What's so wrong with Linspire that you don't want them to join your following? I see this attitude everywhere, but I don't understand it. I hope this is something more than the script-kiddie "If grandma can use it then it sux: OSS should be hard to use" attitude.
Because Lindows, Linspire, or whatever you want to call it, sets up users to run as root. That is one of the major mistakes made by MS and is a wide open security hole. Having a bunch of rooted Lindows boxes causing havoc would be a black eye for Linux in general, not just the short-sighted company responsible. When problems start happening, most people are not going to make the distinction between Lindows Linux and more responsible distros - it'll just be Linux. Mandrake is not hard to use, and users are not set up to run as root.
None of us are getting out of here alive. Of course if you die with enough Karma, you get Nirvana for eternity (a great reason for negative mods if ever I heard one).
And yet because of business you can get a job that pays $75,000 a year, have cheap commodity hardware to play on, and live in a world largely shaped by the efforts of 'people like us'.
The point is that the "business" is not the CEO, and the CEO is not the "business." Giving the CEO $20 million per year for an often-failed job does not generate more of those "$75,000 a year" jobs for the rest of us - especially when the CEO decides to pump her bonus by offshoring those jobs. High CEO compensation decreases the number of those jobs, both through redirection of capital (to the CEO) and the loss of business due to poor, overly-compensated management.
On a serious note, why is it that CEOs are rewarded very handsomely for poor performance and failure when the rest of us get fired when we don't get the job done, or even are perceived as not being value for money?
Why indeed? The previous CEO of Northwestern Power made many millions annually and had obscene perks while he drove the company into bankruptcy and devastated the long-term shareholders, who were mostly just regular customers of the utility. After he was fired/resigned, the board of directors attempted to give him a bonus for a year in which he wasn't even employed by the company. That kind of stuff makes me see red.
well, they already upped it to a razor with a fricken battery in the razor handle. It's called the Gillette M3Power !
An editor of a computer-related magazine (of all things) recently reviewed the prototype, too. I can't remember which magazine it was - loss of short-term memory, I guess. Anyway they had a picture of the poor guy's neck when he was finished. It looked like he'd been in a cat fight and lost. Anyone else remember seeing that product review?
Reminds me of the F-15 a.k.a. the "Aluminum Lawn Dart" (or world's most expensive lawn dart) because if you turn off the engine thats what your flight path looks like.
The F-15 wasn't the first to be notable for that. The F-4 Phantom, fondly (or perhaps not so fondly) known as the What-For, had an essentially vertical glide path, but with 18,000 pounds of thrust it somehow managed to fly. The often heard wisecrack was that the F-4 proved that with enough power, you could make a brick fly.
The current political pressure on NASA is to go to the moon and Mars. If NASA has to spend all of its money on that, there's nothing left for Hubble.
It's a good idea for NASA to drag its heels right now. If the administration changes in November, there may be a new, er, vision, and commitments made now may become wasted effort and money.
Hmmm, I guess MS has decided to take a little (read: tiny) more aggressive stance towards piracy, no more automagic updates for you.
When you think about it though, what good does it do MS? These days malware doesn't format your drive and pop up a box saying, "Ha ha. Yer a victem of DorkLord Seth." It uses the box to attack other Windows boxes (and generally cause grief for the rest of the computing world).
If they think denying patches to pirates is anything except self-defeating, they are mistaken. While what remains of their reputation is taking a beating, Microsoft's best policy would be to keep every Windows box as secure as possible - no matter what its legal status. If they want the BSA to go take some names later, well that's their business.
I should have provided an easier link straight to the downloadable stuff. I believe they are adding DOQ data currently. The DLG hydrography data should be available free (from other USGS sources) in SDTS format. You have to find a conversion utility, which is a pain, but it's free in that (non)format. HTH.
I don't know about fire data, but IIRC, DEM data was the first dataset available on the National Map, and SRTM was added recently. AFAIK, it's all free in small enough chunks. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Again, IIRC, hydrography DLG vector data is available through older USGS sources if not the National Map.
What needs to be done, I think, is for the community to create some kind of central portal that makes it easy to find, and then download all of the data.
What data is it that you need and is not available via the USGS National Map? There's a lot there besides topography, and it's constantly adding new datasets.
Granted while it a little out of scope, it indeed proves that there IS another Ontario anywhere else in the world:)
Really, it's not out of scope either. Ontario International Airport is in California not Canada. If you say Ontario in California, at least twenty million people won't be thinking about Canada.
I would say Internet Explorer problems related to spyware installed in the browser make up at least 30% of the calls I take for HP / Compaq desktops, probably more like 40%.
I use Firebird at work (yeah, I know it's dated). One of my co-workers (a major MS fan) has claimed in the past that it is impossible to pick up malware from web browsing unless you do something stupid. He was using IE (as usual) last week and brought a virus into the building. He's looking a little sheepish lately. Unfortunately, our security guy doesn't seem inclined to change the default browser, even after the CERT advisory and some pointed suggestions that he do so.
