And in many alphabets (all the Asian langauges I know enough about) case does not exist - AFAIK it is a characteristic of alphabets descened from the Greek and Latin ones.
It would be better if the developers took out the option to fake the user agent string for all sites and replaced it with a site by site option (i.e. individually list sites that require it).
Opera cuts its own throat by identifying itself as IE by default, so of course it looks like hardly anyone uses Opera.
They have every reason to allow co-operate with open source deveopers. They can not make money from open source, so if they enforce the patent the result will be that developers will work around it, and the last thing they want is the emergence of alternative.
We had a client who objected to the name of the tablespace used by an Oracle application (he happened to see it while one of my colleagues was installing, and, no, it was not offensive or anything, and, of course, there was no way an end suer would ever see it)
I have had to teach the head of an IT department how to use Excel
My former employer's network restricted access to servers by what mahcine they were acessed from rather than login, so when I needed to copy stuff to a server I did not have access to (as I often did to distribute it) I just walked over to a colleagues machine that did have access.
I could go on, and there are even better examples outside of IT but I though these were most likely to be appreciated on/.
I like Chartreuse, but it is not as good as either Trappise beers, or Benedictine, or the greatest drink invented by monks (although no longer AFAIK made by them), champagne.
The biggest problem is that a lot of the people who currently use Linux tend to sue cammand line rather than GUI for things such as configuration. This confuses everyone else.
LInux gives you a choice, but most of the people who currently use Linux try to teach new users to wrong choice for non-geeks.
As Adam Smith pointed out (not in exactly the same words, but its a reasonable paraphrase) everyone is in favour of free market competition except for themselves.
Also, I hope everyone realises that if the US closed its markets to other countries, they would:
1) Have fewer dollars to buy American goods and services with.
2) They would have less reason to keep their markets open to American goods and services (tariffs lead to retaliatory tariffs)
3) They would have less reason to pass laws strengthening copyright and patents (or even have copyright/patent laws at all) which generally work to the favour of American businesses (largely becuase they favour big business and an awful lot of big business, especialyl in technology and media, is Amaerican)
Its easy to learn and use (very good if the people using our embeded language are not programmers). Its mature, supposed to be extensible, and if you decide you need something more powerful later on even the current full verion is not that bloated.
your standard of living is going to go way, way, way down
Rubbish. I moved from the UK to Sri Lanka and my standard of living has improved in many ways. I earn less in absolute terms but the cost of living is MUCH lower.
whether my standard of living is better or worse is actually quite subjective. Examples:
My car is a Hyundai, but I pay someone else to drive it for me.
I eat out more and mostly at better restaurants, but the best here are not as good as the best in London and there is less choice.
I can afford more holdiays within the country and stay at much better hotels than I could afford in England, but I can afford fewer foreign holidays.
Overall the only things I really miss are the theatre, big bookshops and (BBC) Radio 4.
Alhough I am now used to it having done it a few times, moving countries is very difficult for those who are not used to it. It is not just the financial cosnequences that matter. You have to make cultural adjsutments, and learn how things work (and put up with lots of little things being different from what you are used to), and move away from friends and familly.
Depends on who. Enron hired some really good people and everyone knew it.
IIn retrospect I am really glad Enron turned me down (as am analyst, not a trader), even though I was very disappointed at the time (I came close and thought I was going to get it).
Sending a foreign check to the United States may involve fees in excess of $50 for the processing of the check (or any other kind of draft) if it is drawn on a foreign bank outside the United States.
And I have had the experience of the US banks doing this with a draft drawn BY a foreign bank on their US correpondent
What is it with the US and foreign cheques? I have never paid these exorbitant amounts in otehr coutnries. May be they (and other projects like this) should open an account abroad (Say, the UK) to deposit foreign cheques. If not waht about credit card donations? I would be happy to send a small donation but have no cost effective way to do it. The result is that projects like this [rovide a global service but can only receive small donations from one country (large doantions are cost effctive to TT.
Why the hell is this crap modded insightful?
