be casterated. It's a complete and utter pain in the ass for everyone else involved.
You know, I found it vaguely irritating back when people posted full text from somewhere like CNN in the article ("in case the article got slashdotted"). However, the article is dead. It's an entirely legitimate bit of work he did. I don't see the problem with him reaping a bloody three points of karma for doing this, you know?
That's actually an interesting consideration. However, I strongly suspect that any place that sells Linux will also sell empty machines.
Irritating as I find the "out of store check", I dislike shoplifting even more. The stores wouldn't do it if it didn't keep down their costs. I'd rather go through such a check than pay a 10% premium on everything, you know?
The real solution would be flogging for shoplifting, but I'm sure that'd never go through. Then I wouldn't hae to do the check *or* pay the premium. Singapore has it knocked.
Scientists are too busy wondering whether it can be done to consider whether it should be done;
This is nothing more than a buzzphrase. Let's look at what you're actually saying -- just that scientists should consider whether weapon manufacture is a good idea. For the sake of discussion, I'll give you that. That's hardly enough to warrent supporting the original poster's statement, which was that one should not be able to have a technical discussion about bombs without also mentioning morality. Considering at some point is quite different from infusing every discussion you've ever had.
2) Lyrics are there to sell songs, not to support arguments. There's nothing there, you know?