I think you fial to grasp how laptops are use din the workforce.
My own workplace is doing the same transition. I'm looking for a different solution -- longer battery life, not a replacement for my tower.
Actually, I could see just having a laptop, if you were a Windows user who didn't have 24/7 connectivity -- it's not particularly convenient to work with your computer remotely -- but I use my computer regularly from a distance.
I just don't care very much about processor power on the laptop. My only real criteria are price and battery life (and while I'm not terribly worried about size, those massive "battery extenders" are a little too large for me).
If I could get a wireless "vt100" dumb terminal, with nothing but TCP/IP/ssh capabilities, I'd be happy.
You just read off the definition of today's subnotebooks
Yeah, but as I pointed out, these are more extreme than I'm talking about. The weird screen form factor is a turn off, at least to me.
Saying youlike a smaller screen isn't the same as saying a half-height screen.
The other problem is that most people buying things like this are interested in portability, not extreme battery life, and a lot of features are based around that.
Given some of Apple's history and culture, probably not as silly as one might think...I vaguely remember Apple at one point banning execs of different sexes from going on business trips together because there was so much sex.
Battery life could be a lot better today, if people put less *crap* in their laptops. Let's do a rundown:
* Axe the CD-ROM drive. Who needs a CD drive on their laptop? Axe it, use large amount of gained space for battery space. Spinning CDs *eats* power.
* Make the screen smaller. Laptops used to have much smaller screens, and improvements in power usage haven't made up for the bigger size. Use a smaller screen. (Heck, there's a nice industry already doing this on an extreme scale with the Vaios and similar).
* Do not use an x86 processor. Repeat after me. Intel and AMD both make processors completely unsuited for laptop use.
* Get rid of the floppy drive. Use saved space for more battery. No one uses floppy drives any more.
* Axe the 3d hardware and extra video crap. No one is going to play Quake on their laptop anyway -- lousy form factor, and trackballs, trackpads, and nipples are all awful at Quake control.
* Have "premium" batteries. It costs more to make fancier, longer lasting batteries? Okay, do so and then offer both fancy and less fancy as an option.
According to the box office, the box office is getting driven out of business by the home movie release people.
The home movie release people have been crying foul on the Linux DVD people, who are driving them ount of business.
So evidently, following the chain of damages...Linux is, according to various entertainment industry associations, responsible for wiping out most of the entertainment industry?
Yet more proof of the damage than an unchecked open source programmer can have.
Ah, but if you look at the original post...the poster uses his real name, posts to a web page with a username that's his real name *and* contains all his personal information.
This is *despite* the fact that one of the most prominent bits on his page says "Important information! Email Privacy - Protect your identity on the internet. Use the strongest encryption..."
Well, that last post seemed to go over unexpectedly well, so lets see how Slashdotters react to an expose of *Slashdot* propoganda.:-)
::MUSIC PROPOGANDA::
The Slashdot line: We want to protect starving artists who are being exploited by the RIAA.
Reality: Almost everyone on Slashdot pushing this has vague notions of "unlimited free music" available, without them having to put any resources into production of future music. As for people that claim (and frequently have rationalized their behavior to the point of believing it) that their goals really *are* to defend the artist rather than get free music...I ask, how many of you were crusading against the recording industry's exploitation of the artist *before Napster was around*?
::WINDOWS SECURITY::
The Slashdot line: Windows is highly insecure. Anyone using it is asking to get broken in to. Linux/Unix is much better.
Reality: Windows and other Microsoft products have had security holes, the same as Unix/Linux has. For every egregious MS bug (active content), there's an equally egregious Unix/Linux bug (massive numbers of buffer overflows in ssh, which is frequently deployed at secure sites and is relied upon to be solid). For every MS program with a miserable security history that runs with administrative permissions (IIS), there's a Unix program that does the same (sendmail).
::H1B WORK VISAS::
Slashdot line: H1Bs exploit foreign workers by bringing them to come to the United States and then work at lower wages than other US workers. H1Bs produce workers that produce code of abysmal quality. H1Bs should be eliminated to protect the workers that are being exploited. The US economy would be better (by employing more US workers) if we got rid of the H1Bs.
Reality: H1Bs let people get into the country. Workers coming to the US are quite happy to work at lower wages for a period of time if it means they get their foot in the door and can get permanent residency. People aren't being forced to take H1Bs -- they want them! They work at lower wages than US workers because US tech wages are astronomical compared to the amount of effort required to gain the skillset necessary to do the job. Many H1B workers are *very* skilled, more so than their US counterparts. If a company is going to go all the way over to another country *and* sponsor a worker, it is damn well going to do an even more stringent examination of the worker's competence than it would a domestic worker. Eliminating H1Bs wouldn't make any H1B-users happy at all -- they *choose* to come to the United States and work at 90% the normal US wage because it beats the snot out of working at 10% the normal US wage in a foreign country. As for the US economy being better by helping domestic workers...that's simply not true. What US workers want is guaranteed jobs (or at least jobs with a heavy edge given them in hiring). Costs of paying US workers more is then passed down to the consumer. So people in favor of labor protectionism are asking the entire United States to subsidize their highly-paid lifestyle when there's a more efficient alternative. Plus, it's easy to move software development to another country -- everyone speaks C++, work is fairly independent, and collaboration (and tools for collaboration) are pretty good and easy. If the US does labor protection, in the long term, companies will either move to other countries or go out of business, beaten by companies in countries with cheaper workers. That's *bad* for the economy.
::SWEATSHOPS::
Slashdot line: Sweatshops are evil. They exploit the foreign worker. They should be eliminated.
