They spent $7 billion on R&D? Says who? Them? Where are the results? Avalon? Longhorn? Gimme a break. Everything in those products is already being worked on in Linux by people with NO money!
The Gates charity hands out $50 million? And how much money does the Gates charity HAVE? Last I heard it was at least $10 BILLION! What percentage of that is $50 million? Do the math!
Of course you've got to throw some money around to make it look good or the IRS will have your ass.
You think tax writeoffs are small change? You think Ted Turner's $200 million a year donation writeoff is small change? Are you his accountant?
Meaning none of your students is competent to work at a multimedia firm where Mac is the platform of choice?
I'll grant you the number of multimedia firms is not high compared to every other industry, but a lot of companies in all industries do have departments (such as advertising and marketing) which are essentially multimedia where Macs do slip in.
Abandoning the Mac platform (or Linux) entirely is a disservice to students.
And not having Linux machines around because there is no "educational software" for them is incorrect as well. City College of San Francisco teaches UNIX courses and has two dozen Linux machines for those students. Any school could afford to have at least a couple Linux machines around so that students could at least be apprised of the existence of alternative OS's and should be taught so in introductory computer courses.
It's not education's job to be shills for Bill Gates regardless of the money he hands out. And that's the ONLY reason he hands that money out.
If the school teaches UNIX courses, you need Linux machines for people to work on.
If the school teaches multimedia courses, you need (well, need may be too strong - make it preferable) to have Macs - because that's what multimedia firms use.
If your school is crap and only teaches courses which are irrelevant to the local business community, you'll run Windows only because they're cheap.
City College of San Francisco offers UNIX and multimedia certificates as well as Windows-oriented certificates and therefore has Macs and Linux machines (and more Windows machines, of course, since more courses are Windows oriented or general.)
While the Instructional Computing Lab tends to have more Windows machines than UNIX or Macs (and the Windows machines are networked using Novell, interesting enough), they do have a fair number of Macs (mostly for the multimedia courses) and at least two dozen Linux machines.
There is also a UNIX/Open Systems Certificate to be had here which involves introductory courses to UNIX, UNIX System Administration, UNIX Network Administration, UNIX Systems Programming, and Oracle Database Administration. (That last is actually not part of the certificate.)
We have a "UNIX guru" here - Abbas Moghtanei - who has been teaching here for many years (as well as running his own consulting firm with clients such as Oracle and Wells Fargo, for whom he has worked in the past), and he's not about to let the college go "Windows only".
When the college set up a Computer Security Certificate program, most of the teachers were Windows oriented. So this fall we have "Advanced Computer Security for Network Administrators" - which he will teach and will be undoubtedly oriented to UNIX. It's a class on preventing hacking and no doubt will involve teams of class members trying to hack into some reserved ICL machines and others trying to prevent them. He likes class projects like that.
When I took Network Security this past spring, I demo'd the Knoppix STD (Security Tools Distribution) to the class. Somebody asked if the tools on the CD were all command line oriented, and I pointed out that while some (such as Ethereal) were GUI oriented, most network security involves servers and many servers are UNIX-based and servers tend not to have GUI interfaces, so a lot of security tools tend to be CLI based.
The college does participate in the Microsoft program where free copies of Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP Professional, Project Planner, and Visio are downloadable free by computer class students. MS has obviously discovered that many college students use Linux because it's cheap, and want to increase student exposure to MS products.
You'll notice the cash cow, Microsoft Office, is NOT on the list.
I'd like to see CCSF have an "Introduction to Linux" course which would take parts of the Introduction to UNIX course but instead concentrate on the Linux desktop, Linux applications, and enough about the CLI to allow students to be comfortable in both the CLI and GUI environments. Students could be taken from installation through tweaking and package management and given some introduction to home and small business uses such as Samba and Apache in one semester, including perhaps a couple sessions on integrating Linux with Windows in a small business (such as email servers to shield Windows machines from viruses). I think such a course would be well attended and valuable.
Re:uh,, Black and White anyone?
on
Game with God
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· Score: 1
First of all, I'm 55. I've lost more pubic hair than you ever had.
