Under the current system many people think that voting for e.g. the Green Party or an independent candidate is a waste of their vote. It is. The British system is much like the US system in that regard, it has been won by the same two parties for so long that it has become ingrained in the British psyche that these are the only two choices.
It is also noteworthy that the system is rigged to benefit those two parties via the boundries of the electoral zones. In the last general election the Liberals won more votes than the Conservatives but won less seats. This was due to Maggie Thatcher redrawing various electoral boundaries via the Boundary Commission when she was in power. The British system is not designed to be democratic, it is designed to give the illusion of democracy while still allowing the same people to rule: The companies and rich people who donate money to political parties.
When you are ready to return to the full Genuine Windows Vista experience for running your favorite games, such as BSOD, simply reboot your machine and take the CD out of the CD-ROM before the reboot starts. I find that game too frustrating. I never seem to make any progress with it so I have given up and stuck with Mahjongg instead.
I just wanted to know whether he'd switch Redhat to apt and.deb in the near future, and whether he sees a significant role for KDE in Redhat's core business plans. In my opinion, Redhat should switch to apt and KDE. He probably will not do anything of the kind. CEO stands for Chief Executive Officer, not Choosing Engineering Officer. The sort of decisions you mention are technological decisions (yes, even the KDE one). He makes decisions like "aim our products at a more accessible market" then gets other people to come up with various ideas as to how to achieve that aim. CEO's are there to give a company direction not choose which technology to use to solve a particular problem.
Not that this guy would be unable to, but he probably has far better things to do with his time that cannot be done by others underneath him.
In response to your comment about KDE there is a very good reason that RedHat use Gnome by default (IMHO): It is more like windows.
The problem with KDE is that the people who design the interface refuse to acknowledge that Windows is what everyone is used to and you need to make the transition away from that as easy as possible. Gnome has certain key features (like cut and paste) that are as close to the windows functionality as possible.
Since Redhat want to gain new customers they need to make their solutions look as familiar as possible to people coming from windows.
In regard to your point about apt I can really comment since I have never used it. The last time I used RPM though it put me off using Redhat for any of my own machines again so maybe you have a point.
Is Apple driving the prices up? No, they are driving prices down. The studios did not want to charge 99c per song for the most popular artists, only for the people you had never heard of yet. For the most popular artists they wanted to charge a premium. Apple used their dominance to try and force a flat rate for all artists:
Re:Morals aside - what's the end result?
on
Sony BMG Dropping DRM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Frankly, if nobody pays to see movies, no movies will get made - or at least, only cheap movies where the person making them can afford to eat the cost. Some of us actually prefer low budget, made for the love of it movies just like you describe.
One example that springs straight to mind is Clerks. I far prefer this to any of Kevin's more recent works. I still like his more recent stuff like Chasing Amy, but it does not hold a candle to the film he made just for the love of film.
Another example which is not so well known is El Mariachi (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104815/). This is the forerunner to Desperado but is far superior in plot and storyline. It lacks the huge explosions (no rpg firing guitar cases) but this is not a loss in my opinion. Far too often the drive to spend huge amounts of the studios money on special effects actually detract from other areas of the film that usually have much longer lasting appeal.
Another problem with Hollywood movies is the actors. They frequently bitch and moan trying to get their own role "enhanced" just to get their useless overpaid faces on the screen for more time since this will increase their future earning potential. Or they try and get less well known actors with far more talent entirely removed from productions or their scenes cut if they are clearly better actors and show them up on screen.
Usually the director will have to go along with a certain amount of their whining in case they threaten to walk off set. Unless the director is more well known than the actor quite frequently the lead can get their part substantially changed on a whim.
Then there is the studios notoriety at tax avoidance. You do not get a type of accounting named after you for nothing:
So even after all this you want me to feel sorry for them if they go out of business? Be serious.
The fact is that there will always be an entertainment industry, since people love to be entertained. If the current form of it died out it would be replaced by something else since someone will always fill that gap and try and make a few pennies out of us in the process. This is not a bad thing, but trying to just skip to the pennies without providing original entertainment first is.
I say original in the previous statement because of the number or sequels or remakes that Hollywood turns out. But this rant has gone on long enough so lets not start on that.
That's why I browse at -1, and I've decided to stop moderating too, because Slashdot moderation should be dropped like a hot potato. The browsing at - I would heartily recommend to everyone. Ok you have to read the occasional bit of drivel but most of us can skip the BS without it annoying us too much.