Reality: This is mostly AFL/CIO-initiated propoganda. Sweatshops are hiring foreign workers at low prices because that's the only way they can be competitive. If you want to pay $50 more for your hard drive, go for it...but competition on price is what has driven down wages. Eliminating sweatshops, as some have proposed, wouldn't do anything to help the foreign worker -- they're willing to work at inhumanly low rates because that's the only way they can get enough for food. Wipe the sweatshops out, and they simply starve. The only people to benefit are US unskilled labor, which gets a short term boost in hiring. This is much the same as the H1B item mentioned above.
::DRUG LEGALIZATION::
Slashdot line: Drug legalization is good because I'm concerned about the human rights of the nonviolent offenders that are put in jail. The Constitution doesn't give the federal government the right to ban drugs.
Reality: Most people taking this view are interested in smoking up, not primarily concerned about potential constitutional violations. Why? I don't see complaints of constitutional violations (libertarian types aside), despite the fact that most of the Bill of Rights is pretty much ignored by the federal government (I remember doing a breakdown at one point of how many are actually strictly followed...something like two of the amendments.)
"In our next story, the economic downturn hasn't been affecting everyone. Manokotak, a tiny village in Alaska has been experiencing a huge tourism boom, after villages reported sightings of a "fucking huge, pterodactyl-like beast". Asked whether he feels the creature will show itself soon to any tourists, the village mayor responded, "Sure, and you can make your chances even better by investing in a pair of official Manokotak beast-spotting binoculars. And perhaps you'd prefer to do your watching through the enormous plate-glass windows of our comfortable beast-themed Manokotak restauraunt."
Claims that the beast is a hoax have been violently rejected by villages. One man said, "That's stupid. Who would have anything to gain in making up a story about a giant bird?"
BTW, Java is a language very well suited to decompilation, if you want to take a look at automated decompilers.
It isn't that people love other operating systems
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The Nation of Macintosh?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
People don't "love" Linux or Mac OS or OS/2. They think they do, and they like them, but they don't "love" them. They just bitterly hate being forced to pay large sums of money to use the sluggish, buggy, oddly not-fun Windows.
I realized this after I'd used a number of non-Windows operating systems and realized that I actually enjoyed using them -- the operating system itself, not the games or whatever written for the OS. All of them. Mac OS was elegant and had some amazing concepts. Lots of people doing binary hacks for it, and tons of good spirit and fun among the community. Linux is the same way, but with source instead of binary hacks, and a more techie community.
Windows has this bland feeling to it. You'd use it for work, but simply using and poking at the machine isn't really enjoyable.
Oh, and you can get *annoyed* with a non-Windows operating system -- like not having the GNU utils on Solaris...but I wouldn't really call that the same thing. There's no fundamental dislike in place.
just something that we don't understand the ramifications of entirely?
Hell, do you understand the ramifications of posting to Slashdot entirely, particularly with a link to your homepage? The Wayback Machine and Google (and soon other places) are archiving what you're writing...you may well be building up an indelible record that future employers will *always* look at before considering you.
Uncertainty is part of life. If it wasn't...well, we'd have a much less interesting time.
why would corporations go though great lengths to exclude people with inferior genes, if these are not real indicators of performance
They wouldn't. Gattaca was designed to be a shock-and-alarm film, scaring people with new technology ("I'll be screwed over because of my *genes*!"). Companies are quite dilligent on crunching the numbers on this -- this is why insurance companies can even exist.
On the other hand, if this *was* a real indicator of performance *in general*, the single person who's an exception to the rule could certainly be screwed over. The company isn't willing to hire because the evidence available says that the guy isn't going to be a good employee...but the same thing happens today, based on other data.
Frankly, I think that the "scariness" of genetic engineering and genetic testing has been way overblown, but...
Score:4 for *that*? I mean, I thought it was kind of cute or I wouldn't have written it, but...
Moderation on Slashdot is a little whacky.
Oh, what really gets my goat is when I post to some post saying "this post deserves to be modded up", and some whimsical moderator mods the "mod up" post up *instead of the parent*. I remember getting a Score:4 saying that the parent post (Score:1) should be modded up.
The whole "free enterprise" and whatnot that's supposed to encourage entrepreneurship is nothing more than national propoganda.
the US govt can't see why the rest of the World...takes offense at this
You really think that the US govt can't see? It's the normal US citizenry that can't see, because they get fed piles upon piles of propoganda.
Let's take a look:::IRAQ::
Gov't line: We need to bomb them to protect the freedoms of the Kuwaiti people
Reality: we have big oil ties with the whole area, and any one country becoming dominant enough to be able to set oil prices or do anything but lie their passively while we import their national resources at dirt-cheap prices would be an economic unpleasantness. Much better to keep them afraid (at least for fifty years, until their oil runs out, at which point we couldn't care less what happens, just like we don't care what happens in places like Africa).::PANAMA (oldie but goodie)::
Gov't line: We need to suppress rebels and ensure stability, so we're moving in troops.
Reality: We want to build a canal at some really awful terms for Panama. Panama doesn't bite. We fund rebel groups, stir up a bit of unrest, move in troops to "maintain Western Hemisphere stability", and build the canal in the middle of their country, letting Panama know that they can have it back in a hundred years. Quite profitable for us.::VIETNAM::
Government line: we want to protect democratic rights in Vietnam, so we're helping fund a fair government
Reality: we want a lapdog government on the borders of communist nations to stop the spread of communism.::BOMBING AFGHANISTAN::
Government line: We're bombing terrorist camps, protecting the human rights of women and others who the Taliban is suppressing.
