Wow, that's a pretty bold assertion with absolutely no evidence to back it up. I don't have any numbers, but I'll go ahead and base my entire argument on personal opinion like you have. I think you're wrong. I'm sure that less people buy operating systems to upgrade themselves than buy them OEM with a new computer, and I know businesses have avoided Vista, and after the fact, when everyone found out for sure that Vista was garbage they stayed away, but "Consumers don't upgrade operating systems" is just straight up silly. The simple fact that Best Buy has them for sale says you are wrong. People do it, and enough do it that Microsoft markets to them.
And, as an aside, business do upgrade operating systems. But not immediately. They give them time, wait for bug fixes and evidence that the platform is stable. With Vista, that never happened, so they didn't upgrade.
"The design could not only lower the cost of wind turbines but increase their power output by 50 percent to as much as 100 percent, in some locations."
100%? Why stop there?!
Oh, and, uh.. why is this whole article about windmills? Couldn't these improvements in generator efficiency be used across the board?
I was honestly expecting a bunch of comments saying this idea is genius, because that's what I was thinking. But I'm not surprised that this is what I actually found.
I'm not sure what "technology" could be developed to make war obsolete. What technology can be developed is stuff that will help keep "our guys" safe. The idea behind that is if there is a war, whether or not you want there to be, at least you can do what you can to reduce casualties. This seems like it could be a cheap and very effective way to do that. Could even help end wars faster if you don't have troops endlessly clearing houses in a village that it turns out doesn't have any bad guys in it. Could even help spare civilian casualties, if you were able to observe and see who they actually are as opposed to poking your head in and getting spooked because you thought that handheld mixer was a gun.
I think it's fairly safe to say the R&D the US military is doing now is pretty much all about that. They are developing surveillance, more accurate and smaller bombs, guns that incapacitate but don't kill. There is no need to make a new gun that vaporizes people that could just be knocked down. Sure, the videos you see of bombs being dropped on guys running around on the ground are excessive, but isn't that better than carpet bombing an entire town or sending 200 guys with rifles and taking the casualties (on both sides) to get that guy?
And the people developing these things aren't declaring wars.
Who knows if anyone will ever read this, but here goes. I agree that they are sleazy, but I don't really agree with how you're saying it. I think providing a service free of charge to people while making money off advertising that isn't so thick that it ruins (yeah, subjective) the experience is just fine. Even a bit of data aggregation is alright. That's the way of the internet.
What's sleazy is how Facebook (I'm not as familiar with myspace) and its apps spread this data. Hundreds of completely worthless facebook "apps". Want to take an IQ test? It'll let you get all the way through the test, THEN tell you you have to give your friends' names to see the results. Why? No good reason. Should they have told you ahead of time? Of course. Is it worth it? I don't even think it's worth the time to click, let alone give the information up. But facebook has the benefit of millions of kids with absolutely nothing better to do.
"I think it's time for Google to embrace OpenOffice.org to take on Microsoft head-on, as CW blogger Preston Gralla has argued for and described how to go about it."
That would be a great idea, if your goal is to hurt Microsoft's sales rather than high quality office software. This is a good example of how two faced people can be. The leg the open source community stands on is improving the offerings in specific types of software, yet somehow lose sight of it, thinking that eliminating an option is in everyone's best interest.
"Selling advertising, and collecting aggregate data..."
"Being a sleazy company operating within the law just wasn't enough for them."
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I think calling the main premise of these sites sleazy reaches a bit far. That's pretty much the reason 90% of profitable websites exist (with the caveat "profitable" because it excludes 99% of websites that don't matter). In the end, the point is turning a profit, whether by offering a free service with the above annoyances or charging for the service (often with the same annoyances).
Ok, a better analogy. Buy an old house and find out a year later that none of the circuit breakers are marked. Are you going to call up the guy you bought the house from and ask which breaker goes to which outlet? Are you going to say online that the guy "must" tell you?
"Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users?"
Of course not. If I give you a car, are you going to expect me to change the oil in it every time its due? Sure, people that spend their time developing software for free may be inclined to help you out to an extent, but they don't owe you anything.
Take the issue I found in Pidgin. It was crashing seemingly randomly, and debugging showed it had something to do with playing sounds. I opened a ticket, someone marked it as an actual defect, and 14 days later, since no one had looked at the ticket again, it automatically closed. Annoying, but I still have a Windows XP disc laying around somewhere (for which there are a number of IM clients that run just fine for me).