Secondly, you have no clue what Transhumanism is about.
Third, I'm not sure the World Transhumanist Association has any clue what Transhumanism is about. But that's another issue.
As for being happy that you have chosen Christianity, I am. It means your ass is grass someday, and that will be one less monkey Transhumans have to deal with.
Feel free to drink some poison Kool-Aid while you're at it.
Private property is a social construct. It is a legal construct only insofar as the state exists.
There is no "legality" without "law", and no "law" without the concept of the monopoly on coercion which is the definition of the state. (I exclude concepts such as "moral laws" which are essentially fictions or "scientific laws" which mean something entirely different.)
Well, since I'm Transhuman (attitudinally, anyway) I can ignore that one, too.
Let me be plain: aside from a few humans who are acceptable to me because they are working on improvements to the human condition (tech workers, scientists and the like - which explicitly does NOT include Microsoft - and not all of them) or some hot babes I like, I really couldn't care less which humans get killed or how.
As far as I am concerned, whoever gets killed is just one less monkey I have to deal with.
" If they do have $50 million like you say, perhaps they can't burn it all before stockholders get really angry and basically vote to withhold confidence in the leadership."
You haven't been following the SCO news, have you?
This has already happened. BayStar pulled their investment (well, okay, converted the stock) and said SCO was incompetent because they couldn't win their lawsuits with the management they have. (BayStar is actually stupid enough to think SCO could win and actually make money sueing people.) This doesn't seem to have affected SCO management much (Darl is still there), but things are not going well on the cash front, either.
SCO is on its last legs - by this time next year, it should all be over and UNIX IP (if SCO actually HAS any) should be picked up for pennies on the dollar at the assets auction.
While a corporation using slave-labor obviously has lower labor costs, and this affects the product's price point, the fact that the consumer sees a product with a low price point and has no knowledge of the means of achieving that low price point cannot logically cause the company to conclude that the consumer supports use of slave labor - which was your point.
I said that from the mere fact of a consumer making a purchase, the company cannot conclude that the consumer approves of slave labor. Most likely, the consumer could care less one way or the other, but in the end, 99% of those consumers are simply ignorant of the facts.
And I reiterate, there is no way most consumers - including you - are going to be aware of the business practices involved in the production of every item they purchase. That simply is not feasible.
You choose to concentrate on slave labor. How about other seedy business practices such as bribing regulators, shoddy construction, yada, yada, the list goes on forever? Am I supposed to investigate every company (including subsidiaries and parent firms who may own companies I buy from) for "immoral" practices?
Like I said before, if I did, I'd be very rich because I'd never be able to buy anything.
The argument is garbage.
The bottom line is: people don't give a shit about other people on this planet. It's against basic human primate hierarchical dominance/submission neurological conditioning.
I'm not supporting Halliburton. I'm just saying if Gates ran Halliburton, he'd be doing the same shit Cheney did.
"What part of computing are they holding back?"
Just about everything. They have $50 billion in resources that could be advancing AI and who knows what else if they would fund some basic research.
Instead they make a PR move to ease some of the hate people feel for that company.
And the Windows trolls on/. bow down and worship Bill again. Amazing suckers. I hope if I ever have billions, I can find suckers to support my every stupid and wasteful act. I'm sure I will.
I quite know what corporations are and what they do.
You and the rest of the pro-Microsoft posters are merely bowing down to the rich because they're rich. Microsoft could be advancing the state of computer science by funding basic research with that $50 billion and then reap the profits of that research which would make the company even more profitable and even more powerful.
But no, like the rest of the CEO morons, you prefer some short-term stock manipulation that makes you look good, but changes nothing fundamentally.
This is a fucking PR move, nothing more.
It's on a par with Gates "charity" which does nothing more than launder his stock for him to dodge SEC rules. Or Ted Turner's billion-dollar donation to the UN, which gets him a huge tax writeoff.
Get your heads out of your asses. These people do NOT DO CHARITY WORK - unless it pays off for them in cold hard cash.
This is an incredibly fucking waste of a massive financial resource. And you morons are clueless.