Reality: There's no big signs on people saying "I am a terrorist." There are a shitload of warlords and private groups and villages. Basically, any faction that doesn't buy into the lapdog government that we're in the process of setting up is portrayed on CNN as a "terrorist group" that we're bombing. Of course, this kills lots of women and children and people that have never had the slightest to do with bombing things in the United States, but we can make up for it by finding the occasional poster person in Afghanistan who is now "freed from the bonds of the veil" and can partake of Western products.::ISRAEL/PALESTINE::
Government line: we're "facilitating the peace process" because we're concerned about the parties involved. Palestine keeps breaking the peace agreements.
Reality: We didn't care in the least about Israel back in the Six Day War, when Israel was about to get invaded by five or so armies. Why? Because we were convinced that Israel was about to get toasted, and we don't really have any interest in pulling anyone's feet out of the fire. After Israel pulled off the most stunning military feat in the last century and won, we decided that Israel was the person to buddy up to. Both Palestine and Israel have regularly violated the rights of each other's people, and both hate each other's guts -- Palestine is no worse here than Israel -- but because Israel is currently the top dog, we villify Palestine.
It goes on and on. US World War II propoganda is particularly amusing, if you ever look back at it, because it's so ridiculous. Speaking of which:::WORLD WAR II:
Government line: we need to go after Germany because they're evil and empire-building (in modern times, there is a perception that we got involved to "save the Jews").
Reality: Most people in the US were entirely uninterested in helping any Jews out, which were pretty much seen as job-taking immigrants. Germany's building an empire...but we didn't care when France was doing the same. No, we just happened to have significantly more economic ties to England and France.::REVOLUTIONARY WAR::
Modern propoganda spin: Our Founding Fathers were noble idealists who were throwing off the shackles of an unjust government.
Reality: Our Founding Fathers were vandals (sorry, that's just what the Boston Tea Party was) who didn't want to pay taxes to pay for the military protection that they had had from Indians for decades.::CIVIL WAR::
Modern spin: fought to save the country from slavery
Reality: Slavery not primary issue to the majority of people fighting, Union or Confederacy. Union cared mostly about not allowing any states to leave the United States (which would weaken the states as a whole), and the Confederacy was mostly interested in being able to have much more power at a state level.::THE ENVIRONMENT::
Government line: the US is the most environmentally conscious of nations, putting out extreme efforts to product emissions-free cars, and using as much clout as it can to require developing nations to be clean.
Reality: The US is quite interested in countries being environmentally conscious -- as long as it isn't us. It's in our interests to drive up their costs and down ours. We've been the single major holdout against international antipollution agreements over the past few years. We *do* care about polution that immediately impacts US citizens (dumping chemicals in rivers that go to reseviours), but as for conservation of international resources...we use so many times our share of energy that it's ridiculous.::BIOLOGICAL WARFARE (this is reaching into speculation, mind you)::
Government line: We stopped offensive germ warfare efforts about twenty years ago. We focus only on defense now.
Reality: Not sure one way or another, but if you remember, when we were proposing the (very sweet for us economically) "food for oil" trade agreement after we arranged for an international embarge of Iraq, and Iraq was holding out, claiming that they had plenty of food resources, there was a very unusual sudden mass outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease throughout Iraq's cattle. Go figure.::NUCLEAR WEAPONS::
Government line: The US government wants to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of "rogue states" and terrorists to keep the world safe for everyone.
Reality: The US wants to keep nuclear weapons away from *anyone else*. Our current nuclear weapon reductions are meaningless -- both Russia and us have easily enough to destroy the other, even enough to overwhelm antimissile defenses. We just ignore allies that have nukes. Yet a nuclear weapon is just about the only meaningful resistance a country can put up in case of a US attack -- the US doesn't want any resistance to be possible. We have overwhelming conventional force, and we want things to stay that way.::MILITARY STRUCTURE::
Government line: "Defense spending". Our military is for "defense".
Reality: And yet, over the last fourty years, almost all our military spending has gone into making our military faster, lighter, and easier to move around the world via ships in battle groups. Why? Not cost effective at all for defense -- we can defend our shores just fine traditional approaches -- but amazingly good at bombardment and intimidation of countries that we aren't getting along with.::AL QAEDA::
Government line: Al Queda is a bunch of cowards who can't take an honest fight who went after innocent people.
Reality: Assuming bin Laden himself was behind Sept. 11, he's one of the most successful military tacticians in the last hundred years. Think about it. He has a force that is outgunned, and outmanned. The people he's working with, Afghanis, have been used by the US governent as disposable tools against US enemies and then dropped when they were no longer useful (much like the Kurds, the Cuban revolutionaries at the Bay of Pigs). The understandably feel some resentment. Their religion (at least the political side of said religion) has been rather oppressed and attacked by Western culture that seems quite evil to them (loss of emphasis on the family, sexual promiscuity, etc). Most of the eastern countries being exploited for their oil are Islamic, and the US has had quite a hand in dirty work in the region. So what does he do, with no tanks, airplanes, or anything else? He uses our own airplanes against us. Who does he attack? Not the US soldiers, the grunts who are being paid to attack other countries, but against the people who are directly responsible for the decisions that caused so much damage to his country and people -- US politicians (the White House), the overbearing US military (the Pentagon), and the powerful corporations that have been encouraging said oil exploitation (rich suits in the World Trade Center).
The US government is just as guilty as the Soviets, the Chinese, and anyone else in putting out bogus propoganda. It's more successful because people are happy and rich. If you think that people that bought into Soviet or North Korean propoganda must have been incredibly stupid...well, look no further than right here at home.