If you've used Windows in a corporate environment and still feel that way, there is something wrong with your organization. I've been with my current company for just over a year now and yesterday I called the help desk for my first Windows related problem. It's stable, period. Now, all the antivirus, security, firewall etc they install makes the thing so slow it's awful to use, but that's beside the point.
One thing is for sure, though. I don't want to make an 'Impress' presentation and send it to a client unless I'm sure they are going to be able to open it in Powerpoint.
..ignoring the fact that the real problem with cell phone cameras is douchebags who would rather watch their 2" LCD than the concert they are actually at so they can watch it later. Except they won't, because the quality makes it worthless.
"Microsoft is not doing its job as looking after its investors interests if it does not pursue the employees involved for this."
BRAIN GAMES! Unscramble the prepositions to discover what Microsoft is doing wrong!
Solution: Microsoft is not doing its job of looking after its investors' interests if it does not pursue the employees involved in doing this.
Seriously, though.. Who is investing in Microsoft?
"We share out docs with staff so application testers can submit comments, saves us writing a custom app to track change requests."
If "comments" equals bugs, than of course they should be using bug tracking software. And you could use software I didn't mention for making comments during testing. TestDirector maybe? That's what their for. And if you are using proper tracking software, the versioning issues the guy mentioned won't exist.
"You want them to use bugzilla to share documentation?"
Nope, I don't want them to do anything. I was pointing out that the alternative to using Google Apps for what they are doing is not writing custom apps, as the original guy suggested. It's using something designed for what they are doing.
"We share out docs with staff so application testers can submit comments, saves us writing a custom app to track change requests."
I'm sure it works, but there are tools specifically designed that would work better. BugZilla, for one. If Google Apps suit your needs, wonderful, but they definately aren't saving you from writing a custom app.
Wait.. did you just insult someone's cell phone service? I think that is truly the most pathetic thing I have ever seen. Worse than anyone who as called someone else a "newb." Worse than any nerdly blow to Microsoft.
What's actually funny is that it seems the people who are the most "in to" cell phones -- by nature, social devices -- are usually the most socially inept. I pay $0 every month to send and receive text messages, because I'm using a phone.
What a wonderful "study." Check a bunch of names that you randomly presume would be desirable, find they are taken, and then assume their use isn't legit.
I'm trying to find a way to tie my hatred of the very concept of twitter in to this but I can't, so I'll just make it a seperate statement.
Yeah, uh, no. The judge basically said "this is wrong, and I'm not going to a damned thing about it."
No shit? I thought the judge said "This ia a load of shit but I'm a judge, not a lawmaker. I can't overstep my authority and rule in a way contrary to those laws or I wouldn't be doing my job at all. And doing this can be tough, because, in cases such as this, the dirty bastards have to win. And then people who don't have a clue who I am, don't know what evidence was presented in the trial, don't know the laws nearly as I do (being a goddamn judge), and are most likely horribly biased as they download music illegally too go on the internet and talk about what a horrible person I am."
On the Eli Manning scale, they're both an "Aw shucks, I done wrong." Unless you solve the problem (rather than just reducing risk to yourself), what you're doing isn't ethical.
As an aside, I'm not saying this because I'm self righteous. I'd just do the work.
I would suggest you propose the $2k/month route and if your boss balks at it, start interviewing with other companies. If you have to leave and you're worried about being blacklisted as a 'whistleblower' (and your boss just might be that kind of guy) then tell him it's for monetary reasons that you're leaving and wish him the best of luck in his future scams.
How is splitting and allowing the work to be done by someone else to do any more ethically sound than doing it yourself?
"Of course we must fear evil men, but there is another evil that we must fear more... and that is the indifference of good men."
That all makes sense until you try it. I thought I was all slick playing movies and NES emulators over the network on my small PC that had RCA out back in the day. But it just sucked. My modded Xbox with the same movies and emulators was 100% better a few years later.
What's the difference? Either they made the change to block homebrew and waited till there were other changes or just pushed it by itself. Either way, you've got AID-- er, no more homebrew software, at least temporarily.
Nope, I 1) don't have kids, 2) hadn't considered that, 3) don't care and 4) never stated an opinion on DST one way or the other. (As it turns out, I also don't care about that. The only time it causes me a problem is when I lose an hour of sleep.)
