That's a ridicules extreme, something only someone losing an arugment would make. There is always a balance somewhere - sometimes we swing too far in one direction or another (B of A might be a good example of going too far), but marketplace keeps searching for that balance.
Only someone with a losing argument would try to dismiss its logical conclusion or a perfectly valid and common example. The "marketplace" also includes regulations put in place by the government.
And you are failing to see (or choosing to ignore) that the American worker IS the American consumer. For the most part they are one and the same.
Pay attention. I never claimed the two were different. I said that when the auto industry claimed that American jobs were being lost to foreigners, the government stepped into help. Same for the steel industry. Now, they won't step into help because it's the corporations that control what legislation is enacted, and the corporations support the exportation of these American jobs for short-term gain.
The answer is NONE if in doing so they will go out of business and lose ALL the jobs company creates in that nation.
Cadillac is still in business despite being undersold by a number of companies. I also remember the Buy American campaigns (not that they did much good). I find your blanket assertions that all companies are forced into a race to the bottom, and that it's the American consumer doing it to be specious. I would gladly buy (more expensive) American made shirts like I used to - if only I could find some. The retailers don't give me that choice.
The responsibility to give them the low prices they demand, or go out of business (because no will buy their higher priced products) and cost the nation even more jobs.
Given that logic, every American worker should be replaced because someone in the world will work for less, and some company might save a nickel. B of A was highly profitable when it began outsourcing jobs; they were in no danger of going out of business.
So, if it really bothered people, back in the 70's (anybody but me remember way back then?), when the U.S. automotive industry was on the verge of collapse from competition from foriegn competitors. How did they survive? Was there a groundswell of patriotism that caused people to buy higher cost, lower quality products? Keep dreaming.
Yes, I remember. The government placed quotas on foreign imports. The government raised tariffs on foreign imports. The government bailed out Chrysler with $4 billion. The difference is that back then it was the American companies being hurt. Now it's just the American worker being hurt by American companies, and that's okay with the government.
After reading through this thread, I can't help but laugh. So many here claim Linux is too hard for the average user and then launch into multi-step, unintuitive, arcane, *easy-to-do* steps needed to secure a user account in Windows. And don't forget to edit the registry and reboot.:)
Meanwhile, the Linuxsecurity site shows that Linux distros have multiple security advisories every week.
Your link shows two distros admitting vulnerabilities. Why are you comparing Linux distros to Windows? Windows is, supposedly, an OS, and IE is, supposedly, an integrated unremovable part of it. If you want to compare kumquats to gnumquats, then do a comparison between Windows and the Linux kernel (not distros).
The sabot reference in the grandparent post is to "sabotage," where workers angry over automation replacing their jobs threw their wooden shoes into the machinery to destroy it.
So did these angry workers rattle their sabots before throwing them into the machinery? I think the OP probably meant *rattle your sabers*, which is inappropriate anyway. I doubt many slashbots sport dueling scars - paper cuts, maybe. *Rattle your keyboards* would be closer.
Mmmm... not good enough if you're writing a counting algorithm. (We added a new condition into the results, which was "no result")
I assume that has something to do with *instant runoff* or whatever it's called, but in the U.S., a voting system should be far simpler. It should not report winners - only totals. The election officials should report the winners.
Generic term or not, if you name your competing operating system anything that even remotely sounds like Windows, you're begging for a Microsoft law suit.
I doubt that rhyme has much to do with it. They probably wouldn't sue if you named your distro "Pintos", although the bloat and gas quotient would be the same.
I'm thinking "Lindoze" would be great. If Microsoft went after them for similarity to "Windoze", I'd laught till I fell off my chair.
While that's funny, the fact that Lindows is far too much like Windows is not. The run-as-root implementation grafts all the worst problems of Windows onto a Linux distro. I'm going to (ackk, gag) root (no pun intended) for Microsoft on this one. Lindows (by any name) needs to go away for the greater good of Linux.
My point was that Dune was not about new technology. Dune takes place in the year 10,000... Considering that, the technology we're presented with is very basic. Besides moving into space (one giant leap, I know) nothing major is presented.
Let's see . . . we have FTL travel (the mainstay of scifi), micromechanics, nanotechnology, cloning, suitcase nukes, anti-gravity, force fields, terraforming, and I'm sure I could come up with more if I thought about it for a bit. Seems fairly techy to me, especially given when it was written.