Now, that doesn't mean that US propoganda is *bad* for us. US citizens enjoy an extremely high standard of living, rights (even in other countries) to ignore local laws that are simply unheard of (Clinton can get a vandal off in Singapore from being punished for his crimes, but if Taiwan tried to get someone off for copyright infringement, I doubt they'd have any success). Most of this comes, counter to said propoganda, not from "rights" or the long-dead "American self-sufficiency" or anything along those lines. It's because we're happy to use our military power to whack people if it gives us an economic benefit. You get to live the good life because there are people in our government who are willing to do the dirty, unethical work that keeps you enjoying your life.
What let most of our modern economy be built? Roads and fuel. Centralization of manufacturing and specialization came directly from those. Why do we get our oil so much cheaper than people in any other countries? Because we club the crap out of anyone that opposes us exporting their oil at dirt-cheap prices. We happily put tariffs up against countries importing, but use every last bit of our clout to prevent countries from taxing US imports. And it's been enormously successful over the past two centuries, making us the dominant economic power, and making us extremely successful.
No, I'm not arguing that this should stop. I'd just like to see that people be aware of what we're doing, and make a conscious decision to do what they're doing. Being the bully on the block can be pretty pleasant, but something feels vaguely wrong about being the bully on the block and thinking that you're the saint.
The state of Linux IM *is* unfortunately pretty awful. The only consolation is that Windows IM isn't all that much better.
Let's take a look.
Pros: no Linux IM client that I know of has ads or relies extensively on client-side security (*cough* ICQ).
Cons:
* There is no Linux ICQ client that can consistently transfer files to Windows users. GnomeICU doesn't support it with any recent ICQ version. Licq requires you to convince the other person to manually flip a protocol switch and only sometimes works then. Licq's file transfer does not work with Trillian (which is growing in popularity). There's a host of IM dead projects, all of which only partly work.
* Protocol lag. I don't know of anything that can *fully* speak the new ICQ protocols.
* Periodically doesn't work. Not sure how bad this is on GAIM these days, but it used to be awful as AOL and MS duked it out. Sudden, unexpected protocol changes are the name of the game.
* Only reasonable ICQ front end requires Qt: Licq is the most usable Linux ICQ client I know of, and the best gtk front end *sucks*, with only one feature over the qt version (auto-establishment of secure connections). It's unstable, doesn't have middle-button-opening of message windows, doesn't highlight usernames in the username clist...
* Gabber *could* be an answer, but isn't. There's a really nice, secure Jabber client called Gabber. Unfortunately, no one *uses* Jabber, and the gateways to other protocols for it are flaky as hell.
* talk is dead. It was the most reliable system I've ever used to talk to people on any computer system, VMS or UNIX.
Meanwhile, IM continues to be a crucial part of the desktop, even entering the business world. I'd like to see Red Hat on some of the groups shaping this stuff (as Microsoft and AOL are). I'd *hate* the standard protocol to be unencrypted or have a message size limit, or rely on propriatary Windows libraries.
MS's release of technical information and source (even, as was mentioned recently, on demand from the courts) *is* a joke, as you've pointed out -- it pretty much is a legal ploy to entangle people in legal barriers preventing from them from working on competition.
But, let's also be fair here. This is *Microsoft* and *Slashdot* we're talking about. If Microsoft BSD-licensed Windows and released the source, there'd be a ton of people on here talking about how it was an attempt to crush Free Software by making BSD licensing more popular than the GPL.:-)
And how many terrorist actions has Iraq funded against the US in recent years?
Bush using the whole Al Qaeda thing to push his family's pet project -- bombing the shit out of Iraq -- when they could be spending the same dollars on our economy is inane.
Frankly, if there's one *good* way to generate people willing to die to hurt the US -- terrorists -- it's to keep bombing a country and killing someone's parents, brothers, sisters, and force them into poverty -- and then stay high overhead, in high-tech airplanes, so that your only recourse is to go after their civilians.
Let's be realistic. We are bombing Iraq because Bush and Bush Sr. are tremendous buddies of the oil companies, who took extreme exception to the invasion of Kuwait (which, to be fair, also would probably have driven up everyone's gas prices). It was an *economic* decision, not one made to save lives (lots of places in the world we could be doing that), and not one made to prevent terrorism (we've financed terrorist groups before, as long as they're aimed at someone else -- USSR, Central American governments -- at the time.)
With the two rapid releases of Phoenix and Mozilla, with Netscape (the browser) being pushed by AOL, and with Chimera popular on the Mac, IE may have more users, but aside from being more stable and configurable, Moz is now steadily heading for a 1-1 user:browser ratio. Hopefully, this will result in an extremely customized browsing experience.
Re:so XFree86 = usage stattistics?
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The End Of Minix?
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· Score: 2
I used and loved bash for a long time, and you can hack it up to have a good chunk of the zsh functionality, but it really isn't as powerful. I wouldn't give up my zsh these days.
The problem is that zsh is a bit bigger and slower, and the two have incompatible formats for things like colorized prompts.:-(
I'm pretty sure that the Register's hinting is dead on -- this whole "make the DMCA look idiotic by making progressively more and more crucial things be inhibited by it" is an ongoing Alan Cox project. He's got a fair bit of tech clout...he might be able to help drop the DMCA.
Give a couple years of building up nasty cases against the DMCA, the EFF decides the time is right, and goes after it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you fial to grasp how laptops are use din the workforce.
My own workplace is doing the same transition. I'm looking for a different solution -- longer battery life, not a replacement for my tower.