Of course, I suppose one could say that since Gates was not doing ANYTHING with it before this, I suppose buying back their stock is a LESS wasteful use of it.
Any "legal construction" is a creature of the state and serves the state's purposes or it would not exist. That simple.
And I did say most corporations don't exercise any actual coercion over their customers. What I mean is that their legal status (tax-wise, lawsuit-wise, etc.) constitutes a state license to get away with stuff an ordinary citizen cannot. If nothing else, it is a state license to raise funds in a more efficient way than a non-state entity can do (i.e., sell stock).
More importantly, a corporation can acquire sufficient power to influence the state - as Microsoft has done with the Bush administration and as almost all large corporations do with the Congress - getting preferential tax regulations added as riders to bills, for instance. This is directly due to the corporation being a state-created entity.
Abolish the corporation and the economy would be an entirely different animal.
Who would I count as my "countrymen" - the suckers who allow Bush to murder thousands of people anywhere in the world he wants?
When you see half a million dead South Koreans and half a million dead North Koreans and fifty thousand dead US troops in Korea (and quite likley several thousand more dead US civilians as a result of another fake "terrorist incident" or a NortH Korean nuke on US soil, tell me again who my "countrymen" are.
Re:uh,, Black and White anyone?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Pascal's Wager again. Been shot down a hundred times.
Your argument is garbage, your beliefs are idiotic, and your future is to die at the hands of Transhumans, whereupon you are assured of never returning because there is absolutely no such thing as any sort of afterlife.
"You are purchasing the product - that's the biggest feedback a company gets if it is on the "right" track"
Now that is obviously wrong. A company cannot conclude that slave labor is correct just because their product gets purchased. That's idiotic on their part - and yours. The only thing they can conclude from a purchase is they have priced the product correctly and somebody needs that product. It has nothing to do with the methods used to produce that product - especially if the public does not know what those methods are.
And if I tried to buy products that agreed with my value system, I would be very rich because I couldn't spend one thin fucking dime - because NO corporation that I am aware of agrees with MY value system.
Your argument is garbage, at least as far as it applies to me - and probably to anyone. You're simply attempting to establish your own moral superiority to everyone else - a classic primate human response.
Well, my only quibble on that would be raising Microsoft to maybe a three or a four - even a five. After all, they are holding back the entire computer revolution, whereas Halliburton is merely stealing billions in tax dollars - which apparently nobody cares about.
What I was trying to express was: 1) some people claim that Microsoft uses slave labor in the form of political prisoners forced to work 2) Walmart imports a lot of Microsoft-made products (which may or may not be made by these people) 3) many Americans like to buy the cheaper products at Walmart and enjoy the deal they get.
If 1 is true, then 3 is bad. But, most Americans are comfortable with not knowing, or even investigating the claim in 1.
Personally I don't buy the argument that just because I buy a product, I'm supporting the methods that went into making it - particularly when I don't know that is the case. And I can hardly investigate every corporation that makes every product I buy down to toilet paper.
I prefer to deal with this issue by simply acknowledging that corporations in general are creatures of the state and thus nothing surprises me in what they do. Unfortunately, nothing can be done about that without abolishing the state - because the corporations control the state. If you don't understand that, Google for "Cheny + Halliburton" and "Bush + Carlyle Group".
And yes, Microsoft does use prison labor in this country. Having been a former Federal prisoner, I actually would have liked to have had such a job, but instead I ended up working in a furniture factory and a cable making factory (making cables for military vehicles, no less - which is probably why nothing works in Iraq.)
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They spent $7 billion on R&D? Says who? Them? Where are the results? Avalon? Longhorn? Gimme a break. Everything in those products is already being worked on in Linux by people with NO money!
The Gates charity hands out $50 million? And how much money does the Gates charity HAVE? Last I heard it was at least $10 BILLION! What percentage of that is $50 million? Do the math!
Of course you've got to throw some money around to make it look good or the IRS will have your ass.
You think tax writeoffs are small change? You think Ted Turner's $200 million a year donation writeoff is small change? Are you his accountant?
Like I said, clueless.
Yeah, but you can get Linux to run on much cheaper machines than OSX.
And Linux runs on MORE types of machines than OSX.