Spice is perhaps the biggest technological breakthrough, and its properties are more magical than sci-fi. I mean, a drug that not only extends your life, but grants you visions of the future, and in the case of your offspring, gives them memories of all their ancestors?
Like spice, most real drugs have natural sources, e.g., digitalis, but many are synthesized. Your "magic" properties of spice were available only to those who had been genetically altered by centuries of controlled breeding or genetic engineering - again, kinda techy. Was it Clarke or Asimov who said, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"?
Okay, fine, if that's true, then Dune isn't sci-fi. It's something a lot bigger and better. That's the point I was trying to make. . . . I didn't mean to insult the... fictional science.... in Dune. I meant to distance it from the general use of the term "sci-fi" . ..
I think I see the gist of what you're saying, and I agree that Dune is far better than most - indeed, it's one of my all-time favorites. I doubt any of the great scifi authors set out to write *science fiction*; they set out to write a great story. It's the editors and readers who categorize those works, and given the futuristic and mostly believable story (which separates it from fantasy), Dune fits into the scifi genre. I'm not going to argue about what tripe the SciFi Channel calls scifi - I've made plenty of comments about that in the past.
I'm not trying to sound elitist, in fact I don't read much at all (especially compared to mighty KFG), but the six Dune books (I'm not counting the new trash, heh) were not really about sci-fi. Sci-fi was just a good excuse for Herbert to share some cool ideas about politics, drugs, the meaning of life, etc.
Hey, that gives me an idea; an enterprising author could take some cool ideas about politics, drugs, the meaning of life, etc., place them in a fictional future combined with all kinds of new technology and social advances/deviations and call it science fiction!
I just happen to be one of the few who feel that they did a pretty good job translating Dune to the screen. I know I'm in the minority on that one.
Make that a minority of two at least. The Lynch movie version of Dune made me sick over what they had done to Herbert's vision. The people in broadcloth uniforms running across the sand, brandishing suitcase handles, and killing the enemy by yelling at them was the ultimate insult to a great book.
Farscape is on miniseries probably becuase they didn't want to risk the investment of an entire season - sort of testing the waters.
Farscape has already tested the waters. When SciFi cancelled it, they caught hell from the viewers. Perhaps the SciFi Channel is just trying to put science fiction back in their programming?
A sacrifice for fans will get them a huge amount of respect that would probably pay off with higher viewership of the channel in general in the long run.
It certainly won't be any sacrifice for them. The viewers will be there, and SciFi will make money. If they regain those lost Farscape fan eyeballs, it is definitely a payoff for the SCiFi Channel. It has to do with content, not respect - Farscape (and other science fiction) fans have (understandably) little respect for the poorly named SciFi Channel.
A quick story, with no commitment to continuity, would work for me, and I'd possibly get back to watching more of it.
Then you're obviously not a Farscape fan. The series was all about "continuity". Viewers weren't subjected to spending 30 minutes of each hour being brought up to speed about the plot, and the story is what made the series. People with short attention spans will not appreciate Farscape. People who don't care about what happened to John and Aeyrn have no heart. *Sniffle*
That's where I have a problem...the outward unsubstantiated and unprovoked hatred and bigotry toward gays, transvestites, and transexuals.
Well, I've been reading at +1 as usual, and I haven't seen any hatred or bigotry, so perhaps the mods have taken care of it. I've seen some jokes, but if you can't take a joke, then perhaps it's you who has the problem. Try being a person of Polish ancestry in the U.S. I'm not overcome by angst. Jokes are jokes. Get over it.
Because you'd have to use Perl/Tk to do the VB part, and that's a sad thing to do to Perl? Just kidding - no offense to Tcl/Tk zealots (if there are any).
This makes me sad because it means I may have to rewrite some stuff I spent *hours* doing a few days ago.
You only have to rewrite "hours" worth of code? You want some cheese with that whine? I don't complain about requirements changes that trash less than a couple of weeks' work.:)
Y2k was WAY over hyped. I mean you would have to be really retarted . ..
It's obvious you've never seen a large COBOL program (I wish I hadn't) with two-digit-year fields and all the validation that's done on them. These even include birth dates in programs for HMOs and insurance companies. There are massive banking, insurance, and payroll programs written in COBOL. Try disrupting the banking industry or stopping people's paychecks, and then ask them if that's a "bad thing".