Actually, I could see just having a laptop, if you were a Windows user who didn't have 24/7 connectivity -- it's not particularly convenient to work with your computer remotely -- but I use my computer regularly from a distance.
I just don't care very much about processor power on the laptop. My only real criteria are price and battery life (and while I'm not terribly worried about size, those massive "battery extenders" are a little too large for me).
If I could get a wireless "vt100" dumb terminal, with nothing but TCP/IP/ssh capabilities, I'd be happy.
You just read off the definition of today's subnotebooks
Yeah, but as I pointed out, these are more extreme than I'm talking about. The weird screen form factor is a turn off, at least to me.
Saying youlike a smaller screen isn't the same as saying a half-height screen.
The other problem is that most people buying things like this are interested in portability, not extreme battery life, and a lot of features are based around that.
Also, they're very expensive.
Given some of Apple's history and culture, probably not as silly as one might think...I vaguely remember Apple at one point banning execs of different sexes from going on business trips together because there was so much sex.
Battery life could be a lot better today, if people put less *crap* in their laptops. Let's do a rundown:
* Axe the CD-ROM drive. Who needs a CD drive on their laptop? Axe it, use large amount of gained space for battery space. Spinning CDs *eats* power.
* Make the screen smaller. Laptops used to have much smaller screens, and improvements in power usage haven't made up for the bigger size. Use a smaller screen. (Heck, there's a nice industry already doing this on an extreme scale with the Vaios and similar).
* Do not use an x86 processor. Repeat after me. Intel and AMD both make processors completely unsuited for laptop use.
* Get rid of the floppy drive. Use saved space for more battery. No one uses floppy drives any more.
* Axe the 3d hardware and extra video crap. No one is going to play Quake on their laptop anyway -- lousy form factor, and trackballs, trackpads, and nipples are all awful at Quake control.
* Have "premium" batteries. It costs more to make fancier, longer lasting batteries? Okay, do so and then offer both fancy and less fancy as an option.
(The obligatory Linux post)
According to the box office, the box office is getting driven out of business by the home movie release people.
The home movie release people have been crying foul on the Linux DVD people, who are driving them ount of business.
So evidently, following the chain of damages...Linux is, according to various entertainment industry associations, responsible for wiping out most of the entertainment industry?
Yet more proof of the damage than an unchecked open source programmer can have.
I'd say that making profit with a giant, pumped up pigeon is about as plausible as the .com business strategies.
That's why we all use anonymous handles here.
Ah, but if you look at the original post...the poster uses his real name, posts to a web page with a username that's his real name *and* contains all his personal information.
This is *despite* the fact that one of the most prominent bits on his page says "Important information! Email Privacy - Protect your identity on the internet. Use the strongest encryption..."
It took 15 minutes for *that* post to get modded up. I give up.
The Slashdot line: We want to protect starving artists who are being exploited by the RIAA.
Reality: Almost everyone on Slashdot pushing this has vague notions of "unlimited free music" available, without them having to put any resources into production of future music. As for people that claim (and frequently have rationalized their behavior to the point of believing it) that their goals really *are* to defend the artist rather than get free music...I ask, how many of you were crusading against the recording industry's exploitation of the artist *before Napster was around*?
The Slashdot line: Windows is highly insecure. Anyone using it is asking to get broken in to. Linux/Unix is much better.
Reality: Windows and other Microsoft products have had security holes, the same as Unix/Linux has. For every egregious MS bug (active content), there's an equally egregious Unix/Linux bug (massive numbers of buffer overflows in ssh, which is frequently deployed at secure sites and is relied upon to be solid). For every MS program with a miserable security history that runs with administrative permissions (IIS), there's a Unix program that does the same (sendmail).
Slashdot line: H1Bs exploit foreign workers by bringing them to come to the United States and then work at lower wages than other US workers. H1Bs produce workers that produce code of abysmal quality. H1Bs should be eliminated to protect the workers that are being exploited. The US economy would be better (by employing more US workers) if we got rid of the H1Bs.
Reality: H1Bs let people get into the country. Workers coming to the US are quite happy to work at lower wages for a period of time if it means they get their foot in the door and can get permanent residency. People aren't being forced to take H1Bs -- they want them! They work at lower wages than US workers because US tech wages are astronomical compared to the amount of effort required to gain the skillset necessary to do the job. Many H1B workers are *very* skilled, more so than their US counterparts. If a company is going to go all the way over to another country *and* sponsor a worker, it is damn well going to do an even more stringent examination of the worker's competence than it would a domestic worker. Eliminating H1Bs wouldn't make any H1B-users happy at all -- they *choose* to come to the United States and work at 90% the normal US wage because it beats the snot out of working at 10% the normal US wage in a foreign country. As for the US economy being better by helping domestic workers...that's simply not true. What US workers want is guaranteed jobs (or at least jobs with a heavy edge given them in hiring). Costs of paying US workers more is then passed down to the consumer. So people in favor of labor protectionism are asking the entire United States to subsidize their highly-paid lifestyle when there's a more efficient alternative. Plus, it's easy to move software development to another country -- everyone speaks C++, work is fairly independent, and collaboration (and tools for collaboration) are pretty good and easy. If the US does labor protection, in the long term, companies will either move to other countries or go out of business, beaten by companies in countries with cheaper workers. That's *bad* for the economy.
Slashdot line: Sweatshops are evil. They exploit the foreign worker. They should be eliminated.