You're a farmer, or construction worker, or anyone who does his business in daylight. During the months of short days, you are up and ready to work at sun up every day and need to work for 8 hours. In the summer, you can still get to the bank and do your business. But in the winter, without DST, you're stuck at work until 5:00pm and can't. DST isn't baseless. It caters to a small group of people that can't adjust their hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that's a pretty bold assertion with absolutely no evidence to back it up. I don't have any numbers, but I'll go ahead and base my entire argument on personal opinion like you have. I think you're wrong. I'm sure that less people buy operating systems to upgrade themselves than buy them OEM with a new computer, and I know businesses have avoided Vista, and after the fact, when everyone found out for sure that Vista was garbage they stayed away, but "Consumers don't upgrade operating systems" is just straight up silly. The simple fact that Best Buy has them for sale says you are wrong. People do it, and enough do it that Microsoft markets to them.
And, as an aside, business do upgrade operating systems. But not immediately. They give them time, wait for bug fixes and evidence that the platform is stable. With Vista, that never happened, so they didn't upgrade.
You forgot the part where she jumps up to grab the bag. We've struck gold with this one!
"The design could not only lower the cost of wind turbines but increase their power output by 50 percent to as much as 100 percent, in some locations."
100%? Why stop there?!
Oh, and, uh.. why is this whole article about windmills? Couldn't these improvements in generator efficiency be used across the board?
I was honestly expecting a bunch of comments saying this idea is genius, because that's what I was thinking. But I'm not surprised that this is what I actually found.
I'm not sure what "technology" could be developed to make war obsolete. What technology can be developed is stuff that will help keep "our guys" safe. The idea behind that is if there is a war, whether or not you want there to be, at least you can do what you can to reduce casualties. This seems like it could be a cheap and very effective way to do that. Could even help end wars faster if you don't have troops endlessly clearing houses in a village that it turns out doesn't have any bad guys in it. Could even help spare civilian casualties, if you were able to observe and see who they actually are as opposed to poking your head in and getting spooked because you thought that handheld mixer was a gun.
I think it's fairly safe to say the R&D the US military is doing now is pretty much all about that. They are developing surveillance, more accurate and smaller bombs, guns that incapacitate but don't kill. There is no need to make a new gun that vaporizes people that could just be knocked down. Sure, the videos you see of bombs being dropped on guys running around on the ground are excessive, but isn't that better than carpet bombing an entire town or sending 200 guys with rifles and taking the casualties (on both sides) to get that guy?
And the people developing these things aren't declaring wars.
What's sleazy is how Facebook (I'm not as familiar with myspace) and its apps spread this data. Hundreds of completely worthless facebook "apps". Want to take an IQ test? It'll let you get all the way through the test, THEN tell you you have to give your friends' names to see the results. Why? No good reason. Should they have told you ahead of time? Of course. Is it worth it? I don't even think it's worth the time to click, let alone give the information up. But facebook has the benefit of millions of kids with absolutely nothing better to do.
http://astalavista.box.sk/
"I think it's time for Google to embrace OpenOffice.org to take on Microsoft head-on, as CW blogger Preston Gralla has argued for and described how to go about it."
That would be a great idea, if your goal is to hurt Microsoft's sales rather than high quality office software. This is a good example of how two faced people can be. The leg the open source community stands on is improving the offerings in specific types of software, yet somehow lose sight of it, thinking that eliminating an option is in everyone's best interest.
"Selling advertising, and collecting aggregate data ..."
"Being a sleazy company operating within the law just wasn't enough for them."
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I think calling the main premise of these sites sleazy reaches a bit far. That's pretty much the reason 90% of profitable websites exist (with the caveat "profitable" because it excludes 99% of websites that don't matter). In the end, the point is turning a profit, whether by offering a free service with the above annoyances or charging for the service (often with the same annoyances).
Ok, a better analogy. Buy an old house and find out a year later that none of the circuit breakers are marked. Are you going to call up the guy you bought the house from and ask which breaker goes to which outlet? Are you going to say online that the guy "must" tell you?
"Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users?"
Of course not. If I give you a car, are you going to expect me to change the oil in it every time its due? Sure, people that spend their time developing software for free may be inclined to help you out to an extent, but they don't owe you anything.
Take the issue I found in Pidgin. It was crashing seemingly randomly, and debugging showed it had something to do with playing sounds. I opened a ticket, someone marked it as an actual defect, and 14 days later, since no one had looked at the ticket again, it automatically closed. Annoying, but I still have a Windows XP disc laying around somewhere (for which there are a number of IM clients that run just fine for me).
If you've used Windows in a corporate environment and still feel that way, there is something wrong with your organization. I've been with my current company for just over a year now and yesterday I called the help desk for my first Windows related problem. It's stable, period. Now, all the antivirus, security, firewall etc they install makes the thing so slow it's awful to use, but that's beside the point.
