Well maybe in the developed markets where people are using windows since last 10 years and are used to it. But in nascent markets it maynot be the case.
In those so-called nascent markets, you can find any copy of any pirated software, so everyone having a computer can purchase the newest software and use it.
For better or for worse, all software is essentially free-as-in-pirated in the third world. It is in China, India, Russia, etc that the real battle between Windows and Linux will take place, on equal footing.
The Linux crowd may come away covered in glory, or humiliated by an ease-of-use loss to Windows. I can't wait to see what happens!
Software pirates are the main reason these draconian licensing agreements have come into existence.
Microsoft will be glad to hear that some of their propaganda/education money has been put to good use. Yes indeed, blame it all on the 'pirates.'
You know, you don't really address the guy's point, which is that piracy does indeed put downward pressure on prices. Look at the Asia situation. Microsoft has been railing against piracy for decades, so it is not inconceivable that their "anti-piracy" licensing schemes really are intended to, well, combat piracy.
[...] I will not trade in my Linux box. I believe the Bazaar model will win, in time, not because it is cheaper, or trendy, but because it simply makes more sense.
I will argue that the Bazaar Model will win, precisely because it is (a) cheaper, and (b) trendy.
What the ol' B.M. does is commoditize certain kinds of program so that nobody makes much money off of them. I am thinking about ftp, news, linux, etc. The free versions are good enough that it is very hard to push a commercial version.
The trendy part is that it is seen as cool to work on such projects, and nice to have on the resume as well. Slowly over time the OSS community will commoditize (heck, beyond commoditize... "freeitize"!) more and more programs in this way.
This is nice in that it frees up developers and money to work on other things, but troubling in that the GPL creates a separate, parallel public domain.
From a financial standpoint it makes very little sense for a programmer to write open source software, and almost no sense for a corporation [1]. OSS will always be around because it is driven by other considerations.
[1] There will be those (aka IBM) who find a way to make OSS pay off for them; more power to 'em.
It's like this. The rent on my house (low for the area) is $900/month. I have four small children. From what I hear, unemployment will give me a whopping $800/month, [...]
My wife went straight from college to mothering, and has never worked, so has few job skills. The company for whom I work (who shall remain nameless) just sold my position to a contracting company, with one weeks' notice. [...]
Did I mention that there aren't really any jobs out there right now? [...]
The idea that everyone has free choice in signing contracts is foolish.
[...]It is correct and appropriate in such cases for the government -- who created the shared stock company as a separate persona in its own right in the first place -- to take action to ensure just and moral practices.
Of course people don't have absolue free choice in signing contracts. What they, and you have, are the consequences of life choices. You chose to support a wife and 4 children on your salary, apparently with no cash reserves -- don't be so surprised when you suddenly realize this takes away some of your leverage in negotiating with your employer.
So... what exactly are you asking for? That NCAs be outlawed? (I would actually be with you there) That unemployment insurance cover as many dependents as you choose to have? That the government step in so that you not lose your job? That economic times not be hard? I'm not sure I understand what you want.
Please advise.
Well they do say vietnam is a beautiful country now that American invaders aren't trying ton bomb into the stone age and kill everyone who doesn't dig bigmacs...
The really funny part is that the Vietnamese are now a bunch of money-grubbing Big-Mac-chomping Marlboro-smoking capitalistas thinly disguised as communists.
Why do people in industries with strict uptime or reliability requirements always act holier-than-thou about the whole issue, as if their way is the only right way?
Because it's really hard, and it's really cool. If you implement a really fault-tolerant system, you are allowed to brag. Like the guys who actually make useful programs in Lisp. Or human-readable programs in Perl.
For myself I've realized I'm simply not going to send rebates in. I've let $100 rebates go at times that I thought when I bought the item, "It's $100, this I'll send in for sure, I'm not that stupid...". Yes, yes I am... [...]
Rebates suck.
This is exactly why rebates rock. There are enough people who forget or don't bother, that the manufacturers can offer huge, huge rebates, secure in the knowledge that only a few people will cash them in. (Of course, with perfect self interest I wouldn't be mentioning this, heh heh)
It takes about a minute to fill in the rebate form and mail it. Add to that the way my wife wields coupons like a weapon, and the savings can become impressive.
