They are probably not Indian call centres. They go out of their way to employ people who speak good English.
I would bet that a lot of complaints about bad English stem from illiterates at American call centres. The type if Indian willing to work in a call centre speaks better English than the type of person from the US or Britain who is willing to do the same.
I notice that organisations that I know do outsource to India heavily (like HSBC) seem to get complaints about bad English - although they do get the other usual complaints about call centres.
BT Voyager modems seem (going on what a quick search turned up) to be problematic under Linux as well, so Windows is not doing much worse than the competition there.
One thing I keep trying to tell people is not to buy crap USB modems, but it is usually too late. Why will people pay plenty to get a fast processor, but buy the cheapest possible peripherals?
What I mean is that they will get away with being stupid, because the voters are stupid enough to think "oh, they can't take any chances, the Turner people should know better".
Having seen jobs ads in your line of work, there does seem to be a lot of Java used.
Can you give me some examples of trading platforms that are pure Java? I used to work for a company that provided trading platforms for stock exchanges and the like. They regarded Java as too slow and did everything in C++, a few counter examples of similar systems providing good performance in Java would be interesting if I feel like an argument next time I meet one of their developers...
Given that the backward compatibility comment also seems to be completely wrong, this looks like a troll.
The only thing Apple do I do not like is to lock the OS to the hardware (they do not need to support the OS on other hardware, but a DRM locking scheme is anti free market).
....to realise something that writers of fiction foresaw long ago?
Examples that come to mind are Larry Niven (short stories dealing with tensions arising from homosexuality on an all male Mars mission) and CS Lewis (one of the stories in the Dark Tower collection).
Other costs of selling downloads are much lower than CDs.
Lower costs could raise volumes.
The type of people who regard big media as evil, are exactly the people who would see a company that dropped DRM as good. The rest do not think about it.
EMIs sales would have the advantage of being completely non-infringing globally.
I think that EMI will get the average slashdotters money. I am sure that, far more importantly, they will get the average music buyer's money. They will certainly get mine.
The wrapper script around the GUI menu definitions is probably the most dangerous. Maybe we need a way of locking them down?
The crontab and at queues approach might also work, depending on how common it is for ordinary users to be allowed to use cron (I see no reason why they should be default). AFAIK the default varies with distro.
As for PATH, my PATH does not contain any user writable directories.
Now that I think of it another approach might be to use the session manager. The KDE one uses the autostart directory (so I already covered it), I do not know if others do anything different.
OK, I missed a few (and thanks for pointing them out), but I still think it looks like there are a limited number of things to be checked, that could probably be checked quite simply.
If all my data were in ~, then I would consider trashing it to be just as bad as trashing everything
What about the time you spend cleaning up or reinstalling? I take a backup every few days so all I would have to copy everything back.
Outside of server space, when was the last time you saw a multi-user system with separate logins?
I am sitting at one.
The reason more people do not do it is because Windows has only recently become usable that way - so the average user does not know it is possible. Some people I know have multiple PCs so that the children do not muck up their data.
In any case, are you sure that it is such a rarity on Linux desktops?
Buy cheap unbranded MP3 players, they generally act as simple USB mass storage devices, and play whatever you put on them.
Incidentally, why do you iPods? Why not play the music off a PC? If you do not want to have a PC on all the time, surely there is some other device in a phone system that could be reprogramed to play an MP3 or ogg? If not, there has to be some device you could use instead (a PDA perhaps?).
I doubt that many people run Apache on Windows on production systems. The Apache 1.3 documentation says "Apache still performs best, and is most reliable on Unix platforms.".
This does not apply to 2.0 but most people still seem to be using 1.3 because of PHP.
Are you seriously comparing Bill Gates to Saddam Hussein?
Bill Gates is FAR more powerful. A US president is highly unlikely to risk taking him head one.
The reasons I say he is more powerful are:
1) He has a lot of money that could be given in campaign contributions or spent to influence elections. If necessary he could even buy up some media companies (outright or just sufficiently large stakes in them to influence editorial policy) and exercise the sort of influence that Rupert Murdoch has in Britain. 2) He is well known and influential. A lot of people respect him - maybe not on Slashdot, but being the richest man in the world brings respect. MS sales people claim that offering customers a chance to meet Bill Gates help swing major sales.
What do you think is bad: Trashing the whole system, or trashing your ~ ? A system can be reinstalled, but most people dont back up their data.
If we talking about trashing the system instead of trashing ~, you would be right in the case of a single user system.
However, we are talking about trashing everything, against trashing just ~. Obviously just ~ is better.
