Re:Suit and Tie do not make the programmer.
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Suit Up Or Ship Out?
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· Score: 2
Actually, physical property is a very natural idea. Go outside and pick up a rock. That's YOUR rock, and no one else can have it unless they take it away from you. Dogs can understand the idea of property at this level; just try to take a bone away from one.
Ideas are fundamentally different. They can be shared in a way that just isn't possible for rocks and bones.
So, how many folks are there who have an already-parallelized|vectorized application that they need to run, rarely, on a supercomputer? How many folks who don't have a supercomputer have programmers on staff with the experience to write for those very specialized machines?
I've always believed that most of the software run on the big iron was problem-specific and machine specific. IBM must be planning to provide some custom programming to make this fly, and I'm guessing that's an important part of the profit plan.
... If you work with someone, does their fashion make a difference in your *professional* opinion of them?
In general, no. In particular, it can. If you want people to treat you like a grownup, it's a bright idea not to wear clothing that makes you look like the fat kid's little brother in hand-me-downs.
When you are making a first impression, remember that appearance is the ONLY thing that people can SEE. Before they hear your voice, before they find out what you know, they see what you look like. If you are the janitor, no-one will care if your teeshirt is smudged. If you aren't the janitor, do you want strangers to think you are? Will it increase their confidence in you? Wear clothing which is appropriate to the time and place.
Someone else pointed out that people at the top and bottom get to wear whatever they like. The ones at the top set the dress code, the ones at the bottom no-one cares about. The ones in the middle must follow the dress code. Ross Perot (owner of EDS, I think) could wear what the janitor wears, if he thought it was more comfortable than his suit. He doesn't, and that should tell you something about comfort.
Folks here keep saying that suits are uncomfortable. Mine aren't, and I've gotten most of them from the second hand stores, so we can't give the tailor any credit. You can buy them cheaper than you can buy denim, and the suits are generally in better condition than the jeans. You will be comfortable in whatever you are accustomed to. If you have chosen to be accustomed to clothing that makes you look rebellious, unreliable and immature, you haven't chosen wisely. Unless, of course, you are rebellious, unreliable and immature, in which case you are wiser than you knew, and the rest of us can continue to rely on appearances.
Re:Suit and Tie do not make the programmer.
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Suit Up Or Ship Out?
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· Score: 2
Have you ever had to wear a suit and tie to work everyday?
Never had to, but I've done it by choice. Suits are comfortable! Loose but not baggy fit, doesn't bind, light-weight fabrics that are great for hot weather, available at the thrift shop for less money than the raggedy blue jeans that everyone wants; the list of advantages goes on and on.
Think about this: the bigwigs in your company (any company) set the dress code, and they can set it to be whatever THEY want to wear. They could choose sackcloth and ashes, or jeans and t-shirts with rude sayings, or something comfortable and impressive looking.
... wool suits in the summer... they are based in Texas, can you say 100 degree summers...)
Think about the Arabs. They wear woolen bedsheets, more or less, and the Arabian peninsula makes Texas summers seem COLD. Wear one layer of light colored, loose fitting clothing of a thin weave. Sounds like dress pants and a white shirt. If you must wear a blazer, be sure it's unlined. Linen is great for this.
... growth is what drives stock value - its the combination of current value (what you are selling) plus the value of future growth (what addtional sales, above current, you'll make in the future).
There's something wrong with this. Think about it: if you sell everything at a loss, are you going to make it up on volume? You probably were using sales as a proxy for profits, and that's great, but what good does it do me the stockholder for the company to make a profit if I never share it?
The value of the stock, ultimately, is nothing but the present (i.e., discounted) value of the stream of future DIVIDENDS. Dividends are vital, since if the company doesn't pay out something, someday, why own it?
Growth does matter, since it will someday enable the company to pay out bigger dividends. Yes, I am aware that there are companies which have never paid a dividend, but still have non-zero stock prices. The market is valuing the expectation that someday, they will stop growing and start paying out, or valueing their ability to attract the ``bigger fools''.
``Bigger fools'' will pay more than the present value of future dividends for a stock, in the hope of finding another bigger fool who will pay even more than they did. When there are enough bigger fools in the market, they attract even more, and the result is an asset price bubble. This behavior is self-limiting, since the finite population of bigger fools is eventually exhausted, and the last bigger fool gets badly burned.