Y2K was no joke, and it hasn't been avoided, only postponed. Nobody expected those programs to last for thirty-plus years when they were first written. With all the *windowing* that was done to avoid Y2K, the problem has just been pushed into the future. If the *fixed* software isn't replaced in the next thirty years or so, it will be a Y2K redux, only worse.
However, doing the moral thing can be illegal. A company officer who takes action against the bottom line, or take inaction to improve the bottom line, is civilly and possibly criminally liable, even if the action or inaction is morally right.
As always when I see a comment like this, I'm going to ask you for some proof. As yet nobody on Slashdot has been able to provide any. In the U.S., anyone can sue anyone for anything. That does not mean there are laws saying CEOs have to act immorally to increase the bottom line. If you have links to any such laws, please provide them. Generally, the people making such arguments are people looking to excuse their actions.
Company officers have a fiduciary duty to the company. That means they have to act in the best interests of the company. That is not the same as pumping the bottom line during any given quarter or any given year. A CEO can easily inflate the current quarter's figures at the expense of later quarters. Saying that they would criminally responsible for not doing so is crazy.
Note that all those companies' executives are getting raked over the coals not because they did something immoral or unethical (although that is virutally certain), but because the shareholders lost value through their actions.
Note that those CxOs are being indicted for cooking the books to inflate the bottom line and increase shareholder value in the short-term, which seems to be exactly the course you're suggesting they should follow.
CEOs don't care about whether SCO is acting illegal or not, and they shouldn't. The only thing we pay them for is to protect the best interest of the company and their employees (usually the company comes before the employees).
Wow, that is so sad. I remember when the employees were considered the central and most important part of a company. Of course that was before some Slashdot readers were born. Companies also felt they had a responsibility to the community that fostered them. Things change - not necessarily for the better.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a ridicules extreme, something only someone losing an arugment would make. There is always a balance somewhere - sometimes we swing too far in one direction or another (B of A might be a good example of going too far), but marketplace keeps searching for that balance.
Only someone with a losing argument would try to dismiss its logical conclusion or a perfectly valid and common example. The "marketplace" also includes regulations put in place by the government.
And you are failing to see (or choosing to ignore) that the American worker IS the American consumer. For the most part they are one and the same.
Pay attention. I never claimed the two were different. I said that when the auto industry claimed that American jobs were being lost to foreigners, the government stepped into help. Same for the steel industry. Now, they won't step into help because it's the corporations that control what legislation is enacted, and the corporations support the exportation of these American jobs for short-term gain.
The answer is NONE if in doing so they will go out of business and lose ALL the jobs company creates in that nation.
Cadillac is still in business despite being undersold by a number of companies. I also remember the Buy American campaigns (not that they did much good). I find your blanket assertions that all companies are forced into a race to the bottom, and that it's the American consumer doing it to be specious. I would gladly buy (more expensive) American made shirts like I used to - if only I could find some. The retailers don't give me that choice.
The responsibility to give them the low prices they demand, or go out of business (because no will buy their higher priced products) and cost the nation even more jobs.
Given that logic, every American worker should be replaced because someone in the world will work for less, and some company might save a nickel. B of A was highly profitable when it began outsourcing jobs; they were in no danger of going out of business.
So, if it really bothered people, back in the 70's (anybody but me remember way back then?), when the U.S. automotive industry was on the verge of collapse from competition from foriegn competitors. How did they survive? Was there a groundswell of patriotism that caused people to buy higher cost, lower quality products? Keep dreaming.
Yes, I remember. The government placed quotas on foreign imports. The government raised tariffs on foreign imports. The government bailed out Chrysler with $4 billion. The difference is that back then it was the American companies being hurt. Now it's just the American worker being hurt by American companies, and that's okay with the government.
After reading through this thread, I can't help but laugh. So many here claim Linux is too hard for the average user and then launch into multi-step, unintuitive, arcane, *easy-to-do* steps needed to secure a user account in Windows. And don't forget to edit the registry and reboot. :)
Meanwhile, the Linuxsecurity site shows that Linux distros have multiple security advisories every week.
Your link shows two distros admitting vulnerabilities. Why are you comparing Linux distros to Windows? Windows is, supposedly, an OS, and IE is, supposedly, an integrated unremovable part of it. If you want to compare kumquats to gnumquats, then do a comparison between Windows and the Linux kernel (not distros).