In the case of a multi-user system, trashing one users ~ is much better than trashing everything. Most home PCs are multi users. Office PCs are invariably single user, but they should get backed up.
It is much easier to back up a single user's directory than an entire system.
Finally, limited access to the system makes it harder for viruses to propagate. How is it going to run again after a log out? Most people do not regularly run executables from their own directories: the executables they do run will not be infected. Certainly something like bash_profile or an autostart directory, but cleaning these up should be trivial. Am I missing anything here?
You have to make a statement that you have a good faith belief that the material is infringing. A bot matching a word seems to be streching good faith a bit - can a bot have good faith?
Obviously they used bots. How else could they have found such a vast volume of material? What they should have done is checked each item found before issuing a notice.
Its true that the FSF does not have the power to move the Linux Kernel to GPL version 3.
However, the FSF is the principal sponsor of the GNU project, and run by the same people.
So, we can expect most GNU stuff to move to GPL 3. If GPL 3 mucks up the Novel deal, I do not see that Novel is going to find it very useful to be able to distribute the Linux kernel without all the GNU stuff.
Thy could price to make the same profit per unit they make on a physical copy, and make a lot more money on higher volumes.
I have no idea what the margins are but I doubt they make more than a few dollars a DVD sold, given retail markups, manufacturing and distribution costs etc.
Of course, where I live DVDs cost approximately $2.50 anyway......
Slashdot Mirror
If they do not know what the key technology they want to put into it is then:
they know when they want to do it, but not what they want to do.
So all they do is pick something that can easily be done in two years.
I bet a lot of people wish they were also in a position to adjust the spec to the timetable.
They are probably not Indian call centres. They go out of their way to employ people who speak good English.
I would bet that a lot of complaints about bad English stem from illiterates at American call centres. The type if Indian willing to work in a call centre speaks better English than the type of person from the US or Britain who is willing to do the same.
I notice that organisations that I know do outsource to India heavily (like HSBC) seem to get complaints about bad English - although they do get the other usual complaints about call centres.
If it is any comfort, common sense is disappearing in the rest of the world as well. This could happen in a lot of other countries as well.
BT Voyager modems seem (going on what a quick search turned up) to be problematic under Linux as well, so Windows is not doing much worse than the competition there.
One thing I keep trying to tell people is not to buy crap USB modems, but it is usually too late. Why will people pay plenty to get a fast processor, but buy the cheapest possible peripherals?
I am not defending them.
What I mean is that they will get away with being stupid, because the voters are stupid enough to think "oh, they can't take any chances, the Turner people should know better".
Thanks, both for the pointer to Currenex and the other comments. I can appreciate the reuse of the server code in particular.
Having seen jobs ads in your line of work, there does seem to be a lot of Java used.
Can you give me some examples of trading platforms that are pure Java? I used to work for a company that provided trading platforms for stock exchanges and the like. They regarded Java as too slow and did everything in C++, a few counter examples of similar systems providing good performance in Java would be interesting if I feel like an argument next time I meet one of their developers...
I'll stick to one of the many Windows personal firewalls
There's your first mistake ;-)
The people want them to act that way.
If they failed to react to something that turned out to be a bomb, they would be out.
When they over-react to something that turns out not to be a bomb, it is not they who have to quit.
So, they are better off always reacting to anything that is the least bit out of the way.
Counterexamples:
Darwin
KHTML/Webkit
Bundled PDF reader/writer
Bundled (though not insalled by default) X11
Redistribution of 3rd party open source applications http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_s
Given that the backward compatibility comment also seems to be completely wrong, this looks like a troll.
The only thing Apple do I do not like is to lock the OS to the hardware (they do not need to support the OS on other hardware, but a DRM locking scheme is anti free market).
....to realise something that writers of fiction foresaw long ago?
Examples that come to mind are Larry Niven (short stories dealing with tensions arising from homosexuality on an all male Mars mission) and CS Lewis (one of the stories in the Dark Tower collection).
The statutory mechanical royalty rate is paid to the music publisher, not the artist. In most cases of music EMI sells, they would be the publisher.
The statutory rate can be overridden by a contract and is, in effect a maximum rate, not a minimum, see http://www.joelmabus.com/royalties.htm
Other costs of selling downloads are much lower than CDs.
Lower costs could raise volumes.
The type of people who regard big media as evil, are exactly the people who would see a company that dropped DRM as good. The rest do not think about it.
EMIs sales would have the advantage of being completely non-infringing globally.