Leaving aside the bigger fools, there is no reason to pay a cent for a company which has never paid a dividend and never will. It can make very good sense for companies to suspend dividends for several years at a time to finance investment which will increase (or enable) future dividends. Growth which doesn't in some reasonable time enable or increase dividends is actually reducing shareholder value.
"While other banking institutions are suffering from network slowdowns and corrupted databases, MS First Union can provide you with reliable access to your funds around the clock. Bank with MSFU....we keep an eye on your money!"
No, no, no... it's: ``... we keep an eye on our money!"
That guy's problem is that he's running a P4. I have one at work, running Windows, and it is deathly slow. It pauses for 5+ seconds on context switches, and is generally a dog. This 1.8GHz P4 is worse than a 900MHz P3.
Advances in installs and config tools happen for a reason. There is nothing "better" about something being harder to use or master period.
True. I don't think that has anything to do with Debian, really.
People keep saying that the Debian installer is HARD, but I'm not sure I believe it. I switched to Debian Potato for my laptop about a year ago, and recently upgraded to Woody. I've installed Woody on another box, also. I didn't find the Debian installer any harder than the Redhat or Mandrake installers. It is different, but no harder.
Text mode is neither harder nor easier to use than GUI. What makes for an easy installation is great hardware detection and sensible defaults. Everything just worked [1], so I guess the hardware detection was good enough. When I didn't know what to choose, I took the default, and have been happy with it.
One point that I haven't seen anyone make yet is that with Debian, it really doesn't matter whether you install some un-needed packages, or forget to install some that you do need. As long as you have apt installed, you can get (or remove) whatever you need. With Redhat, I learned to install EVERYTHING, because installing one thing later can lead you into RPM-dependency-hell.
... I prefer the "easier to use" distros.
Now you're changing the subject! Debian has the same applications as the other Linux distributions, and thus should be equally easy to use (assuming those other distributions have apt). Actually, it is easier for me, since I bump into fewer bugs in stable than in Mandrake or Redhat.
[1] Everything just worked except sound, of course, but that never worked out of the box for me with Redhat or Mandrake, either, on any of my machines.
They said 'trust me' over the tax cut which would not break the budget, guess what it did.
Well, there is correlation but not causation there. Basic Macro, the sort we teach to the undergrads, tells us that lowering taxes raises GDP. Reality isn't quite that tidy, but no-one would expect a tax cut to do anything other than reduce the severity of a recession.
Here's the point: the recession, and the busted budget, were coming. They were going to hit no matter what the current administration did. The Bush2 taxcuts lessened the severity of the recession, and might have REDUCED the extent of the deficit [1]. There is a reason they call it the business cycle! If any politician is going to be assigned credit/blame for the timing of the current trough in the cycle, it would have to be one of his predecessors.
There is absolutely nothing an administration can do that is more harmful to national security than to use security classifications for political ends. Unfortunately it is very hard to believe this government when it says 'trust me'.
All very true. All that cynicism wasn't built in a day. Again, Bush2 (and all of us) is reaping the harvest sowed by his predecessors in that office.
Unfortunately, this isn't a Republican or Democratic problem; this is a US problem. We have allowed our government to get away with a lot of secrecy and thus a lot of wrongdoing in the name of National Security. When my parents were young, It was the Germans and the Japanese. Then it was the Godless Commies. For a while it was the War on Drugs. Now it's Rogue States and Terrorists. All very real, and all very convenient for the well intentioned folks who think it would be so much easier to do their jobs if it weren't for the citizens asking all those pesky questions. Convenient, also, for the people who are trying to cover up deliberate malfeasance.
[1] It might also have increased the deficit. I haven't tried to estimate the effects. The point is that it is equally rediculous to ascribe either effect to it.
If you LOOK american [1], you should be able to teach English in Taiwan. You could make a bit more than enough to live on, and living somewhere is far better than being a tourist there [2]. My inlaws have been trying to get me to do that, but I'm making significantly better money here.
I suspect that you could do the same thing in Japan, and most of the Orient.
If you are looking for technical work which will further your career, things may be a little harder. I know that the big investment banks have operations around the world, and use lots of expensive IT, and lend people between countries at least occasionally. This is a bad time to be looking for that kind of job, though, and if you want to have a life, and see your surroundings, you don't want to work there.
[1] You don't have to BE a native English speaker, just look like one. If you look Chinese, you will have a hard time convincing the locals that you speak proper English, even if you grew up here and speak no Chinese!
[2]If you want to learn about the place, rather than simply see the sights and move on.