However you also say you have stopped moderating. Please, please, please next time you get some points, use them. What slashdot needs is more moderators who have a realistic idea of what the system should be used for. This means not just modding down crap you disagree with, but modding up really good posts to make them more prominent and also to make the posters of decent contributions feel appreciated.
Where I work we just survived a security audit. Hopefully this will make it so impractical for the security companies to stay in business we will never have to go through on ever again. Then we can get away with producing a slipshod product that leaks personal private data left right and central.
IP changes, in my experience from both Comcast and Verizon FIOS, are so rare that they effectively don't happen. I've never had a change with FIOS from the day the service was fired up, and although I can't recall ever having my previous Comcast one change except when I physically moved, its possible it did once or twice. My IP changes every time I reconnect. If I tell my router to drop its connection then reconnect straight away I never get the same IP. As to why my ISP do this I have no idea if it is to stop me running a home server or not, but I do know they throttle bit torrent traffic. Personally I don't mind them throttling torrent traffic if it means I can play online games with no lag.
Back on topic I would like to say that for about as long as I can remember we have been very close to the limit of IPv4 addresses. Without dynamically assigning a lot of home user IP addresses we certainly would have hit that limit a long time ago.
I've been known in the past to do some stupid things as far as blogs and stuff go. I don't do them anymore. This guy doesn't appear to have learned that lesson. He will as soon as he walk into his office and everyone goes deadly quiet and stares at him. Then as soon as his back is turned they will resume their giggles at the hilarious rant they were reading on slashdot that was seemingly posted by a teenager with chronic anger management issues.
The lesson will prove even more invaluable whenever he is next looking for work (I predict this to be coming sooner than he expects). All it will take is one person at the company to throw his name into google and then look at the internet archive version of his site and voila: Instant rejection.
Wow, thanks for the links. I can not actually check out the pdf at present as I am zipping about on a train with somewhat intermittent net access, but I will have a look later. I thought I remembered reading that the US had never lost any before Bush but I guess I was wrong.
By the way, it is not "you guys" in my case as I am European (English).
The truth is that this has been expected for a while. You cannot expect to have one rule for trade flowing one way and then try and exempt certain businesses just because you don't like them. European Governments are not allowed to reject all Genetically modified soya so the US can not reject all gambling.
Before Bush came into office the US had never lost a single case at the WTO. Now he has lost at least two. The last one I remember was against Europe with regard to an import tax on steel. Here is a link or two:
In that case the US backed down fairly quickly as the tariffs Europe was going to impose were all designed to damage the economy in places Bush needed to get re-elected. One example given was taxing Florida oranges heavily and making them far more expensive than those from elsewhere. This is what every last tariff was designed to do. The European Union chose products where the same item could be obtained elsewhere for a competitive price (but not after a 30% tax hike was imposed on the US produce).
In this case turning Antigua into a file sharing haven will be an annoyance, but probably not as dire as what Europe was aiming for. This is especially true when you look at the amounts involved. In this case 21 million dollars per year is fairly small compared to the 2.2 billion that the last dispute could have cost had the US not backed down.
I used to think I didn't mind PC noise either. For years I used to sleep in a room with a very loud rackmount 24 port gigabit hub, and several always on PCs. That lot did actually make a fair racket, enough to drive most of my geeky friends mad.
Then I got a proper job that involved me visiting a datacentre periodically. I actually find it kinda hard to concentrate in there. The server noise is just about bearable, but the real killer is th AC's. They have 4 very noisy units with 50% redundancy over the places current heat load. I would defy anyone to tolerate that day in, day out.
Both of the items you mention I can just about understand making it through a software testing process. It is feasible that none of the test machines had the two peices of software you mention installed. But if you can find me a windows box without explorer.exe I will show you a borked installation.
It is not an optional component to install last time I checked so all of their test machines should have had this file. At least some of their test machines should have had exactly that same version of this file as the one they decided was a virus. So how the hell did they not notice when it quarantined or deleted it? Windows would go tits up at the next boot, if not earlier.