I think that EMI will get the average slashdotters money. I am sure that, far more importantly, they will get the average music buyer's money. They will certainly get mine.
Mandriva or Ubuntu is (in my experience) mature enough for non-techie end users (if someone else installs it), so why not for retailers?
You can pay $1300 for a mac...or you can spend $700 for a PC. Which do you THINK parents are going to buy?
A Mac Mini for $600 perhaps?
Ouch, I should have thought of some of those.
The wrapper script around the GUI menu definitions is probably the most dangerous. Maybe we need a way of locking them down?
The crontab and at queues approach might also work, depending on how common it is for ordinary users to be allowed to use cron (I see no reason why they should be default). AFAIK the default varies with distro.
As for PATH, my PATH does not contain any user writable directories.
Now that I think of it another approach might be to use the session manager. The KDE one uses the autostart directory (so I already covered it), I do not know if others do anything different.
OK, I missed a few (and thanks for pointing them out), but I still think it looks like there are a limited number of things to be checked, that could probably be checked quite simply.
Google has done very little that will lock people into using them.
Its not being big and having lots of users that is the problem. It is being able to reduce consumer choice that is the problem.
If all my data were in ~, then I would consider trashing it to be just as bad as trashing everything
What about the time you spend cleaning up or reinstalling? I take a backup every few days so all I would have to copy everything back.Outside of server space, when was the last time you saw a multi-user system with separate logins?
I am sitting at one.
The reason more people do not do it is because Windows has only recently become usable that way - so the average user does not know it is possible. Some people I know have multiple PCs so that the children do not muck up their data.
In any case, are you sure that it is such a rarity on Linux desktops?
Buy cheap unbranded MP3 players, they generally act as simple USB mass storage devices, and play whatever you put on them.
Incidentally, why do you iPods? Why not play the music off a PC? If you do not want to have a PC on all the time, surely there is some other device in a phone system that could be reprogramed to play an MP3 or ogg? If not, there has to be some device you could use instead (a PDA perhaps?).
I doubt that many people run Apache on Windows on production systems. The Apache 1.3 documentation says "Apache still performs best, and is most reliable on Unix platforms.". This does not apply to 2.0 but most people still seem to be using 1.3 because of PHP.
Are you seriously comparing Bill Gates to Saddam Hussein?
Bill Gates is FAR more powerful. A US president is highly unlikely to risk taking him head one.
The reasons I say he is more powerful are:
1) He has a lot of money that could be given in campaign contributions or spent to influence elections. If necessary he could even buy up some media companies (outright or just sufficiently large stakes in them to influence editorial policy) and exercise the sort of influence that Rupert Murdoch has in Britain.
2) He is well known and influential. A lot of people respect him - maybe not on Slashdot, but being the richest man in the world brings respect. MS sales people claim that offering customers a chance to meet Bill Gates help swing major sales.
If we talking about trashing the system instead of trashing ~, you would be right in the case of a single user system.
However, we are talking about trashing everything, against trashing just ~. Obviously just ~ is better.
In the case of a multi-user system, trashing one users ~ is much better than trashing everything. Most home PCs are multi users. Office PCs are invariably single user, but they should get backed up.
It is much easier to back up a single user's directory than an entire system.
Finally, limited access to the system makes it harder for viruses to propagate. How is it going to run again after a log out? Most people do not regularly run executables from their own directories: the executables they do run will not be infected. Certainly something like bash_profile or an autostart directory, but cleaning these up should be trivial. Am I missing anything here?
http://www.cyberlawcentral.com/2005/06/musings-on
You have to make a statement that you have a good faith belief that the material is infringing. A bot matching a word seems to be streching good faith a bit - can a bot have good faith?
Obviously they used bots. How else could they have found such a vast volume of material? What they should have done is checked each item found before issuing a notice.
Its true that the FSF does not have the power to move the Linux Kernel to GPL version 3.
However, the FSF is the principal sponsor of the GNU project, and run by the same people.
So, we can expect most GNU stuff to move to GPL 3. If GPL 3 mucks up the Novel deal, I do not see that Novel is going to find it very useful to be able to distribute the Linux kernel without all the GNU stuff.
Marketing is the biggest element in the SG and A line for pharmas.
This is is a result of what "Yes Minister" (a BBC TV comedy and book) called the politicians' syllogism:
We must to something.
This is something.
Therefore we must to this.
I have no idea what the margins are but I doubt they make more than a few dollars a DVD sold, given retail markups, manufacturing and distribution costs etc.
Of course, where I live DVDs cost approximately $2.50 anyway......