I kid you not, wordstar probably NEVER crashes on them.:)
Wordstar 3.x used to crash every few hours on DOS 1.2. Wordstar was better on CPM. That's probably because those early Wordstars were ports from CPM. Wordstar 5.something never crashed for me on DOS 5.something. Of course, I didn't use it nearly as much as I did the older versions. (Same hardware, by the way; intel 8088 in a Leading Edge model D.)
I can already use the same password for all my computer accounts if I want to. Or not, if I want to. It seems to me that Passport won't improve on that.
And I believe you can get motherboards for other CPUs with AGP and sATA.
If you can point me to a link for PPC or MIPS motherboards with PCI busses, which use AT or ATX power supplies, I'd be very happy.
You're just going to have to pay four times as much. x86 systems are cheap because millions of people buy them...
There's some truth in that. I've found motherboards for Alpha's, but they cost over $1000, so were a little hard to justify. The problem was that the manufacturer didn't want his motherboards competing with his assembled machines, I think.
... WinNT was originally intended to be cross-platform. 3.51 was released for x86, PPC, Alpha, MIPS, and I think one other.
Alpha, MIPS and x86 I know about. PPC I hadn't heard about. Was that for IBM's RS6000 workstations? I don't think PPC support was still there by NT4.something.
Sounds as if ``customize'' means ``call the functions with arbitrary arguments''. That's pretty much standard for libraries, I think. That's not ``change the functionality'', which is how I had originally interpreted what you said.
I picked Solaris as being a platform on which MS once supported IE [1]. I believe that MS no longer does that. There are a LOT of non-windows platforms out there. Solaris is one, AIX is another, IRIX and Linux and the BSDs are others, then there are the Macs, then there are the palm-tops and embedded devices (some of which are candidates for Mozilla, or Gecko). If you can't run your app on any of these, you're limiting your user pool. If you can use this on Mac today, will MS make it available there tomorrow? Remember, they once had IE on Solaris.
... yes, it is distributable.
Somehow I suspect that we are using freely distributable in very different ways.
Having the source code is a big deal for ``distributable'', since it means that someone can make it run on his platform, I could make it run on my platform, and so on. No source code means that it only runs where MS allows it to this week.
So, you have in IE a library which you can call to render things onto the screen, IF you are developing for Windows only. I'm glad you are so easily pleased.
[1] Never saw it myself, but was told by a usually reliable source that MSIE 4.x was available for Solaris. If it still is, it isn't current enough to be relevant to the topic at hand.
>> Actually, US soldiers have a fairly good reputation in this area. Most of the GIs behave more or less as they would at home
>So then we have nothing to fear from an international court.
We have nothing to fear from any court which follows our standards for acceptable behavior, and our standards for justice. How about a sharia court, run by an appointee from Armpitistan? How about a UN court run by that same appointee? The UN is an organization of enemies of the US. Even the countries which are not dedicated to our destruction, and pass as civilized, generally have radically different legal systems. Bad as our legal system is, most of these others are worse. Ours (and to a lesser extent, the British system from which it sprang) begins with the intent to protect the individual from the mob, and from the government. That second clause is where the British system is a bit weaker.
Wars play out internationally, so an international body is required when someone commits a war crime.
I suspect that most folks who say this are thinking of the Neuremberg trials, where we let the British and Soviets in on the action. They had helped defeat the Nazis, and so it would have been hard to justify not letting them participate. It seems obvious to me that for most of the times where US troops have been dispatched to act as mercenaries for the UN, this is a false analogy.
Think about it from the US perspective:
1) We won. The Nazis had lost.
2) Point (1) means we are the good guys. The Nazis were the bad guys.
3) The ``allies'' in our recent police actions haven't contributed much, as far as we are concerned. I'm sure it's more than they wanted to contribute, but their reluctance dosn't make it look better.
4) A trial in a UN court would be at the urging of the defeated party, and he wouldn't be satisfied unless he packed the court with his allies.
5) The UN considers Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Syria and Uganda (and I think North Korea) to be our moral equivalent.
Points (1) and (2) are humor. Points (3) and (4) are serious matters, and I think they explain why a UN court is a non-starter for us. Point (5) explains part of why I view the UN as an enemy organization.
>>I seem to recall that some use MSIE as a component architecture to develop generalized applications in much the same way, but I can't think of any examples of this right now.
>Good examples would be Oddpost [oddpost.com], an email app that launches from the web, and RhymBox [rhymbox.com], a Jabber client.