Go penguins! And little BSD daemons. And that... Mozilla lizard thing.:-)
Quick, get Peter Jackson to work on this. Imagine the battle scene: Little red guys with pitchforks mounted on Mozillards charging forward as chain-mailed penguins scale the walls of Redmonds Deep.
The article was about software companies, the thread was about big business. Space Cadet was part of the poster's nick. Duh. Get a user account coward, and take your lumps you clueless sack of byproducts. No offense, of course.
Those greedy software companies! How dare they write software just to make money! They should give the software away, since they're so rich and we're so poor. No fair, greed!
Hey there, Space Cadet. I thought the thread was about corporate American business in general and its practices, not just software companies. But if you insist on making it software-specific, there's no way I can pass up a chance to point out Microsoft's 80+ percent profit margins and 50+ billion in cash. You do know that American grocery retailers have a 1 to 2 percent profit margin, don't you? Greed in software companies? Of course not, I work in software. I would never suggest any such thing.
The hemorraging of outsourced jobs will stop once the first big security problem arises.
Ha. Cisco already had their code stolen via their Chinese coders, and they aren't the only company with problems. If you read the trade rags like InfoWorld and ComputerWorld, you know that the CxOs say that the danger to security and IP in offshoring IT work is just another cost of doing business. Then they say they can't do anything about it because all their competitors are doing the same thing. It's just hollow talk, and it's all about the short-term money. Never overestimate the intelligence of a CEO.
Expect large coverups and wild finger pointing to protect the management's butts when the stuff hits the fan, nothing more. When B of A gets 0wned, I expect to hear the CEO say, "But our IT workers never warned us about this, so I'm firing every American IT worker we still have." The financial pundits will love it, tout it on TV as new cost savings, and the stock will go up some more. The management will get bonuses. The B of A customers will be screwed. Same old stuff.
Of course nothing is ever truly original, but.NET is certainly much more innovative than anything else MS has done in the last five years.
Is that really saying much? I don't pay a lot of attention to MS development anymore, but I've been subjected to the.NET buzzword for years as some incredible, overarching, be-all, end-all, and cure-all for everything under the Sun (pun intended). From what I've read, it sounds like another VM. All the.NET fanatics may now attack and correct me.
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What's so wrong with Linspire that you don't want them to join your following? I see this attitude everywhere, but I don't understand it. I hope this is something more than the script-kiddie "If grandma can use it then it sux: OSS should be hard to use" attitude.
Because Lindows, Linspire, or whatever you want to call it, sets up users to run as root. That is one of the major mistakes made by MS and is a wide open security hole. Having a bunch of rooted Lindows boxes causing havoc would be a black eye for Linux in general, not just the short-sighted company responsible. When problems start happening, most people are not going to make the distinction between Lindows Linux and more responsible distros - it'll just be Linux. Mandrake is not hard to use, and users are not set up to run as root.
Yep. Everything is dying. Aint entropy a bitch? :)
None of us are getting out of here alive. Of course if you die with enough Karma, you get Nirvana for eternity (a great reason for negative mods if ever I heard one).
And yet because of business you can get a job that pays $75,000 a year, have cheap commodity hardware to play on, and live in a world largely shaped by the efforts of 'people like us'.
The point is that the "business" is not the CEO, and the CEO is not the "business." Giving the CEO $20 million per year for an often-failed job does not generate more of those "$75,000 a year" jobs for the rest of us - especially when the CEO decides to pump her bonus by offshoring those jobs. High CEO compensation decreases the number of those jobs, both through redirection of capital (to the CEO) and the loss of business due to poor, overly-compensated management.
I'm a software engineer who recieved my Masters in CS and am about to complete an MBA as well, so I've got some perspective from both sides.
Turn back from the dark side before it's too late. (Only slightly kidding.)
On a serious note, why is it that CEOs are rewarded very handsomely for poor performance and failure when the rest of us get fired when we don't get the job done, or even are perceived as not being value for money?
Why indeed? The previous CEO of Northwestern Power made many millions annually and had obscene perks while he drove the company into bankruptcy and devastated the long-term shareholders, who were mostly just regular customers of the utility. After he was fired/resigned, the board of directors attempted to give him a bonus for a year in which he wasn't even employed by the company. That kind of stuff makes me see red.
well, they already upped it to a razor with a fricken battery in the razor handle. It's called the Gillette M3Power !
An editor of a computer-related magazine (of all things) recently reviewed the prototype, too. I can't remember which magazine it was - loss of short-term memory, I guess. Anyway they had a picture of the poor guy's neck when he was finished. It looked like he'd been in a cat fight and lost. Anyone else remember seeing that product review?
Reminds me of the F-15 a.k.a. the "Aluminum Lawn Dart" (or world's most expensive lawn dart) because if you turn off the engine thats what your flight path looks like.
The F-15 wasn't the first to be notable for that. The F-4 Phantom, fondly (or perhaps not so fondly) known as the What-For, had an essentially vertical glide path, but with 18,000 pounds of thrust it somehow managed to fly. The often heard wisecrack was that the F-4 proved that with enough power, you could make a brick fly.
The current political pressure on NASA is to go to the moon and Mars. If NASA has to spend all of its money on that, there's nothing left for Hubble.