Which is basically the same statement as the one above, I guess.
Try this
Melt humans down and instead of using them for "Soylent Green", use 'em for chips!
Or put another way, use cow chips for chips!
"hardly anyone in business used Macs"
Meaning none of your students is competent to work at a multimedia firm where Mac is the platform of choice?
I'll grant you the number of multimedia firms is not high compared to every other industry, but a lot of companies in all industries do have departments (such as advertising and marketing) which are essentially multimedia where Macs do slip in.
Abandoning the Mac platform (or Linux) entirely is a disservice to students.
And not having Linux machines around because there is no "educational software" for them is incorrect as well. City College of San Francisco teaches UNIX courses and has two dozen Linux machines for those students. Any school could afford to have at least a couple Linux machines around so that students could at least be apprised of the existence of alternative OS's and should be taught so in introductory computer courses.
It's not education's job to be shills for Bill Gates regardless of the money he hands out. And that's the ONLY reason he hands that money out.
You, sir, deserve a medal
Seriously.
What you did is exactly what a teacher should do.
Well done.
It entirely depends on the courses being taught.
If the school teaches UNIX courses, you need Linux machines for people to work on.
If the school teaches multimedia courses, you need (well, need may be too strong - make it preferable) to have Macs - because that's what multimedia firms use.
If your school is crap and only teaches courses which are irrelevant to the local business community, you'll run Windows only because they're cheap.
City College of San Francisco offers UNIX and multimedia certificates as well as Windows-oriented certificates and therefore has Macs and Linux machines (and more Windows machines, of course, since more courses are Windows oriented or general.)
While the Instructional Computing Lab tends to have more Windows machines than UNIX or Macs (and the Windows machines are networked using Novell, interesting enough), they do have a fair number of Macs (mostly for the multimedia courses) and at least two dozen Linux machines.
There is also a UNIX/Open Systems Certificate to be had here which involves introductory courses to UNIX, UNIX System Administration, UNIX Network Administration, UNIX Systems Programming, and Oracle Database Administration. (That last is actually not part of the certificate.)
We have a "UNIX guru" here - Abbas Moghtanei - who has been teaching here for many years (as well as running his own consulting firm with clients such as Oracle and Wells Fargo, for whom he has worked in the past), and he's not about to let the college go "Windows only".
When the college set up a Computer Security Certificate program, most of the teachers were Windows oriented. So this fall we have "Advanced Computer Security for Network Administrators" - which he will teach and will be undoubtedly oriented to UNIX. It's a class on preventing hacking and no doubt will involve teams of class members trying to hack into some reserved ICL machines and others trying to prevent them. He likes class projects like that.
When I took Network Security this past spring, I demo'd the Knoppix STD (Security Tools Distribution) to the class. Somebody asked if the tools on the CD were all command line oriented, and I pointed out that while some (such as Ethereal) were GUI oriented, most network security involves servers and many servers are UNIX-based and servers tend not to have GUI interfaces, so a lot of security tools tend to be CLI based.
The college does participate in the Microsoft program where free copies of Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP Professional, Project Planner, and Visio are downloadable free by computer class students. MS has obviously discovered that many college students use Linux because it's cheap, and want to increase student exposure to MS products.
You'll notice the cash cow, Microsoft Office, is NOT on the list.
I'd like to see CCSF have an "Introduction to Linux" course which would take parts of the Introduction to UNIX course but instead concentrate on the Linux desktop, Linux applications, and enough about the CLI to allow students to be comfortable in both the CLI and GUI environments. Students could be taken from installation through tweaking and package management and given some introduction to home and small business uses such as Samba and Apache in one semester, including perhaps a couple sessions on integrating Linux with Windows in a small business (such as email servers to shield Windows machines from viruses). I think such a course would be well attended and valuable.
First of all, I'm 55. I've lost more pubic hair than you ever had.
Secondly, you have no clue what Transhumanism is about.
Third, I'm not sure the World Transhumanist Association has any clue what Transhumanism is about. But that's another issue.
As for being happy that you have chosen Christianity, I am. It means your ass is grass someday, and that will be one less monkey Transhumans have to deal with.