From the Oddpost website:
Oddpost requires Internet Explorer 5.0 (or above) for Windows.
Gee, I guess I could run that at work where I have no use for it, but I don't have Windows or IE at home, where I might want to use it. Guess they should have used something multiplatform, that they could distribute with their application. Like Mozilla.
>> Let's see... can I embed IE into my web app?
>>Nope.
Yes you can. I've done it before, and I currently use three different programs with IE integrated.
Wow. We must be using the word ``embed'' completely differently. I had always thought of ``embed a in b'' as meaning something along the lines of: ``Make the source for a an include file for b.'' Are you saying that you can call the IE library (dll?) from your program? Can you do it if you aren't using Windows? Can you redistribute it? Freely? Can you (or your agent) fix it if it is broken?
>>Can I modify IE in case I need additional functionality?
>>Nope.
>Yup, you sure can. I run a customized version of IE for a few special projects.
Wow. We must be using the word ``customize'' completely differently. I had always thought of ``customize c'' as meaning ``change the program c''. I'm not sure how you're using it. Has Uncle Gates let you use the source, Luke?
>All in all, I gotta say this was a *very* professional troll. Blatantly wrong, and intentionally inflammatory.
I disagree. I might have said that about your post, if I wasn't so polite, but certainly not about the post you replied to.
Please let me know how you're embedding IE, and how I can do it on, say, Solaris; and how you have modified IE, and where I can get the (redistributable) source.
This effectively gives US soldiers carte blanche to rape, pillage and burn...
Actually, US soldiers have a fairly good reputation in this area. Most of the GIs behave more or less as they would at home.
Some years ago I met an old Chinese soldier who took me into his house, fed me dinner, and gave me gifts, all because I was American. He told me that American soldiers were the best disciplined and most reliable in the world. They followed orders even when no-one was looking! That, apparently, was as un-Chinese as you could get. Thirty years after observing this, he was still astonished.
Of course, this old fellow was comparing regular army soldiers to Chinese bandits (the KMT and the competition had common origins in organized crime). We shouldn't forget about the times that US soldiers have done wrong; My Lai is probably the most famous, and our soldiers have embarrased us on Guam several times recently. This kind of thing makes the news because it isn't normal, and the US military has been very determined about dealing harshly with the evildoers it finds in its ranks. If the Army sends you overseas and you rape a local girl, you're going to wish you had brought her home and done it where the US civilian courts could punish you.
... US has demanded... concessions that no US military personnel can be tried for war crimes on UN missions.''
So, you want us to send our soldiers as mercenaries to wipe your behind for you, and then you expect us to turn our soldiers over to whatever butcher is running the world court this year? We are not amused. Don't forget, the UN is filled with nations that want to destroy us (and you, too, if you're in Europe).
... I despair about a nation that claims to be the home of Democracy.
You aren't despairing about us, then. Greece was the birthplace of democracy, but democracy is unstable, and never lasts long anywhere. The US has always been a republic. Insofar as we can avoid democracy, we have a chance to keep our freedoms.
... what kind of noises would be coming out of the US if American citizens were being held in similar conditions...
Our State Department would do nothing of consequence. If it became a common practice to treat Americans thus in some country, the government would advise us not to travel there. If a US citizen abroad gets involved in a revolutionary group, or some sort of criminal activity, the US government generally turns its back on him. They didn't even take any effective action to deal with Iran during the hostage mess when Carter was president, and those guys were government employees!
... they... only use roughly 25% of the dynamic range of a CD.
It really doesn't matter for most of us. My stereos won't play it any differently, how ever they mix it. My cheap stuff just doesn't have the sort of dynamic range that a CD is capable of storing, and my ears can barely hear the range my cheap equipment CAN play. When I listen in the car, it might as well be mono, since the road noise drowns out all the detail that I can hear when we're stopped.
I realize that for less than a thousand dollars I could get a stereo that would sound WAY better to you. I wouldn't hear the difference. By the way, I've had my hearing checked recently, and it's normal. My ``problem'' isn't bad hearing, or bad equipment, it's bad attitude: I don't care that much.
My point is that there are a LOT more of us who don't care than there are of the folks who care enough to spend the big bucks. You probably spend a lot more on music than ten people like me, but I bet you're still buying the stuff that was mixed by ``... the braindead sound engineers who optimize for radio play rather than home audio...''. The big studios can get away with putting out stuff that is technically crap for the same reason that they can get away with putting out stuff that is artistically crap: enough folks just don't care about quality, and so they buy crap.