It's a good idea for NASA to drag its heels right now. If the administration changes in November, there may be a new, er, vision, and commitments made now may become wasted effort and money.
It refers to the Microsoft policy of releasing security vulnerabilities on the second Tuesday of each month instead of the time they become available.
Microsoft is releasing security vulnerabilities? Well, there's the problem. They should be releasing security fixes instead.
Have a 5-vote output buffer. When it's full, write a random vote to the disk.
I don't want my vote buffered at all, especially by some oft-patched Visual Basic code running on an OS known for random crashes.
Thats why Microsoft also makes a Windows version.
Microsoft doing Windows versions of software. What will they think of next? :)
Hmmm, I guess MS has decided to take a little (read: tiny) more aggressive stance towards piracy, no more automagic updates for you.
When you think about it though, what good does it do MS? These days malware doesn't format your drive and pop up a box saying, "Ha ha. Yer a victem of DorkLord Seth." It uses the box to attack other Windows boxes (and generally cause grief for the rest of the computing world).
If they think denying patches to pirates is anything except self-defeating, they are mistaken. While what remains of their reputation is taking a beating, Microsoft's best policy would be to keep every Windows box as secure as possible - no matter what its legal status. If they want the BSA to go take some names later, well that's their business.
I should have provided an easier link straight to the downloadable stuff. I believe they are adding DOQ data currently. The DLG hydrography data should be available free (from other USGS sources) in SDTS format. You have to find a conversion utility, which is a pain, but it's free in that (non)format. HTH.
I don't know about fire data, but IIRC, DEM data was the first dataset available on the National Map, and SRTM was added recently. AFAIK, it's all free in small enough chunks. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Again, IIRC, hydrography DLG vector data is available through older USGS sources if not the National Map.
What needs to be done, I think, is for the community to create some kind of central portal that makes it easy to find, and then download all of the data.
What data is it that you need and is not available via the USGS National Map? There's a lot there besides topography, and it's constantly adding new datasets.
Granted while it a little out of scope, it indeed proves that there IS another Ontario anywhere else in the world :)
Really, it's not out of scope either. Ontario International Airport is in California not Canada. If you say Ontario in California, at least twenty million people won't be thinking about Canada.
I would say Internet Explorer problems related to spyware installed in the browser make up at least 30% of the calls I take for HP / Compaq desktops, probably more like 40%.
I use Firebird at work (yeah, I know it's dated). One of my co-workers (a major MS fan) has claimed in the past that it is impossible to pick up malware from web browsing unless you do something stupid. He was using IE (as usual) last week and brought a virus into the building. He's looking a little sheepish lately. Unfortunately, our security guy doesn't seem inclined to change the default browser, even after the CERT advisory and some pointed suggestions that he do so.
Go penguins! And little BSD daemons. And that... Mozilla lizard thing. :-)
Quick, get Peter Jackson to work on this. Imagine the battle scene: Little red guys with pitchforks mounted on Mozillards charging forward as chain-mailed penguins scale the walls of Redmonds Deep.
The article was about software companies, the thread was about big business. Space Cadet was part of the poster's nick. Duh. Get a user account coward, and take your lumps you clueless sack of byproducts. No offense, of course.
Those greedy software companies! How dare they write software just to make money! They should give the software away, since they're so rich and we're so poor. No fair, greed!
Hey there, Space Cadet. I thought the thread was about corporate American business in general and its practices, not just software companies. But if you insist on making it software-specific, there's no way I can pass up a chance to point out Microsoft's 80+ percent profit margins and 50+ billion in cash. You do know that American grocery retailers have a 1 to 2 percent profit margin, don't you? Greed in software companies? Of course not, I work in software. I would never suggest any such thing.
Why don't companys just change their values instead of trying to screw people?
The short answer, and the long answer, is greed.
Now that is insightful, informative, truthful, and underrated.
The hemorraging of outsourced jobs will stop once the first big security problem arises.
Ha. Cisco already had their code stolen via their Chinese coders, and they aren't the only company with problems. If you read the trade rags like InfoWorld and ComputerWorld, you know that the CxOs say that the danger to security and IP in offshoring IT work is just another cost of doing business. Then they say they can't do anything about it because all their competitors are doing the same thing. It's just hollow talk, and it's all about the short-term money. Never overestimate the intelligence of a CEO.
Expect large coverups and wild finger pointing to protect the management's butts when the stuff hits the fan, nothing more. When B of A gets 0wned, I expect to hear the CEO say, "But our IT workers never warned us about this, so I'm firing every American IT worker we still have." The financial pundits will love it, tout it on TV as new cost savings, and the stock will go up some more. The management will get bonuses. The B of A customers will be screwed. Same old stuff.
Of course nothing is ever truly original, but .NET is certainly much more innovative than anything else MS has done in the last five years.
Is that really saying much? I don't pay a lot of attention to MS development anymore, but I've been subjected to the .NET buzzword for years as some incredible, overarching, be-all, end-all, and cure-all for everything under the Sun (pun intended). From what I've read, it sounds like another VM. All the .NET fanatics may now attack and correct me.