The only way I can think this could happen is if the skimped on testing. In which case this is most definitely the sort of news I would like to read on slashdot as it will give me a reason not to use their anti-virus solutions. An Anti-Virus solution without a very well defined and effective testing procedure is not one I want to use.
put another way, let's say their project was to build an amplifier. in theory, they could design the whole thing with discrete components. but in reality, using an off-the-shelf op-amp in the design will yield better results than they could ever achieve. But one method will teach you about the basics of amplifier design, the other will teach you how to click the buy button on amazon or whatever.
The reason these people have chosen Linux is that they can strip out as much as possible that they do not need and have a fairly small kernel. Then they can still write some code that does everything they need to for their project on another linux box and cross-compile it for the tiny kernel they created earlier.
Slashdot editors, please figure that out already. I have a feeling they probably know this already but since they generally just post quotes from other news sources they are stuck with the original quote. It is much better to correctly quote something that is incorrect than to try and change the meaning of someone elses words to make them correct.
In this case however the slashdot editors did miss something very important: single quotation marks around the word bricking.
So if I randomly shoot my AK-47 in a crowed mall can I claim that everything is hunky dory just because I am such a piss poor shot that I don't kill anyone?
I think not. More likely is that I am sent to prison for the act of endangering peoples lives even if nobody is hurt.
This is much easier to type, and since it is something I need to type at least once per day when checking tables for the sort of typical values a column contains this is important. This will probably illicit a response along the lines of why don't you just remember (too many tables in our main app, let alone each column in each table) or have a schema you can reference (we do, but since I am usually in a query browser anyway I find a quick random selection of 10 adjacent rows easier and more useful).
Whenever I code for T-SQL it always amazes me how quirky it is. MySQL is much more geared towards hand crafting queries in a text editor and them executing first time. T-SQL always used to annoy me with it's fussiness about the order you specified tables when using JOIN's. I always assumed that T-SQL was about encouraging developers to use query mangler to build SQL statements and hence buy an extra dev licence of SQL Server.
T-SQL always had the edge by allowing you bypass its annoyances by using stored procedures and views but this has now changed since MySQL 5.
You can make the same points by talking about US military aid to Egypt or Pakistan without inviting the wrath of the Anti-defamation league As far as I was aware US millitary aid to the countries you mention does not come to 2.2 Billion dollars.
Its dangerous to make such comments lest you be labelled anti-semite. Maybe, but that would be a bit ridiculous because all the facts I quoted were from a respected jewish source (The link I posted). anyone who does consider what I posted to be anti-semetic should remember that disagreeing with the actions of the Israeli Government is not an attack on the Jewish people. Would it be anti-christian to vocalise my disagreement with some of president Bush's policies?
Can anybody explain the commercial benefit to space travel? There are numerous commercial benefits some of which have mentioned by other people, but one that has not yet is GPS. Maybe this came out of the defense budget but the underlying research into putting satelites into orbit was done as part of the original space race. This spawned a real world benefit which now everyone is coming to rely on.
Given the significant resources spend for NASA, is this monies better off spent elsewhere or is this spent responsibly? Maybe. But then the US spends far more on defense. Some of this defense budget is about defending the US from foreign attack but an awful lot is just pissed up the wall on projects that will never come to fruition.
The US also donate over 2 billion dollars every year to Israel. If you want to talk about return on investment what return do US citizens get from this? Apart from earning the hatred of large parts of the Arab world since alot of that money is donated in the form of Military hardware. The fact is that the nation of Israel would not exist if not for the US Govt constantly propping it up with massive injections of cash and tanks.
This investment is going to have to continue indefinately as well, since there is no way that Israel will ever become self-sufficient in our lifetimes unless they invade Iran and steal all their oil.
At least with NASA there is a small glimmer of hope that they may start bringing back valuable raw materials or come up with further advancements in technology that will benefit the US.
Slashdot Mirror
It is also noteworthy that the system is rigged to benefit those two parties via the boundries of the electoral zones. In the last general election the Liberals won more votes than the Conservatives but won less seats. This was due to Maggie Thatcher redrawing various electoral boundaries via the Boundary Commission when she was in power. The British system is not designed to be democratic, it is designed to give the illusion of democracy while still allowing the same people to rule: The companies and rich people who donate money to political parties.
In other words he used lots of words you did not understand so you try and dismiss it any way you can.
I have a better idea, try and look up all the bits you did not understand and then you might learn something.
Not that this guy would be unable to, but he probably has far better things to do with his time that cannot be done by others underneath him.