Feel free to drink some poison Kool-Aid while you're at it.
Yes.
Private property is a social construct. It is a legal construct only insofar as the state exists.
There is no "legality" without "law", and no "law" without the concept of the monopoly on coercion which is the definition of the state. (I exclude concepts such as "moral laws" which are essentially fictions or "scientific laws" which mean something entirely different.)
Well, since I'm Transhuman (attitudinally, anyway) I can ignore that one, too.
Let me be plain: aside from a few humans who are acceptable to me because they are working on improvements to the human condition (tech workers, scientists and the like - which explicitly does NOT include Microsoft - and not all of them) or some hot babes I like, I really couldn't care less which humans get killed or how.
As far as I am concerned, whoever gets killed is just one less monkey I have to deal with.
Which includes you, BTW.
Have a nice day.
Ok, I go with your numbers. Didn't RBC bail, too, though, or is my memory fuzzy?
In any event, while they still have enough in the bank to pay Boies, I don't think anybody (except Baystar maybe) views them as a good investment.
So I think we can expect the investors to be looking to pull out more if they can. This dumping of the Daimler case should definitely help.
Drop the menu.
Go back to the command line on their Web site.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
" If they do have $50 million like you say, perhaps they can't burn it all before stockholders get really angry and basically vote to withhold confidence in the leadership."
You haven't been following the SCO news, have you?
This has already happened. BayStar pulled their investment (well, okay, converted the stock) and said SCO was incompetent because they couldn't win their lawsuits with the management they have. (BayStar is actually stupid enough to think SCO could win and actually make money sueing people.) This doesn't seem to have affected SCO management much (Darl is still there), but things are not going well on the cash front, either.
SCO is on its last legs - by this time next year, it should all be over and UNIX IP (if SCO actually HAS any) should be picked up for pennies on the dollar at the assets auction.
You're still completely missing the point.
While a corporation using slave-labor obviously has lower labor costs, and this affects the product's price point, the fact that the consumer sees a product with a low price point and has no knowledge of the means of achieving that low price point cannot logically cause the company to conclude that the consumer supports use of slave labor - which was your point.
I said that from the mere fact of a consumer making a purchase, the company cannot conclude that the consumer approves of slave labor. Most likely, the consumer could care less one way or the other, but in the end, 99% of those consumers are simply ignorant of the facts.
And I reiterate, there is no way most consumers - including you - are going to be aware of the business practices involved in the production of every item they purchase. That simply is not feasible.
You choose to concentrate on slave labor. How about other seedy business practices such as bribing regulators, shoddy construction, yada, yada, the list goes on forever? Am I supposed to investigate every company (including subsidiaries and parent firms who may own companies I buy from) for "immoral" practices?
Like I said before, if I did, I'd be very rich because I'd never be able to buy anything.
The argument is garbage.
The bottom line is: people don't give a shit about other people on this planet. It's against basic human primate hierarchical dominance/submission neurological conditioning.
Only Transhumanism has a solution for this.
Anything less is just "bit-fiddling".
I'm not supporting Halliburton. I'm just saying if Gates ran Halliburton, he'd be doing the same shit Cheney did.
/. bow down and worship Bill again. Amazing suckers. I hope if I ever have billions, I can find suckers to support my every stupid and wasteful act. I'm sure I will.
"What part of computing are they holding back?"
Just about everything. They have $50 billion in resources that could be advancing AI and who knows what else if they would fund some basic research.
Instead they make a PR move to ease some of the hate people feel for that company.
And the Windows trolls on
I quite know what corporations are and what they do.
You and the rest of the pro-Microsoft posters are merely bowing down to the rich because they're rich. Microsoft could be advancing the state of computer science by funding basic research with that $50 billion and then reap the profits of that research which would make the company even more profitable and even more powerful.
But no, like the rest of the CEO morons, you prefer some short-term stock manipulation that makes you look good, but changes nothing fundamentally.
This is a fucking PR move, nothing more.
It's on a par with Gates "charity" which does nothing more than launder his stock for him to dodge SEC rules. Or Ted Turner's billion-dollar donation to the UN, which gets him a huge tax writeoff.