I'm at least not contributing to the problem: I buy used CDs, I go to concerts, I download music that is posted to the web by the musicians, but I don't buy (new) music that is commercially distributed. The last time I bought a new CD, I wrote out a check to the artist during the intermission, and he handed me the CD.
Language is probably part of the reason that Linux is catching on there. Look here and here, for a start. They've been working on the problem for a while, and are as likely to make progress as is MS. Maybe more likely; I doubt that MS is very interested in localizing their products, even in Hindi. I suspect that Tamil is a complete non-starter, as far as MS is concerned.
The fact that this decision will help to produce a homegrown hightech industry is a great bonus that reliance on MS would have precluded, but it certainly isn't the only reason for going this route. It's certainly going to be good for us
Software is not sentient by any stretch of the imagination.
That's true. Of course, folks used to say that about their slaves.
... but comparing software licensing to slavery is a bit overboard.
Under slavery, it was obviously the slave that suffered. Less obviously, the slave owner suffered. When you do something immoral, you have to suffer lost respect from others, you have to lie to yourself and others to justify it, and so on. It probably seemed a very attractive way to suffer.
Here, it is the user of the software who suffers, in a way analogous to the way the slaveowner suffered. The comparison is overboard if you're thinking about the slaves. It seems more reasonable if you're thinking about the masters.
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Ideas are fundamentally different. They can be shared in a way that just isn't possible for rocks and bones.
I've always believed that most of the software run on the big iron was problem-specific and machine specific. IBM must be planning to provide some custom programming to make this fly, and I'm guessing that's an important part of the profit plan.
But who's on first?!
In general, no. In particular, it can. If you want people to treat you like a grownup, it's a bright idea not to wear clothing that makes you look like the fat kid's little brother in hand-me-downs.
When you are making a first impression, remember that appearance is the ONLY thing that people can SEE. Before they hear your voice, before they find out what you know, they see what you look like. If you are the janitor, no-one will care if your teeshirt is smudged. If you aren't the janitor, do you want strangers to think you are? Will it increase their confidence in you? Wear clothing which is appropriate to the time and place.
Someone else pointed out that people at the top and bottom get to wear whatever they like. The ones at the top set the dress code, the ones at the bottom no-one cares about. The ones in the middle must follow the dress code. Ross Perot (owner of EDS, I think) could wear what the janitor wears, if he thought it was more comfortable than his suit. He doesn't, and that should tell you something about comfort.
Folks here keep saying that suits are uncomfortable. Mine aren't, and I've gotten most of them from the second hand stores, so we can't give the tailor any credit. You can buy them cheaper than you can buy denim, and the suits are generally in better condition than the jeans. You will be comfortable in whatever you are accustomed to. If you have chosen to be accustomed to clothing that makes you look rebellious, unreliable and immature, you haven't chosen wisely. Unless, of course, you are rebellious, unreliable and immature, in which case you are wiser than you knew, and the rest of us can continue to rely on appearances.
Never had to, but I've done it by choice. Suits are comfortable! Loose but not baggy fit, doesn't bind, light-weight fabrics that are great for hot weather, available at the thrift shop for less money than the raggedy blue jeans that everyone wants; the list of advantages goes on and on.
Think about this: the bigwigs in your company (any company) set the dress code, and they can set it to be whatever THEY want to wear. They could choose sackcloth and ashes, or jeans and t-shirts with rude sayings, or something comfortable and impressive looking.
Think about the Arabs. They wear woolen bedsheets, more or less, and the Arabian peninsula makes Texas summers seem COLD. Wear one layer of light colored, loose fitting clothing of a thin weave. Sounds like dress pants and a white shirt. If you must wear a blazer, be sure it's unlined. Linen is great for this.
There's something wrong with this. Think about it: if you sell everything at a loss, are you going to make it up on volume? You probably were using sales as a proxy for profits, and that's great, but what good does it do me the stockholder for the company to make a profit if I never share it?
The value of the stock, ultimately, is nothing but the present (i.e., discounted) value of the stream of future DIVIDENDS. Dividends are vital, since if the company doesn't pay out something, someday, why own it?
Growth does matter, since it will someday enable the company to pay out bigger dividends. Yes, I am aware that there are companies which have never paid a dividend, but still have non-zero stock prices. The market is valuing the expectation that someday, they will stop growing and start paying out, or valueing their ability to attract the ``bigger fools''.