In response to your comment about KDE there is a very good reason that RedHat use Gnome by default (IMHO): It is more like windows.
The problem with KDE is that the people who design the interface refuse to acknowledge that Windows is what everyone is used to and you need to make the transition away from that as easy as possible. Gnome has certain key features (like cut and paste) that are as close to the windows functionality as possible.
Since Redhat want to gain new customers they need to make their solutions look as familiar as possible to people coming from windows.
In regard to your point about apt I can really comment since I have never used it. The last time I used RPM though it put me off using Redhat for any of my own machines again so maybe you have a point.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2005/tc20050929_4235_tc056.htm
One example that springs straight to mind is Clerks. I far prefer this to any of Kevin's more recent works. I still like his more recent stuff like Chasing Amy, but it does not hold a candle to the film he made just for the love of film.
Another example which is not so well known is El Mariachi (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104815/). This is the forerunner to Desperado but is far superior in plot and storyline. It lacks the huge explosions (no rpg firing guitar cases) but this is not a loss in my opinion. Far too often the drive to spend huge amounts of the studios money on special effects actually detract from other areas of the film that usually have much longer lasting appeal.
Another problem with Hollywood movies is the actors. They frequently bitch and moan trying to get their own role "enhanced" just to get their useless overpaid faces on the screen for more time since this will increase their future earning potential. Or they try and get less well known actors with far more talent entirely removed from productions or their scenes cut if they are clearly better actors and show them up on screen.
Usually the director will have to go along with a certain amount of their whining in case they threaten to walk off set. Unless the director is more well known than the actor quite frequently the lead can get their part substantially changed on a whim.
Then there is the studios notoriety at tax avoidance. You do not get a type of accounting named after you for nothing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
So even after all this you want me to feel sorry for them if they go out of business? Be serious.
The fact is that there will always be an entertainment industry, since people love to be entertained. If the current form of it died out it would be replaced by something else since someone will always fill that gap and try and make a few pennies out of us in the process. This is not a bad thing, but trying to just skip to the pennies without providing original entertainment first is.
I say original in the previous statement because of the number or sequels or remakes that Hollywood turns out. But this rant has gone on long enough so lets not start on that.
However you also say you have stopped moderating. Please, please, please next time you get some points, use them. What slashdot needs is more moderators who have a realistic idea of what the system should be used for. This means not just modding down crap you disagree with, but modding up really good posts to make them more prominent and also to make the posters of decent contributions feel appreciated.
Where I work we just survived a security audit. Hopefully this will make it so impractical for the security companies to stay in business we will never have to go through on ever again. Then we can get away with producing a slipshod product that leaks personal private data left right and central.
IP changes, in my experience from both Comcast and Verizon FIOS, are so rare that they effectively don't happen. I've never had a change with FIOS from the day the service was fired up, and although I can't recall ever having my previous Comcast one change except when I physically moved, its possible it did once or twice. My IP changes every time I reconnect. If I tell my router to drop its connection then reconnect straight away I never get the same IP. As to why my ISP do this I have no idea if it is to stop me running a home server or not, but I do know they throttle bit torrent traffic. Personally I don't mind them throttling torrent traffic if it means I can play online games with no lag.
Back on topic I would like to say that for about as long as I can remember we have been very close to the limit of IPv4 addresses. Without dynamically assigning a lot of home user IP addresses we certainly would have hit that limit a long time ago.
The lesson will prove even more invaluable whenever he is next looking for work (I predict this to be coming sooner than he expects). All it will take is one person at the company to throw his name into google and then look at the internet archive version of his site and voila: Instant rejection.
To be honest I feel a little sympathy for him.
Wow, thanks for the links. I can not actually check out the pdf at present as I am zipping about on a train with somewhat intermittent net access, but I will have a look later. I thought I remembered reading that the US had never lost any before Bush but I guess I was wrong.
By the way, it is not "you guys" in my case as I am European (English).
The truth is that this has been expected for a while. You cannot expect to have one rule for trade flowing one way and then try and exempt certain businesses just because you don't like them. European Governments are not allowed to reject all Genetically modified soya so the US can not reject all gambling.