Reality: This is mostly AFL/CIO-initiated propoganda. Sweatshops are hiring foreign workers at low prices because that's the only way they can be competitive. If you want to pay $50 more for your hard drive, go for it...but competition on price is what has driven down wages. Eliminating sweatshops, as some have proposed, wouldn't do anything to help the foreign worker -- they're willing to work at inhumanly low rates because that's the only way they can get enough for food. Wipe the sweatshops out, and they simply starve. The only people to benefit are US unskilled labor, which gets a short term boost in hiring. This is much the same as the H1B item mentioned above.
Slashdot line: Drug legalization is good because I'm concerned about the human rights of the nonviolent offenders that are put in jail. The Constitution doesn't give the federal government the right to ban drugs.
Reality: Most people taking this view are interested in smoking up, not primarily concerned about potential constitutional violations. Why? I don't see complaints of constitutional violations (libertarian types aside), despite the fact that most of the Bill of Rights is pretty much ignored by the federal government (I remember doing a breakdown at one point of how many are actually strictly followed...something like two of the amendments.)
Invest in some skepticism.
Fair enough.
"In our next story, the economic downturn hasn't been affecting everyone. Manokotak, a tiny village in Alaska has been experiencing a huge tourism boom, after villages reported sightings of a "fucking huge, pterodactyl-like beast". Asked whether he feels the creature will show itself soon to any tourists, the village mayor responded, "Sure, and you can make your chances even better by investing in a pair of official Manokotak beast-spotting binoculars. And perhaps you'd prefer to do your watching through the enormous plate-glass windows of our comfortable beast-themed Manokotak restauraunt."
Claims that the beast is a hoax have been violently rejected by villages. One man said, "That's stupid. Who would have anything to gain in making up a story about a giant bird?"
reverse compiling
Commonly known as decompiling.
BTW, Java is a language very well suited to decompilation, if you want to take a look at automated decompilers.
People don't "love" Linux or Mac OS or OS/2. They think they do, and they like them, but they don't "love" them. They just bitterly hate being forced to pay large sums of money to use the sluggish, buggy, oddly not-fun Windows.
I realized this after I'd used a number of non-Windows operating systems and realized that I actually enjoyed using them -- the operating system itself, not the games or whatever written for the OS. All of them. Mac OS was elegant and had some amazing concepts. Lots of people doing binary hacks for it, and tons of good spirit and fun among the community. Linux is the same way, but with source instead of binary hacks, and a more techie community.
Windows has this bland feeling to it. You'd use it for work, but simply using and poking at the machine isn't really enjoyable.
Oh, and you can get *annoyed* with a non-Windows operating system -- like not having the GNU utils on Solaris...but I wouldn't really call that the same thing. There's no fundamental dislike in place.
just something that we don't understand the ramifications of entirely?
Hell, do you understand the ramifications of posting to Slashdot entirely, particularly with a link to your homepage? The Wayback Machine and Google (and soon other places) are archiving what you're writing...you may well be building up an indelible record that future employers will *always* look at before considering you.
Uncertainty is part of life. If it wasn't...well, we'd have a much less interesting time.
why would corporations go though great lengths to exclude people with inferior genes, if these are not real indicators of performance
They wouldn't. Gattaca was designed to be a shock-and-alarm film, scaring people with new technology ("I'll be screwed over because of my *genes*!"). Companies are quite dilligent on crunching the numbers on this -- this is why insurance companies can even exist.
On the other hand, if this *was* a real indicator of performance *in general*, the single person who's an exception to the rule could certainly be screwed over. The company isn't willing to hire because the evidence available says that the guy isn't going to be a good employee...but the same thing happens today, based on other data.
Frankly, I think that the "scariness" of genetic engineering and genetic testing has been way overblown, but...
Score:4 for *that*? I mean, I thought it was kind of cute or I wouldn't have written it, but...
Moderation on Slashdot is a little whacky.
Oh, what really gets my goat is when I post to some post saying "this post deserves to be modded up", and some whimsical moderator mods the "mod up" post up *instead of the parent*. I remember getting a Score:4 saying that the parent post (Score:1) should be modded up.
Those ::HEADER:: lines should each be on their own line. Slashcode likes randomly stripping lines to make things "more concise". Dammit.
The whole "free enterprise" and whatnot that's supposed to encourage entrepreneurship is nothing more than national propoganda.
::IRAQ::
::PANAMA (oldie but goodie)::
::VIETNAM::
::BOMBING AFGHANISTAN::
::ISRAEL/PALESTINE::
::WORLD WAR II:
::REVOLUTIONARY WAR::
::CIVIL WAR::
::THE ENVIRONMENT::
::BIOLOGICAL WARFARE (this is reaching into speculation, mind you)::
::NUCLEAR WEAPONS::
::MILITARY STRUCTURE::
::AL QAEDA::
...well, look no further than right here at home.
the US govt can't see why the rest of the World...takes offense at this
You really think that the US govt can't see? It's the normal US citizenry that can't see, because they get fed piles upon piles of propoganda.
Let's take a look:
Gov't line: We need to bomb them to protect the freedoms of the Kuwaiti people
Reality: we have big oil ties with the whole area, and any one country becoming dominant enough to be able to set oil prices or do anything but lie their passively while we import their national resources at dirt-cheap prices would be an economic unpleasantness. Much better to keep them afraid (at least for fifty years, until their oil runs out, at which point we couldn't care less what happens, just like we don't care what happens in places like Africa).
Gov't line: We need to suppress rebels and ensure stability, so we're moving in troops.
Reality: We want to build a canal at some really awful terms for Panama. Panama doesn't bite. We fund rebel groups, stir up a bit of unrest, move in troops to "maintain Western Hemisphere stability", and build the canal in the middle of their country, letting Panama know that they can have it back in a hundred years. Quite profitable for us.