``Bigger fools'' will pay more than the present value of future dividends for a stock, in the hope of finding another bigger fool who will pay even more than they did. When there are enough bigger fools in the market, they attract even more, and the result is an asset price bubble. This behavior is self-limiting, since the finite population of bigger fools is eventually exhausted, and the last bigger fool gets badly burned.
Leaving aside the bigger fools, there is no reason to pay a cent for a company which has never paid a dividend and never will. It can make very good sense for companies to suspend dividends for several years at a time to finance investment which will increase (or enable) future dividends. Growth which doesn't in some reasonable time enable or increase dividends is actually reducing shareholder value.
No, no, no ... it's: ``... we keep an eye on our money!"
That guy's problem is that he's running a P4. I have one at work, running Windows, and it is deathly slow. It pauses for 5+ seconds on context switches, and is generally a dog. This 1.8GHz P4 is worse than a 900MHz P3.
True. I don't think that has anything to do with Debian, really.
People keep saying that the Debian installer is HARD, but I'm not sure I believe it. I switched to Debian Potato for my laptop about a year ago, and recently upgraded to Woody. I've installed Woody on another box, also. I didn't find the Debian installer any harder than the Redhat or Mandrake installers. It is different, but no harder.
Text mode is neither harder nor easier to use than GUI. What makes for an easy installation is great hardware detection and sensible defaults. Everything just worked [1], so I guess the hardware detection was good enough. When I didn't know what to choose, I took the default, and have been happy with it.
One point that I haven't seen anyone make yet is that with Debian, it really doesn't matter whether you install some un-needed packages, or forget to install some that you do need. As long as you have apt installed, you can get (or remove) whatever you need. With Redhat, I learned to install EVERYTHING, because installing one thing later can lead you into RPM-dependency-hell.
Now you're changing the subject! Debian has the same applications as the other Linux distributions, and thus should be equally easy to use (assuming those other distributions have apt). Actually, it is easier for me, since I bump into fewer bugs in stable than in Mandrake or Redhat.
[1] Everything just worked except sound, of course, but that never worked out of the box for me with Redhat or Mandrake, either, on any of my machines.
Well, there is correlation but not causation there. Basic Macro, the sort we teach to the undergrads, tells us that lowering taxes raises GDP. Reality isn't quite that tidy, but no-one would expect a tax cut to do anything other than reduce the severity of a recession.
Here's the point: the recession, and the busted budget, were coming. They were going to hit no matter what the current administration did. The Bush2 taxcuts lessened the severity of the recession, and might have REDUCED the extent of the deficit [1]. There is a reason they call it the business cycle! If any politician is going to be assigned credit/blame for the timing of the current trough in the cycle, it would have to be one of his predecessors.
There is absolutely nothing an administration can do that is more harmful to national security than to use security classifications for political ends. Unfortunately it is very hard to believe this government when it says 'trust me'.
All very true. All that cynicism wasn't built in a day. Again, Bush2 (and all of us) is reaping the harvest sowed by his predecessors in that office.
Unfortunately, this isn't a Republican or Democratic problem; this is a US problem. We have allowed our government to get away with a lot of secrecy and thus a lot of wrongdoing in the name of National Security. When my parents were young, It was the Germans and the Japanese. Then it was the Godless Commies. For a while it was the War on Drugs. Now it's Rogue States and Terrorists. All very real, and all very convenient for the well intentioned folks who think it would be so much easier to do their jobs if it weren't for the citizens asking all those pesky questions. Convenient, also, for the people who are trying to cover up deliberate malfeasance.
[1] It might also have increased the deficit. I haven't tried to estimate the effects. The point is that it is equally rediculous to ascribe either effect to it.
If you are looking for technical work which will further your career, things may be a little harder. I know that the big investment banks have operations around the world, and use lots of expensive IT, and lend people between countries at least occasionally. This is a bad time to be looking for that kind of job, though, and if you want to have a life, and see your surroundings, you don't want to work there.
[1] You don't have to BE a native English speaker, just look like one. If you look Chinese, you will have a hard time convincing the locals that you speak proper English, even if you grew up here and speak no Chinese!
[2]If you want to learn about the place, rather than simply see the sights and move on.