Thus talking about the prospect would be akin to rattling your sabots.
-- Me fail English?
Apparently so. :)
So you agree with me that rhyme has nothing to do with it. What's your point?
The sabot reference in the grandparent post is to "sabotage," where workers angry over automation replacing their jobs threw their wooden shoes into the machinery to destroy it.
So did these angry workers rattle their sabots before throwing them into the machinery? I think the OP probably meant *rattle your sabers*, which is inappropriate anyway. I doubt many slashbots sport dueling scars - paper cuts, maybe. *Rattle your keyboards* would be closer.
Mmmm... not good enough if you're writing a counting algorithm. (We added a new condition into the results, which was "no result")
I assume that has something to do with *instant runoff* or whatever it's called, but in the U.S., a voting system should be far simpler. It should not report winners - only totals. The election officials should report the winners.
Generic term or not, if you name your competing operating system anything that even remotely sounds like Windows, you're begging for a Microsoft law suit.
I doubt that rhyme has much to do with it. They probably wouldn't sue if you named your distro "Pintos", although the bloat and gas quotient would be the same.
I'm thinking "Lindoze" would be great. If Microsoft went after them for similarity to "Windoze", I'd laught till I fell off my chair.
While that's funny, the fact that Lindows is far too much like Windows is not. The run-as-root implementation grafts all the worst problems of Windows onto a Linux distro. I'm going to (ackk, gag) root (no pun intended) for Microsoft on this one. Lindows (by any name) needs to go away for the greater good of Linux.
My point was that Dune was not about new technology. Dune takes place in the year 10,000... Considering that, the technology we're presented with is very basic. Besides moving into space (one giant leap, I know) nothing major is presented.
Let's see . . . we have FTL travel (the mainstay of scifi), micromechanics, nanotechnology, cloning, suitcase nukes, anti-gravity, force fields, terraforming, and I'm sure I could come up with more if I thought about it for a bit. Seems fairly techy to me, especially given when it was written.
Spice is perhaps the biggest technological breakthrough, and its properties are more magical than sci-fi. I mean, a drug that not only extends your life, but grants you visions of the future, and in the case of your offspring, gives them memories of all their ancestors?
Like spice, most real drugs have natural sources, e.g., digitalis, but many are synthesized. Your "magic" properties of spice were available only to those who had been genetically altered by centuries of controlled breeding or genetic engineering - again, kinda techy. Was it Clarke or Asimov who said, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"?
Okay, fine, if that's true, then Dune isn't sci-fi. It's something a lot bigger and better. That's the point I was trying to make. . . . I didn't mean to insult the... fictional science.... in Dune. I meant to distance it from the general use of the term "sci-fi" . . .
I think I see the gist of what you're saying, and I agree that Dune is far better than most - indeed, it's one of my all-time favorites. I doubt any of the great scifi authors set out to write *science fiction*; they set out to write a great story. It's the editors and readers who categorize those works, and given the futuristic and mostly believable story (which separates it from fantasy), Dune fits into the scifi genre. I'm not going to argue about what tripe the SciFi Channel calls scifi - I've made plenty of comments about that in the past.
Your Amazon link doesn't work.
It does if you take the space out.
I'm not trying to sound elitist, in fact I don't read much at all (especially compared to mighty KFG), but the six Dune books (I'm not counting the new trash, heh) were not really about sci-fi. Sci-fi was just a good excuse for Herbert to share some cool ideas about politics, drugs, the meaning of life, etc.
Hey, that gives me an idea; an enterprising author could take some cool ideas about politics, drugs, the meaning of life, etc., place them in a fictional future combined with all kinds of new technology and social advances/deviations and call it science fiction!
I just happen to be one of the few who feel that they did a pretty good job translating Dune to the screen. I know I'm in the minority on that one.
Make that a minority of two at least. The Lynch movie version of Dune made me sick over what they had done to Herbert's vision. The people in broadcloth uniforms running across the sand, brandishing suitcase handles, and killing the enemy by yelling at them was the ultimate insult to a great book.
Farscape is on miniseries probably becuase they didn't want to risk the investment of an entire season - sort of testing the waters.
Farscape has already tested the waters. When SciFi cancelled it, they caught hell from the viewers. Perhaps the SciFi Channel is just trying to put science fiction back in their programming?