Before Bush came into office the US had never lost a single case at the WTO. Now he has lost at least two. The last one I remember was against Europe with regard to an import tax on steel. Here is a link or two:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3291537.stm
http://themanufacturer.com/us/detail.html?contents_id=1726
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article77803.ece
In that case the US backed down fairly quickly as the tariffs Europe was going to impose were all designed to damage the economy in places Bush needed to get re-elected. One example given was taxing Florida oranges heavily and making them far more expensive than those from elsewhere. This is what every last tariff was designed to do. The European Union chose products where the same item could be obtained elsewhere for a competitive price (but not after a 30% tax hike was imposed on the US produce).
In this case turning Antigua into a file sharing haven will be an annoyance, but probably not as dire as what Europe was aiming for. This is especially true when you look at the amounts involved. In this case 21 million dollars per year is fairly small compared to the 2.2 billion that the last dispute could have cost had the US not backed down.
You missed one:
http://slashdotcity.myminicity.com/
Now we have our own, not these crap cities people keep spamming us with. Let show them that honesty is the best policy.
It looks like the city needs transport:
http://slashdotcity.myminicity.com/tra/
I used to think I didn't mind PC noise either. For years I used to sleep in a room with a very loud rackmount 24 port gigabit hub, and several always on PCs. That lot did actually make a fair racket, enough to drive most of my geeky friends mad.
Then I got a proper job that involved me visiting a datacentre periodically. I actually find it kinda hard to concentrate in there. The server noise is just about bearable, but the real killer is th AC's. They have 4 very noisy units with 50% redundancy over the places current heat load. I would defy anyone to tolerate that day in, day out.
Both of the items you mention I can just about understand making it through a software testing process. It is feasible that none of the test machines had the two peices of software you mention installed. But if you can find me a windows box without explorer.exe I will show you a borked installation.
It is not an optional component to install last time I checked so all of their test machines should have had this file. At least some of their test machines should have had exactly that same version of this file as the one they decided was a virus. So how the hell did they not notice when it quarantined or deleted it? Windows would go tits up at the next boot, if not earlier.
The only way I can think this could happen is if the skimped on testing. In which case this is most definitely the sort of news I would like to read on slashdot as it will give me a reason not to use their anti-virus solutions. An Anti-Virus solution without a very well defined and effective testing procedure is not one I want to use.
Although I have seen every episode
The reason these people have chosen Linux is that they can strip out as much as possible that they do not need and have a fairly small kernel. Then they can still write some code that does everything they need to for their project on another linux box and cross-compile it for the tiny kernel they created earlier.
In this case however the slashdot editors did miss something very important: single quotation marks around the word bricking.
So if I randomly shoot my AK-47 in a crowed mall can I claim that everything is hunky dory just because I am such a piss poor shot that I don't kill anyone?
I think not. More likely is that I am sent to prison for the act of endangering peoples lives even if nobody is hurt.
As a web developer I know which I prefer:
LIMIT [offset,] recordcount
This is much easier to type, and since it is something I need to type at least once per day when checking tables for the sort of typical values a column contains this is important. This will probably illicit a response along the lines of why don't you just remember (too many tables in our main app, let alone each column in each table) or have a schema you can reference (we do, but since I am usually in a query browser anyway I find a quick random selection of 10 adjacent rows easier and more useful).
Whenever I code for T-SQL it always amazes me how quirky it is. MySQL is much more geared towards hand crafting queries in a text editor and them executing first time. T-SQL always used to annoy me with it's fussiness about the order you specified tables when using JOIN's. I always assumed that T-SQL was about encouraging developers to use query mangler to build SQL statements and hence buy an extra dev licence of SQL Server.
T-SQL always had the edge by allowing you bypass its annoyances by using stored procedures and views but this has now changed since MySQL 5.
So does that make Windows ME the most secure OS ever?
Obscure the entire OS behind a blue screen and your done.
The US also donate over 2 billion dollars every year to Israel. If you want to talk about return on investment what return do US citizens get from this? Apart from earning the hatred of large parts of the Arab world since alot of that money is donated in the form of Military hardware. The fact is that the nation of Israel would not exist if not for the US Govt constantly propping it up with massive injections of cash and tanks.
(http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/U.S._Assistance_to_Israel1.html)
This investment is going to have to continue indefinately as well, since there is no way that Israel will ever become self-sufficient in our lifetimes unless they invade Iran and steal all their oil.
At least with NASA there is a small glimmer of hope that they may start bringing back valuable raw materials or come up with further advancements in technology that will benefit the US.