If you can't learn on your own to do your homework, then even with all the education in the world you're dead meat in real life anyway. And you only really, really learn when you f**k up. Kids need that independence.
Where I work, I have to file a status report every week. It's a good thing for my boss and me -- we all know what I'm up to. I do what I think I'm supposed to be doing, and if there is a miscommunication of priorities or whatever it can be quickly corrected. This up-to-the-minute grade/status report seems no different. A wise parent (sez I) will periodically check progress, and if a downward trend shows up, parent can take action. By "action" I mean sit down with the child and offer tutoring. In my world, the parent should know how to do the child's lessons, even if he has to sneak a peek into textbooks!
From your post it seems you disagree with constant monitoring. What would an appropriate monitoring interval be for you? Weekly (my choice)? Monthly?
Not quite. At first, the Buggers didn't realize that humans are individuals rather than a Hive Mind. The Buggers finally got it after the second Bugger War.
I never understood how the buggers were supposed to not realize humans were intelligent after they saw our spaceships. "We sent in an invasion, creatures in spaceships resisted, but we couldn't imagine that they were actually intelligent creatures, spaceships nonwithstanding, so we sent in a second invasion fleet, had several massive space battles with nuclear fucking bombs in the cometary shell, did something called 'the Scathing of China', and didn't 'realize' that humans were sentient until some jerkoff named Mazer Rackham kicked our butts". Sure. How were non-sentient creatures supposed to shoot nuclear missles at you?
After the first invasion they *knew* we were legit, but they came anyway. I'm glad Ender beat the crap out of them. Too bad in the later books the surviving alien egg took hypnotic control over him and made him miss the obvious truth.
If you're fighting for something you love (Not necessarily your leader, but your home, or your country) against a superior force, you do anything. Suicide bombers, chemical weapons, torturing POWs, anything you think might give you a chance.
But what if you know that even that won't give you a chance, that all it will do is make that superior force very, very angry? Is it still a good idea? Remember, the whole idea behind the Geneva Convention is "what if we lose?" -- the side that loses wants to be in good standing GC-wise, to protect themselves later.
Also, this is why you may see refusals to deploy "cheating" weapons. Take Iraq (please): from the perspective of the Baath party, losing the war is unimaginable catastrophe: they cease to exist, and their institutional will is to fight to the bitter end. But to young Joe al-Schmoe, PFC, if the country falls it means that he gets a short vacation in a POW camp, then a new government that he also doesn't get a say in. It's not quite as bad for him.
Interestingly, that is why the media war is so important. The Iraqis want to convince the populace that their backs are against the wall to stiffen their will to fight ("The Zionists want to kill us all, then forcibly convert us all to Judaism... fight with your fingernails!"), and the coalition types want to convince the Iraqis that this is merely a regime change ("Tired of being oppressed? Just stay home and wait it out!").
ETYMOLOGY: 17c in this sense; 16c in historical sense 'to select by lot and execute one in every ten': from Latin decimare to take a tenth person or thing, from decem ten.
Ya gotta love those Romans, inventing a word for "kill every tenth person". In addition to all the good stuff (literacy, pax, engineering, etc) those fun guys left their jackbooted footsteps all over our vocabulary (read aloud with robot voice):
The font rendering on a modern distro (I'm using Mandrake 9.1 right now) looks comparable to or better than the font rendering on my Windows box. [...] For example, reading CNN or Slashdot in Konqueror, or Phoenix, on my Linux box, it's comparable in readability to on my Windows box.
So we've got the fonts looking nice on Slashdot. Will somebody now please fix the content?
They have invented a new text compression method [...]
Yes... they replace dark green pixels (#006400) with smaller black ones (#0). That's 1/6 the size! It also works with dark red, dark gray, dark brown, etc.
Bright sites, unfortunately, show very little improvements.