A sacrifice for fans will get them a huge amount of respect that would probably pay off with higher viewership of the channel in general in the long run.
It certainly won't be any sacrifice for them. The viewers will be there, and SciFi will make money. If they regain those lost Farscape fan eyeballs, it is definitely a payoff for the SCiFi Channel. It has to do with content, not respect - Farscape (and other science fiction) fans have (understandably) little respect for the poorly named SciFi Channel.
A quick story, with no commitment to continuity, would work for me, and I'd possibly get back to watching more of it.
Then you're obviously not a Farscape fan. The series was all about "continuity". Viewers weren't subjected to spending 30 minutes of each hour being brought up to speed about the plot, and the story is what made the series. People with short attention spans will not appreciate Farscape. People who don't care about what happened to John and Aeyrn have no heart. *Sniffle*
That's where I have a problem...the outward unsubstantiated and unprovoked hatred and bigotry toward gays, transvestites, and transexuals.
Well, I've been reading at +1 as usual, and I haven't seen any hatred or bigotry, so perhaps the mods have taken care of it. I've seen some jokes, but if you can't take a joke, then perhaps it's you who has the problem. Try being a person of Polish ancestry in the U.S. I'm not overcome by angst. Jokes are jokes. Get over it.
Why not just use a couple dozen lines of perl?
Because you'd have to use Perl/Tk to do the VB part, and that's a sad thing to do to Perl? Just kidding - no offense to Tcl/Tk zealots (if there are any).
This makes me sad because it means I may have to rewrite some stuff I spent *hours* doing a few days ago.
You only have to rewrite "hours" worth of code? You want some cheese with that whine? I don't complain about requirements changes that trash less than a couple of weeks' work. :)
Y2k was WAY over hyped. I mean you would have to be really retarted . . .
It's obvious you've never seen a large COBOL program (I wish I hadn't) with two-digit-year fields and all the validation that's done on them. These even include birth dates in programs for HMOs and insurance companies. There are massive banking, insurance, and payroll programs written in COBOL. Try disrupting the banking industry or stopping people's paychecks, and then ask them if that's a "bad thing".
Y2K was no joke, and it hasn't been avoided, only postponed. Nobody expected those programs to last for thirty-plus years when they were first written. With all the *windowing* that was done to avoid Y2K, the problem has just been pushed into the future. If the *fixed* software isn't replaced in the next thirty years or so, it will be a Y2K redux, only worse.
I knew I should not have ordered that second bottle of tequila but I did anyway.
Tequila sunrise *shudder*.
However, doing the moral thing can be illegal. A company officer who takes action against the bottom line, or take inaction to improve the bottom line, is civilly and possibly criminally liable, even if the action or inaction is morally right.
As always when I see a comment like this, I'm going to ask you for some proof. As yet nobody on Slashdot has been able to provide any. In the U.S., anyone can sue anyone for anything. That does not mean there are laws saying CEOs have to act immorally to increase the bottom line. If you have links to any such laws, please provide them. Generally, the people making such arguments are people looking to excuse their actions.
Company officers have a fiduciary duty to the company. That means they have to act in the best interests of the company. That is not the same as pumping the bottom line during any given quarter or any given year. A CEO can easily inflate the current quarter's figures at the expense of later quarters. Saying that they would criminally responsible for not doing so is crazy.
Note that all those companies' executives are getting raked over the coals not because they did something immoral or unethical (although that is virutally certain), but because the shareholders lost value through their actions.
Note that those CxOs are being indicted for cooking the books to inflate the bottom line and increase shareholder value in the short-term, which seems to be exactly the course you're suggesting they should follow.
CEOs don't care about whether SCO is acting illegal or not, and they shouldn't. The only thing we pay them for is to protect the best interest of the company and their employees (usually the company comes before the employees).
Wow, that is so sad. I remember when the employees were considered the central and most important part of a company. Of course that was before some Slashdot readers were born. Companies also felt they had a responsibility to the community that fostered them. Things change - not necessarily for the better.
What about HP? HP-UX is dying, they need to jump on something.
How about Carly?
HP is wandering in the woods.
Same problem.
they only have 6.5 billion in cash right now
I guess I'm just getting old, but *only $6.5 billion in cash* seems like a mega-oxymoron to me.