Take it point by point:
compiling, recompiling
I have been using Linux for two years. Number of timees I have compiled anything: zero
can't set your monitor resolution
Heres how I do it: go to Mandrake Control Centre, a few more mouse clicks, and its done.
font management
What can you not do in Linux exactly?
printing
I do it by clicking print from the file menu of what ever app I am using. I never had to configure anything as the Mandrake installer correctly recognised the printer
I think your point is that if you try a really old Linux distro, or one aimed at hackers then its difficult to use
British companies were also helped to remain competitive by invading India and forcibly stopping the Indian's from weaving.
The British Empire was vastly centrally planned, with all the industrial jobs being concentrated in Britain.
In the current context, what is to stop the lower wage countries also improving productivity by automating more?
I agree. I was appalled that a scool I recently visited (one of the best in Britain in many ways) was teaching kids how to use specific applications and no fundamentsals.
I would like to see kids taught prgramming for the same reason that Plato advocated teching geometry (or waas it arithmetic), as a mental excercise.
Also as other posters have pointed out the fundamentals do not become obsolete.
Anyway, I plan to teach my daughter myself if the schools do not do a good job - I have some time, she is one and her computer skills currently stop at being absolutely fascinated by daddy playing with KFract (Mandelbrot and Julia set generator).
A 9% drop is less than normal fluctuatiosn due to the state of the economy etc.
The third of PVR users are watching ads that they actually choose to, therefore the ads should be more effective and worth more per view to advertisers.
People already skips ads by switching channels, leavings the room, talking during ads etc. so this makes no difference really.
Ad supported TV can certainly survive quite nicely on 91% of its current ad revenue.
Even if everyone gets a PVR and there are no offsetting improvements to revenues then reveneus drop by two thirds and they will just have to cut the cost of the content - spend less on sports rights, less on film rights, less on poduction etc. The main effect is that a few (mostly very highly paid people) see their salaries drop (they are unlikely to go of and do anything else as they will still be very well paid).
I assume you comapred like with like by trying a recent distro, commercial package with support rather than a download, pre-installed on the hardware you bought, right?
Salary is not based on cost of living, it is based on market mechanisims,regulation and a host of other factors.
On the other hand from the point of view of an employee csot of living is relevant. What matters is how well you can afford to live. What would I gain by earing a thousand pounds more a month by moving back to London if I pay a thousand pounds more a month in rent and had to pay higher London prices on everything else as well?
Also differentials between jobs at different skill levels are greater here, so labour intensive services are less expensive relative to my salary, manufactured goods (cars, PCs) are more expensive, my rent is less (15% of salary as against 30% in Manchest and nearly 50% in London), food is about the same. I could not definitely afford there a LOT of things I can afford here.
There are a lot of stuctural reasons why people like me will remain in this position for a long time to come - until this economy becomes developed (in which case I would also benefit form abcolute salary rises and be back in teh same position I was in in England).
I am not aware why you think inflation will balance everything off as cost of living differentials have persisted for decades, if not centuries. They also exist within countries - look at the cost of living in the north of England vs London.
What you way might be true if we hadd a true global free market with free movement of labour etc, but that is not the case. Even if it did happen the adjsutment would take a very long time before everything equalised.
You are arguing based on a very simplistic ecomonic model. I sugest you read a little of the real thing - there is a fairly accessible text book by David Begg (head of the department at which I did my MSc) which manages to cover a lot of the real world issues.
We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO's intellectual property)
He also refuses to say that anyone other than Sun is "clean", not even MS.
It looks like they are going after everyone, even MS, even embedded OSes.
Most of those IT jobs are going to people who are being well paid.
I work for a software company (not as an IT person though) in the third world and compared to my last job in England:
I have a lower salary in absolute terms
In some ways this is offset by the lower cost of living. For example I have a cheap car, but I can afford to pay someone else to drive me around in it. I spent my last (local) holiday staying in MUCH nicer hotels can I have ever been able to afford anywhere in Europe
I work in a much nicer office: landscaped grounds, beautiful buildings and out of town. This is a huge improvement on Manchester city centre.
Job security is much better: it is both harder to make people redundant (or fire them) here than in Britain, and employers will try harder to avoid doing it.
Management and general working atmosphere are the second best I have experience (the best was a long bust dotcom and not likely to be repeatable anywhere these days.
I tried buying Caldera's Linux distro many years ago.
My credit card was not authorised when they tried to process the payment and they did not let me know: the CDs just never arrived.