Government line: we want to protect democratic rights in Vietnam, so we're helping fund a fair government
Reality: we want a lapdog government on the borders of communist nations to stop the spread of communism.
Government line: We're bombing terrorist camps, protecting the human rights of women and others who the Taliban is suppressing.
Reality: There's no big signs on people saying "I am a terrorist." There are a shitload of warlords and private groups and villages. Basically, any faction that doesn't buy into the lapdog government that we're in the process of setting up is portrayed on CNN as a "terrorist group" that we're bombing. Of course, this kills lots of women and children and people that have never had the slightest to do with bombing things in the United States, but we can make up for it by finding the occasional poster person in Afghanistan who is now "freed from the bonds of the veil" and can partake of Western products.
Government line: we're "facilitating the peace process" because we're concerned about the parties involved. Palestine keeps breaking the peace agreements.
Reality: We didn't care in the least about Israel back in the Six Day War, when Israel was about to get invaded by five or so armies. Why? Because we were convinced that Israel was about to get toasted, and we don't really have any interest in pulling anyone's feet out of the fire. After Israel pulled off the most stunning military feat in the last century and won, we decided that Israel was the person to buddy up to. Both Palestine and Israel have regularly violated the rights of each other's people, and both hate each other's guts -- Palestine is no worse here than Israel -- but because Israel is currently the top dog, we villify Palestine.
It goes on and on. US World War II propoganda is particularly amusing, if you ever look back at it, because it's so ridiculous. Speaking of which:
Government line: we need to go after Germany because they're evil and empire-building (in modern times, there is a perception that we got involved to "save the Jews").
Reality: Most people in the US were entirely uninterested in helping any Jews out, which were pretty much seen as job-taking immigrants. Germany's building an empire...but we didn't care when France was doing the same. No, we just happened to have significantly more economic ties to England and France.
Modern propoganda spin: Our Founding Fathers were noble idealists who were throwing off the shackles of an unjust government.
Reality: Our Founding Fathers were vandals (sorry, that's just what the Boston Tea Party was) who didn't want to pay taxes to pay for the military protection that they had had from Indians for decades.
Modern spin: fought to save the country from slavery
Reality: Slavery not primary issue to the majority of people fighting, Union or Confederacy. Union cared mostly about not allowing any states to leave the United States (which would weaken the states as a whole), and the Confederacy was mostly interested in being able to have much more power at a state level.
Government line: the US is the most environmentally conscious of nations, putting out extreme efforts to product emissions-free cars, and using as much clout as it can to require developing nations to be clean.
Reality: The US is quite interested in countries being environmentally conscious -- as long as it isn't us. It's in our interests to drive up their costs and down ours. We've been the single major holdout against international antipollution agreements over the past few years. We *do* care about polution that immediately impacts US citizens (dumping chemicals in rivers that go to reseviours), but as for conservation of international resources...we use so many times our share of energy that it's ridiculous.
Government line: We stopped offensive germ warfare efforts about twenty years ago. We focus only on defense now.
Reality: Not sure one way or another, but if you remember, when we were proposing the (very sweet for us economically) "food for oil" trade agreement after we arranged for an international embarge of Iraq, and Iraq was holding out, claiming that they had plenty of food resources, there was a very unusual sudden mass outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease throughout Iraq's cattle. Go figure.
Government line: The US government wants to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of "rogue states" and terrorists to keep the world safe for everyone.
Reality: The US wants to keep nuclear weapons away from *anyone else*. Our current nuclear weapon reductions are meaningless -- both Russia and us have easily enough to destroy the other, even enough to overwhelm antimissile defenses. We just ignore allies that have nukes. Yet a nuclear weapon is just about the only meaningful resistance a country can put up in case of a US attack -- the US doesn't want any resistance to be possible. We have overwhelming conventional force, and we want things to stay that way.
Government line: "Defense spending". Our military is for "defense".
Reality: And yet, over the last fourty years, almost all our military spending has gone into making our military faster, lighter, and easier to move around the world via ships in battle groups. Why? Not cost effective at all for defense -- we can defend our shores just fine traditional approaches -- but amazingly good at bombardment and intimidation of countries that we aren't getting along with.
Government line: Al Queda is a bunch of cowards who can't take an honest fight who went after innocent people.
Reality: Assuming bin Laden himself was behind Sept. 11, he's one of the most successful military tacticians in the last hundred years. Think about it. He has a force that is outgunned, and outmanned. The people he's working with, Afghanis, have been used by the US governent as disposable tools against US enemies and then dropped when they were no longer useful (much like the Kurds, the Cuban revolutionaries at the Bay of Pigs). The understandably feel some resentment. Their religion (at least the political side of said religion) has been rather oppressed and attacked by Western culture that seems quite evil to them (loss of emphasis on the family, sexual promiscuity, etc). Most of the eastern countries being exploited for their oil are Islamic, and the US has had quite a hand in dirty work in the region. So what does he do, with no tanks, airplanes, or anything else? He uses our own airplanes against us. Who does he attack? Not the US soldiers, the grunts who are being paid to attack other countries, but against the people who are directly responsible for the decisions that caused so much damage to his country and people -- US politicians (the White House), the overbearing US military (the Pentagon), and the powerful corporations that have been encouraging said oil exploitation (rich suits in the World Trade Center).