I really really want to underclock my cpus to hardware emulate old machines.
now if i can get a p4 down to 8mhz and in 286 mode
Open the following programs:
Visio
Word
Eclipse
Outlook
Internet Explorer
Real Player
Exceed
The few measley MB of disk space you have left after installing all that software will quickly be eaten by your swapfile. The system will groan under the load (using even more cycles and memory to play the.mp3 sound-effect), quickly catapaulting you into realms of slow performance and unproductivity you haven't seen since the mid 80's.
Wipe away that nostalgic tear, start a compile, and go get a cup of coffee. Lord, the memories!
P.S. I can't do much about 286 mode. Try downloading and installing a lot of device drivers, or running Windows Update a couple times, if you want that kind of system instability.
I wonder why the media is not covering the news of Iraqi deaths.
I imagine we don't have really good numbers on that. A lot of the places we bomb are not under our control on the ground, so we have no way of knowing how many people died.
I suppose we could count dead soldiers as the front line sweeps past them, but I think the people over there are way too busy.
Prediction: this information won't come out for several weeks.
Losing languages means loss of potentially valuable ideas and viewpoints.
What are these viewpoints? Can they only be expressed in the language they were invented in? If so, what's the point... they can't explain them to us. If they can be translated, then they aren't really inherent to the language, rather to the culture involved.
Doesn't anyone believe in a sort of "Turing-completeness" for human languages?
Slashdot Mirror
The Linux crowd may come away covered in glory, or humiliated by an ease-of-use loss to Windows. I can't wait to see what happens!
What the ol' B.M. does is commoditize certain kinds of program so that nobody makes much money off of them. I am thinking about ftp, news, linux, etc. The free versions are good enough that it is very hard to push a commercial version.
The trendy part is that it is seen as cool to work on such projects, and nice to have on the resume as well. Slowly over time the OSS community will commoditize (heck, beyond commoditize
This is nice in that it frees up developers and money to work on other things, but troubling in that the GPL creates a separate, parallel public domain.
From a financial standpoint it makes very little sense for a programmer to write open source software, and almost no sense for a corporation [1]. OSS will always be around because it is driven by other considerations.
[1] There will be those (aka IBM) who find a way to make OSS pay off for them; more power to 'em.
So
God, I love this world.
It takes about a minute to fill in the rebate form and mail it. Add to that the way my wife wields coupons like a weapon, and the savings can become impressive.
From your post it seems you disagree with constant monitoring. What would an appropriate monitoring interval be for you? Weekly (my choice)? Monthly?
After the first invasion they *knew* we were legit, but they came anyway. I'm glad Ender beat the crap out of them. Too bad in the later books the surviving alien egg took hypnotic control over him and made him miss the obvious truth.
Also, this is why you may see refusals to deploy "cheating" weapons. Take Iraq (please): from the perspective of the Baath party, losing the war is unimaginable catastrophe: they cease to exist, and their institutional will is to fight to the bitter end. But to young Joe al-Schmoe, PFC, if the country falls it means that he gets a short vacation in a POW camp, then a new government that he also doesn't get a say in. It's not quite as bad for him.
Interestingly, that is why the media war is so important. The Iraqis want to convince the populace that their backs are against the wall to stiffen their will to fight ("The Zionists want to kill us all, then forcibly convert us all to Judaism
We'll see how this all rolls out in the news.
Abolish, Eliminate, Expunge, Exterminate, Extinguish, Extirpate, Eradicate, Liquidate, Obliterate,
Bad sci-fi owes the Roman Empire a debt it can never repay.
The linked article points out some problems with this approach.
Sheesh.
Bright sites, unfortunately, show very little improvements.
- Visio
- Word
- Eclipse
- Outlook
- Internet Explorer
- Real Player
- Exceed
The few measley MB of disk space you have left after installing all that software will quickly be eaten by your swapfile. The system will groan under the load (using even more cycles and memory to play theWipe away that nostalgic tear, start a compile, and go get a cup of coffee. Lord, the memories!
P.S. I can't do much about 286 mode. Try downloading and installing a lot of device drivers, or running Windows Update a couple times, if you want that kind of system instability.
I suppose we could count dead soldiers as the front line sweeps past them, but I think the people over there are way too busy.
Prediction: this information won't come out for several weeks.
Doesn't anyone believe in a sort of "Turing-completeness" for human languages?
Just a thought.