Wordstar 3.x used to crash every few hours on DOS 1.2. Wordstar was better on CPM. That's probably because those early Wordstars were ports from CPM. Wordstar 5.something never crashed for me on DOS 5.something. Of course, I didn't use it nearly as much as I did the older versions. (Same hardware, by the way; intel 8088 in a Leading Edge model D.)
I can already use the same password for all my computer accounts if I want to. Or not, if I want to. It seems to me that Passport won't improve on that.
If you can point me to a link for PPC or MIPS motherboards with PCI busses, which use AT or ATX power supplies, I'd be very happy.
You're just going to have to pay four times as much. x86 systems are cheap because millions of people buy them ...
There's some truth in that. I've found motherboards for Alpha's, but they cost over $1000, so were a little hard to justify. The problem was that the manufacturer didn't want his motherboards competing with his assembled machines, I think.
Alpha, MIPS and x86 I know about. PPC I hadn't heard about. Was that for IBM's RS6000 workstations? I don't think PPC support was still there by NT4.something.
>Mozilla?
No, he said interesting.
(Disclosure: This was posted using Mozilla.)
I picked Solaris as being a platform on which MS once supported IE [1]. I believe that MS no longer does that. There are a LOT of non-windows platforms out there. Solaris is one, AIX is another, IRIX and Linux and the BSDs are others, then there are the Macs, then there are the palm-tops and embedded devices (some of which are candidates for Mozilla, or Gecko). If you can't run your app on any of these, you're limiting your user pool. If you can use this on Mac today, will MS make it available there tomorrow? Remember, they once had IE on Solaris.
Somehow I suspect that we are using freely distributable in very different ways.
Having the source code is a big deal for ``distributable'', since it means that someone can make it run on his platform, I could make it run on my platform, and so on. No source code means that it only runs where MS allows it to this week.
So, you have in IE a library which you can call to render things onto the screen, IF you are developing for Windows only. I'm glad you are so easily pleased.
[1] Never saw it myself, but was told by a usually reliable source that MSIE 4.x was available for Solaris. If it still is, it isn't current enough to be relevant to the topic at hand.
>So then we have nothing to fear from an international court.
We have nothing to fear from any court which follows our standards for acceptable behavior, and our standards for justice. How about a sharia court, run by an appointee from Armpitistan? How about a UN court run by that same appointee? The UN is an organization of enemies of the US. Even the countries which are not dedicated to our destruction, and pass as civilized, generally have radically different legal systems. Bad as our legal system is, most of these others are worse. Ours (and to a lesser extent, the British system from which it sprang) begins with the intent to protect the individual from the mob, and from the government. That second clause is where the British system is a bit weaker.
Wars play out internationally, so an international body is required when someone commits a war crime.
I suspect that most folks who say this are thinking of the Neuremberg trials, where we let the British and Soviets in on the action. They had helped defeat the Nazis, and so it would have been hard to justify not letting them participate. It seems obvious to me that for most of the times where US troops have been dispatched to act as mercenaries for the UN, this is a false analogy.
Think about it from the US perspective:
1) We won. The Nazis had lost.
2) Point (1) means we are the good guys. The Nazis were the bad guys.
3) The ``allies'' in our recent police actions haven't contributed much, as far as we are concerned. I'm sure it's more than they wanted to contribute, but their reluctance dosn't make it look better.
4) A trial in a UN court would be at the urging of the defeated party, and he wouldn't be satisfied unless he packed the court with his allies.
5) The UN considers Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Syria and Uganda (and I think North Korea) to be our moral equivalent.
Points (1) and (2) are humor. Points (3) and (4) are serious matters, and I think they explain why a UN court is a non-starter for us. Point (5) explains part of why I view the UN as an enemy organization.
>Good examples would be Oddpost [oddpost.com], an email app that launches from the web, and RhymBox [rhymbox.com], a Jabber client.
From the Oddpost website:
Gee, I guess I could run that at work where I have no use for it, but I don't have Windows or IE at home, where I might want to use it. Guess they should have used something multiplatform, that they could distribute with their application. Like Mozilla.>>Nope.
Yes you can. I've done it before, and I currently use three different programs with IE integrated.
Wow. We must be using the word ``embed'' completely differently. I had always thought of ``embed a in b'' as meaning something along the lines of: ``Make the source for a an include file for b.'' Are you saying that you can call the IE library (dll?) from your program? Can you do it if you aren't using Windows? Can you redistribute it? Freely? Can you (or your agent) fix it if it is broken?
>>Can I modify IE in case I need additional functionality? >>Nope.