The US government is just as guilty as the Soviets, the Chinese, and anyone else in putting out bogus propoganda. It's more successful because people are happy and rich. If you think that people that bought into Soviet or North Korean propoganda must have been incredibly stupid
Now, that doesn't mean that US propoganda is *bad* for us. US citizens enjoy an extremely high standard of living, rights (even in other countries) to ignore local laws that are simply unheard of (Clinton can get a vandal off in Singapore from being punished for his crimes, but if Taiwan tried to get someone off for copyright infringement, I doubt they'd have any success). Most of this comes, counter to said propoganda, not from "rights" or the long-dead "American self-sufficiency" or anything along those lines. It's because we're happy to use our military power to whack people if it gives us an economic benefit. You get to live the good life because there are people in our government who are willing to do the dirty, unethical work that keeps you enjoying your life.
What let most of our modern economy be built? Roads and fuel. Centralization of manufacturing and specialization came directly from those. Why do we get our oil so much cheaper than people in any other countries? Because we club the crap out of anyone that opposes us exporting their oil at dirt-cheap prices. We happily put tariffs up against countries importing, but use every last bit of our clout to prevent countries from taxing US imports. And it's been enormously successful over the past two centuries, making us the dominant economic power, and making us extremely successful.
No, I'm not arguing that this should stop. I'd just like to see that people be aware of what we're doing, and make a conscious decision to do what they're doing. Being the bully on the block can be pretty pleasant, but something feels vaguely wrong about being the bully on the block and thinking that you're the saint.
The state of Linux IM *is* unfortunately pretty awful. The only consolation is that Windows IM isn't all that much better.
Let's take a look.
Pros: no Linux IM client that I know of has ads or relies extensively on client-side security (*cough* ICQ).
Cons:
* There is no Linux ICQ client that can consistently transfer files to Windows users. GnomeICU doesn't support it with any recent ICQ version. Licq requires you to convince the other person to manually flip a protocol switch and only sometimes works then. Licq's file transfer does not work with Trillian (which is growing in popularity). There's a host of IM dead projects, all of which only partly work.
* Protocol lag. I don't know of anything that can *fully* speak the new ICQ protocols.
* Periodically doesn't work. Not sure how bad this is on GAIM these days, but it used to be awful as AOL and MS duked it out. Sudden, unexpected protocol changes are the name of the game.
* Only reasonable ICQ front end requires Qt: Licq is the most usable Linux ICQ client I know of, and the best gtk front end *sucks*, with only one feature over the qt version (auto-establishment of secure connections). It's unstable, doesn't have middle-button-opening of message windows, doesn't highlight usernames in the username clist...
* Gabber *could* be an answer, but isn't. There's a really nice, secure Jabber client called Gabber. Unfortunately, no one *uses* Jabber, and the gateways to other protocols for it are flaky as hell.
* talk is dead. It was the most reliable system I've ever used to talk to people on any computer system, VMS or UNIX.
Meanwhile, IM continues to be a crucial part of the desktop, even entering the business world. I'd like to see Red Hat on some of the groups shaping this stuff (as Microsoft and AOL are). I'd *hate* the standard protocol to be unencrypted or have a message size limit, or rely on propriatary Windows libraries.
MS's release of technical information and source (even, as was mentioned recently, on demand from the courts) *is* a joke, as you've pointed out -- it pretty much is a legal ploy to entangle people in legal barriers preventing from them from working on competition.
:-)
But, let's also be fair here. This is *Microsoft* and *Slashdot* we're talking about. If Microsoft BSD-licensed Windows and released the source, there'd be a ton of people on here talking about how it was an attempt to crush Free Software by making BSD licensing more popular than the GPL.
And how many terrorist actions has Iraq funded against the US in recent years?
Bush using the whole Al Qaeda thing to push his family's pet project -- bombing the shit out of Iraq -- when they could be spending the same dollars on our economy is inane.
Frankly, if there's one *good* way to generate people willing to die to hurt the US -- terrorists -- it's to keep bombing a country and killing someone's parents, brothers, sisters, and force them into poverty -- and then stay high overhead, in high-tech airplanes, so that your only recourse is to go after their civilians.
Let's be realistic. We are bombing Iraq because Bush and Bush Sr. are tremendous buddies of the oil companies, who took extreme exception to the invasion of Kuwait (which, to be fair, also would probably have driven up everyone's gas prices). It was an *economic* decision, not one made to save lives (lots of places in the world we could be doing that), and not one made to prevent terrorism (we've financed terrorist groups before, as long as they're aimed at someone else -- USSR, Central American governments -- at the time.)
The Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, not the judicial branch, which means the current administration owns it.
:-)
The DoJ can put someone in court, but the judicial branch still has to rule against them.
With the two rapid releases of Phoenix and Mozilla, with Netscape (the browser) being pushed by AOL, and with Chimera popular on the Mac, IE may have more users, but aside from being more stable and configurable, Moz is now steadily heading for a 1-1 user:browser ratio. Hopefully, this will result in an extremely customized browsing experience.
I used and loved bash for a long time, and you can hack it up to have a good chunk of the zsh functionality, but it really isn't as powerful. I wouldn't give up my zsh these days.
:-(
The problem is that zsh is a bit bigger and slower, and the two have incompatible formats for things like colorized prompts.
I'm pretty sure that the Register's hinting is dead on -- this whole "make the DMCA look idiotic by making progressively more and more crucial things be inhibited by it" is an ongoing Alan Cox project. He's got a fair bit of tech clout...he might be able to help drop the DMCA.
Give a couple years of building up nasty cases against the DMCA, the EFF decides the time is right, and goes after it.
What is wrong with the system?
The government has no balls.
Not true. Clinton/Reno was beating up on Microsoft quite a bit.
The Republicans dropped most of the case the moment they got Bush in, and it's unlikely that they're going to start up anything again soon.
The Demms certainly have their drawbacks, but they're a lot better than the Republicans in going after companies abusing power.