Get your heads out of your asses. These people do NOT DO CHARITY WORK - unless it pays off for them in cold hard cash.
This is an incredibly fucking waste of a massive financial resource. And you morons are clueless.
Of course, I suppose one could say that since Gates was not doing ANYTHING with it before this, I suppose buying back their stock is a LESS wasteful use of it.
Idiots.
Any "legal construction" is a creature of the state and serves the state's purposes or it would not exist. That simple.
And I did say most corporations don't exercise any actual coercion over their customers. What I mean is that their legal status (tax-wise, lawsuit-wise, etc.) constitutes a state license to get away with stuff an ordinary citizen cannot. If nothing else, it is a state license to raise funds in a more efficient way than a non-state entity can do (i.e., sell stock).
More importantly, a corporation can acquire sufficient power to influence the state - as Microsoft has done with the Bush administration and as almost all large corporations do with the Congress - getting preferential tax regulations added as riders to bills, for instance. This is directly due to the corporation being a state-created entity.
Abolish the corporation and the economy would be an entirely different animal.
I have no "countrymen".
Who would I count as my "countrymen" - the suckers who allow Bush to murder thousands of people anywhere in the world he wants?
When you see half a million dead South Koreans and half a million dead North Koreans and fifty thousand dead US troops in Korea (and quite likley several thousand more dead US civilians as a result of another fake "terrorist incident" or a NortH Korean nuke on US soil, tell me again who my "countrymen" are.
Pascal's Wager again. Been shot down a hundred times.
Your argument is garbage, your beliefs are idiotic, and your future is to die at the hands of Transhumans, whereupon you are assured of never returning because there is absolutely no such thing as any sort of afterlife.
Good luck!
Or should I say, LOL!
Moron.
"You are purchasing the product - that's the biggest feedback a company gets if it is on the "right" track"
Now that is obviously wrong. A company cannot conclude that slave labor is correct just because their product gets purchased. That's idiotic on their part - and yours. The only thing they can conclude from a purchase is they have priced the product correctly and somebody needs that product. It has nothing to do with the methods used to produce that product - especially if the public does not know what those methods are.
And if I tried to buy products that agreed with my value system, I would be very rich because I couldn't spend one thin fucking dime - because NO corporation that I am aware of agrees with MY value system.
Your argument is garbage, at least as far as it applies to me - and probably to anyone. You're simply attempting to establish your own moral superiority to everyone else - a classic primate human response.
Sorry, pal, has absolutely no effect on me.
You're clueless about Microsoft and corporations and what is correct and incorrect about the behavior of either.
Another Windows idiot.
Well, my only quibble on that would be raising Microsoft to maybe a three or a four - even a five. After all, they are holding back the entire computer revolution, whereas Halliburton is merely stealing billions in tax dollars - which apparently nobody cares about.
Oops, that Google on "Cheny" won't get you anything, will it? Make that "Cheney + Halliburton".
s/China/Microsoft/g;
What I was trying to express was:
1) some people claim that Microsoft uses slave labor in the form of political prisoners forced to work
2) Walmart imports a lot of Microsoft-made products (which may or may not be made by these people)
3) many Americans like to buy the cheaper products at Walmart and enjoy the deal they get.
If 1 is true, then 3 is bad. But, most Americans are comfortable with not knowing, or even investigating the claim in 1.
Personally I don't buy the argument that just because I buy a product, I'm supporting the methods that went into making it - particularly when I don't know that is the case. And I can hardly investigate every corporation that makes every product I buy down to toilet paper.
I prefer to deal with this issue by simply acknowledging that corporations in general are creatures of the state and thus nothing surprises me in what they do. Unfortunately, nothing can be done about that without abolishing the state - because the corporations control the state. If you don't understand that, Google for "Cheny + Halliburton" and "Bush + Carlyle Group".
And yes, Microsoft does use prison labor in this country. Having been a former Federal prisoner, I actually would have liked to have had such a job, but instead I ended up working in a furniture factory and a cable making factory (making cables for military vehicles, no less - which is probably why nothing works in Iraq.)