One thing is for sure, though. I don't want to make an 'Impress' presentation and send it to a client unless I'm sure they are going to be able to open it in Powerpoint.
..ignoring the fact that the real problem with cell phone cameras is douchebags who would rather watch their 2" LCD than the concert they are actually at so they can watch it later. Except they won't, because the quality makes it worthless.
"Microsoft is not doing its job as looking after its investors interests if it does not pursue the employees involved for this."
BRAIN GAMES! Unscramble the prepositions to discover what Microsoft is doing wrong!
Solution: Microsoft is not doing its job of looking after its investors' interests if it does not pursue the employees involved in doing this.
Seriously, though.. Who is investing in Microsoft?
"We share out docs with staff so application testers can submit comments, saves us writing a custom app to track change requests."
If "comments" equals bugs, than of course they should be using bug tracking software. And you could use software I didn't mention for making comments during testing. TestDirector maybe? That's what their for. And if you are using proper tracking software, the versioning issues the guy mentioned won't exist.
"You want them to use bugzilla to share documentation?"
Nope, I don't want them to do anything. I was pointing out that the alternative to using Google Apps for what they are doing is not writing custom apps, as the original guy suggested. It's using something designed for what they are doing.
"We share out docs with staff so application testers can submit comments, saves us writing a custom app to track change requests."
I'm sure it works, but there are tools specifically designed that would work better. BugZilla, for one. If Google Apps suit your needs, wonderful, but they definately aren't saving you from writing a custom app.
I still like sitting down and making fun of a movie with friends a lot more than watching another group of friends do it.
Wait.. did you just insult someone's cell phone service? I think that is truly the most pathetic thing I have ever seen. Worse than anyone who as called someone else a "newb." Worse than any nerdly blow to Microsoft.
What's actually funny is that it seems the people who are the most "in to" cell phones -- by nature, social devices -- are usually the most socially inept. I pay $0 every month to send and receive text messages, because I'm using a phone.
What a wonderful "study." Check a bunch of names that you randomly presume would be desirable, find they are taken, and then assume their use isn't legit.
I'm trying to find a way to tie my hatred of the very concept of twitter in to this but I can't, so I'll just make it a seperate statement.
Yeah, uh, no. The judge basically said "this is wrong, and I'm not going to a damned thing about it."
No shit? I thought the judge said "This ia a load of shit but I'm a judge, not a lawmaker. I can't overstep my authority and rule in a way contrary to those laws or I wouldn't be doing my job at all. And doing this can be tough, because, in cases such as this, the dirty bastards have to win. And then people who don't have a clue who I am, don't know what evidence was presented in the trial, don't know the laws nearly as I do (being a goddamn judge), and are most likely horribly biased as they download music illegally too go on the internet and talk about what a horrible person I am."
On the Eli Manning scale, they're both an "Aw shucks, I done wrong." Unless you solve the problem (rather than just reducing risk to yourself), what you're doing isn't ethical.
As an aside, I'm not saying this because I'm self righteous. I'd just do the work.
I would suggest you propose the $2k/month route and if your boss balks at it, start interviewing with other companies. If you have to leave and you're worried about being blacklisted as a 'whistleblower' (and your boss just might be that kind of guy) then tell him it's for monetary reasons that you're leaving and wish him the best of luck in his future scams.
How is splitting and allowing the work to be done by someone else to do any more ethically sound than doing it yourself?
"Of course we must fear evil men, but there is another evil that we must fear more... and that is the indifference of good men."
That all makes sense until you try it. I thought I was all slick playing movies and NES emulators over the network on my small PC that had RCA out back in the day. But it just sucked. My modded Xbox with the same movies and emulators was 100% better a few years later.
What's the difference? Either they made the change to block homebrew and waited till there were other changes or just pushed it by itself. Either way, you've got AID-- er, no more homebrew software, at least temporarily.
Nope, I 1) don't have kids, 2) hadn't considered that, 3) don't care and 4) never stated an opinion on DST one way or the other. (As it turns out, I also don't care about that. The only time it causes me a problem is when I lose an hour of sleep.)
You're a farmer, or construction worker, or anyone who does his business in daylight. During the months of short days, you are up and ready to work at sun up every day and need to work for 8 hours. In the summer, you can still get to the bank and do your business. But in the winter, without DST, you're stuck at work until 5:00pm and can't. DST isn't baseless. It caters to a small group of people that can't adjust their hours.