When I complained I got a VERY rude email back telling me that it was my fault for giving them a dud credit card (actually it was their fault, or their bank's fault as the card was fine), and verging on accusing me of being a crook.
Maybe that sort of customer service has something to do with where they are now.
Slashdot Mirror
And in many alphabets (all the Asian langauges I know enough about) case does not exist - AFAIK it is a characteristic of alphabets descened from the Greek and Latin ones.
That is why all the music produced before copyright laws existed is all bland junk.....
Opera cuts its own throat by identifying itself as IE by default, so of course it looks like hardly anyone uses Opera.
They have every reason to allow co-operate with open source deveopers. They can not make money from open source, so if they enforce the patent the result will be that developers will work around it, and the last thing they want is the emergence of alternative.
That statement is never, ever, true
We had a client who objected to the name of the tablespace used by an Oracle application (he happened to see it while one of my colleagues was installing, and, no, it was not offensive or anything, and, of course, there was no way an end suer would ever see it)
I have had to teach the head of an IT department how to use Excel
My former employer's network restricted access to servers by what mahcine they were acessed from rather than login, so when I needed to copy stuff to a server I did not have access to (as I often did to distribute it) I just walked over to a colleagues machine that did have access.
I could go on, and there are even better examples outside of IT but I though these were most likely to be appreciated on /.
I like Chartreuse, but it is not as good as either Trappise beers, or Benedictine, or the greatest drink invented by monks (although no longer AFAIK made by them), champagne.
LInux gives you a choice, but most of the people who currently use Linux try to teach new users to wrong choice for non-geeks.
Also, I hope everyone realises that if the US closed its markets to other countries, they would:
1) Have fewer dollars to buy American goods and services with.
2) They would have less reason to keep their markets open to American goods and services (tariffs lead to retaliatory tariffs)
3) They would have less reason to pass laws strengthening copyright and patents (or even have copyright/patent laws at all) which generally work to the favour of American businesses (largely becuase they favour big business and an awful lot of big business, especialyl in technology and media, is Amaerican)
Its easy to learn and use (very good if the people using our embeded language are not programmers). Its mature, supposed to be extensible, and if you decide you need something more powerful later on even the current full verion is not that bloated.
Rubbish. I moved from the UK to Sri Lanka and my standard of living has improved in many ways. I earn less in absolute terms but the cost of living is MUCH lower.
whether my standard of living is better or worse is actually quite subjective. Examples:
- My car is a Hyundai, but I pay someone else to drive it for me.
- I eat out more and mostly at better restaurants, but the best here are not as good as the best in London and there is less choice.
- I can afford more holdiays within the country and stay at much better hotels than I could afford in England, but I can afford fewer foreign holidays.
Overall the only things I really miss are the theatre, big bookshops and (BBC) Radio 4.Alhough I am now used to it having done it a few times, moving countries is very difficult for those who are not used to it. It is not just the financial cosnequences that matter. You have to make cultural adjsutments, and learn how things work (and put up with lots of little things being different from what you are used to), and move away from friends and familly.
IIn retrospect I am really glad Enron turned me down (as am analyst, not a trader), even though I was very disappointed at the time (I came close and thought I was going to get it).
And I have had the experience of the US banks doing this with a draft drawn BY a foreign bank on their US correpondent
What is it with the US and foreign cheques? I have never paid these exorbitant amounts in otehr coutnries. May be they (and other projects like this) should open an account abroad (Say, the UK) to deposit foreign cheques. If not waht about credit card donations? I would be happy to send a small donation but have no cost effective way to do it. The result is that projects like this [rovide a global service but can only receive small donations from one country (large doantions are cost effctive to TT.
Loved ones usually also includes spouses, SOs and children.
Sorry, I forgot this was Slashdot.
compiling, recompiling
I have been using Linux for two years. Number of timees I have compiled anything: zero
can't set your monitor resolution
Heres how I do it: go to Mandrake Control Centre, a few more mouse clicks, and its done.
font management
What can you not do in Linux exactly?
printing
I do it by clicking print from the file menu of what ever app I am using. I never had to configure anything as the Mandrake installer correctly recognised the printer
I think your point is that if you try a really old Linux distro, or one aimed at hackers then its difficult to use
British companies were also helped to remain competitive by invading India and forcibly stopping the Indian's from weaving. The British Empire was vastly centrally planned, with all the industrial jobs being concentrated in Britain. In the current context, what is to stop the lower wage countries also improving productivity by automating more?