>Yup, you sure can. I run a customized version of IE for a few special projects.
Wow. We must be using the word ``customize'' completely differently. I had always thought of ``customize c'' as meaning ``change the program c''. I'm not sure how you're using it. Has Uncle Gates let you use the source, Luke?
>All in all, I gotta say this was a *very* professional troll. Blatantly wrong, and intentionally inflammatory.
I disagree. I might have said that about your post, if I wasn't so polite, but certainly not about the post you replied to.
Please let me know how you're embedding IE, and how I can do it on, say, Solaris; and how you have modified IE, and where I can get the (redistributable) source.
In other words, YANAL. You Are Not A Lawyer.
As Foghorn Leghorn would say: ``That's a joke, I say, that's a joke, son.''
Actually, US soldiers have a fairly good reputation in this area. Most of the GIs behave more or less as they would at home.
Some years ago I met an old Chinese soldier who took me into his house, fed me dinner, and gave me gifts, all because I was American. He told me that American soldiers were the best disciplined and most reliable in the world. They followed orders even when no-one was looking! That, apparently, was as un-Chinese as you could get. Thirty years after observing this, he was still astonished.
Of course, this old fellow was comparing regular army soldiers to Chinese bandits (the KMT and the competition had common origins in organized crime). We shouldn't forget about the times that US soldiers have done wrong; My Lai is probably the most famous, and our soldiers have embarrased us on Guam several times recently. This kind of thing makes the news because it isn't normal, and the US military has been very determined about dealing harshly with the evildoers it finds in its ranks. If the Army sends you overseas and you rape a local girl, you're going to wish you had brought her home and done it where the US civilian courts could punish you.
So, you want us to send our soldiers as mercenaries to wipe your behind for you, and then you expect us to turn our soldiers over to whatever butcher is running the world court this year? We are not amused. Don't forget, the UN is filled with nations that want to destroy us (and you, too, if you're in Europe).
You aren't despairing about us, then. Greece was the birthplace of democracy, but democracy is unstable, and never lasts long anywhere. The US has always been a republic. Insofar as we can avoid democracy, we have a chance to keep our freedoms.
Our State Department would do nothing of consequence. If it became a common practice to treat Americans thus in some country, the government would advise us not to travel there. If a US citizen abroad gets involved in a revolutionary group, or some sort of criminal activity, the US government generally turns its back on him. They didn't even take any effective action to deal with Iran during the hostage mess when Carter was president, and those guys were government employees!
It really doesn't matter for most of us. My stereos won't play it any differently, how ever they mix it. My cheap stuff just doesn't have the sort of dynamic range that a CD is capable of storing, and my ears can barely hear the range my cheap equipment CAN play. When I listen in the car, it might as well be mono, since the road noise drowns out all the detail that I can hear when we're stopped.
I realize that for less than a thousand dollars I could get a stereo that would sound WAY better to you. I wouldn't hear the difference. By the way, I've had my hearing checked recently, and it's normal. My ``problem'' isn't bad hearing, or bad equipment, it's bad attitude: I don't care that much.
My point is that there are a LOT more of us who don't care than there are of the folks who care enough to spend the big bucks. You probably spend a lot more on music than ten people like me, but I bet you're still buying the stuff that was mixed by ``... the braindead sound engineers who optimize for radio play rather than home audio ...''. The big studios can get away with putting out stuff that is technically crap for the same reason that they can get away with putting out stuff that is artistically crap: enough folks just don't care about quality, and so they buy crap.
I'm at least not contributing to the problem: I buy used CDs, I go to concerts, I download music that is posted to the web by the musicians, but I don't buy (new) music that is commercially distributed. The last time I bought a new CD, I wrote out a check to the artist during the intermission, and he handed me the CD.
These are computer hobbyists! The virgins, at least, are safe.
The fact that this decision will help to produce a homegrown hightech industry is a great bonus that reliance on MS would have precluded, but it certainly isn't the only reason for going this route. It's certainly going to be good for us
That's true. Of course, folks used to say that about their slaves.
Under slavery, it was obviously the slave that suffered. Less obviously, the slave owner suffered. When you do something immoral, you have to suffer lost respect from others, you have to lie to yourself and others to justify it, and so on. It probably seemed a very attractive way to suffer.
Here, it is the user of the software who suffers, in a way analogous to the way the slaveowner suffered. The comparison is overboard if you're thinking about the slaves. It seems more reasonable if you're thinking about the masters.