I agree. I was appalled that a scool I recently visited (one of the best in Britain in many ways) was teaching kids how to use specific applications and no fundamentsals.
I would like to see kids taught prgramming for the same reason that Plato advocated teching geometry (or waas it arithmetic), as a mental excercise.
Also as other posters have pointed out the fundamentals do not become obsolete.
Anyway, I plan to teach my daughter myself if the schools do not do a good job - I have some time, she is one and her computer skills currently stop at being absolutely fascinated by daddy playing with KFract (Mandelbrot and Julia set generator).
90.9% of ads will still be watched.
A 9% drop is less than normal fluctuatiosn due to the state of the economy etc.
The third of PVR users are watching ads that they actually choose to, therefore the ads should be more effective and worth more per view to advertisers.
People already skips ads by switching channels, leavings the room, talking during ads etc. so this makes no difference really.
Ad supported TV can certainly survive quite nicely on 91% of its current ad revenue.
Even if everyone gets a PVR and there are no offsetting improvements to revenues then reveneus drop by two thirds and they will just have to cut the cost of the content - spend less on sports rights, less on film rights, less on poduction etc. The main effect is that a few (mostly very highly paid people) see their salaries drop (they are unlikely to go of and do anything else as they will still be very well paid).
Why the websites of the largest companies rather than the highest traffic websites (which would probably give Apache more share)?
Why US only? - Netcraft is global.
To me it looks like a surevey method designed to get
No, Americans would jsut buy more stuff made by non-American companies as their products would be a lot cheaper.
Of course you could also put tarrifs on those, then the result would be HUGE inflation and loss of export jobs.
I assume you comapred like with like by trying a recent distro, commercial package with support rather than a download, pre-installed on the hardware you bought, right?
Salary is not based on cost of living, it is based on market mechanisims,regulation and a host of other factors.
On the other hand from the point of view of an employee csot of living is relevant. What matters is how well you can afford to live. What would I gain by earing a thousand pounds more a month by moving back to London if I pay a thousand pounds more a month in rent and had to pay higher London prices on everything else as well?
Also differentials between jobs at different skill levels are greater here, so labour intensive services are less expensive relative to my salary, manufactured goods (cars, PCs) are more expensive, my rent is less (15% of salary as against 30% in Manchest and nearly 50% in London), food is about the same. I could not definitely afford there a LOT of things I can afford here.
There are a lot of stuctural reasons why people like me will remain in this position for a long time to come - until this economy becomes developed (in which case I would also benefit form abcolute salary rises and be back in teh same position I was in in England).
I am not aware why you think inflation will balance everything off as cost of living differentials have persisted for decades, if not centuries. They also exist within countries - look at the cost of living in the north of England vs London.
What you way might be true if we hadd a true global free market with free movement of labour etc, but that is not the case. Even if it did happen the adjsutment would take a very long time before everything equalised.
You are arguing based on a very simplistic ecomonic model. I sugest you read a little of the real thing - there is a fairly accessible text book by David Begg (head of the department at which I did my MSc) which manages to cover a lot of the real world issues.
In This interview SCO's VP of OSes said:
We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO's intellectual property)
He also refuses to say that anyone other than Sun is "clean", not even MS.
It looks like they are going after everyone, even MS, even embedded OSes.
Most of those IT jobs are going to people who are being well paid.
I work for a software company (not as an IT person though) in the third world and compared to my last job in England:
No probs with Moz, at elast running ti for a fwe hours at a time. What does cause problems (i.e. it crashes) is Galeon under KDE.
I tried buying Caldera's Linux distro many years ago.
My credit card was not authorised when they tried to process the payment and they did not let me know: the CDs just never arrived.
When I complained I got a VERY rude email back telling me that it was my fault for giving them a dud credit card (actually it was their fault, or their bank's fault as the card was fine), and verging on accusing me of being a crook.
Maybe that sort of customer service has something to do with where they are now.