The/etc problem is still stickier but the "days-long recomplie update" is easily solved.
Maintain a local test machine with whatever updates you like and when the package passes your approval you push it to an internal update server in pre-compiled form to which your clients sync.
Assuming these aren't people's personal machines, i.e. student laptops, even the/etc stuff can be relatively easily handled. Most changes are going to be universal or at least nearly so, dhcpcd or ntpd configs for example. Any orphan machine that requires any significant individual tweaking is probably not one worth spending time or money on anyway.
The ML was part of a model/part number while the actual unit given on the volume was ml.
Ther are problems aside from cost though, the guy who actually tried Fluoroinert in a PC cooling setup found that it turned to jelly if it got too cold and burned out the pump he was using to circulate it.
Your citations only refute the layman's assumption that the inspectors were there to "find anything".
For the most part the inspectors were there to ensure compliance with the orders to destroy the known stockpiles of weapons and ensure that whatever the UN had sealed would remain sealed.
What the UN and later the US inspectors found was that the UN seals were still in place, the stockpiles were as we had expected them to be and that no new weapons programs had been established, perhaps as your evidence suggests it was attempted, but not actually established as the mass production line which our government sent our troops to find and head off.
They didn't conclude that Iraq had no WMDs, they concluded they had no *hidden* WMDs.
They didn't conclude that Iraq was harmless, they did conclude that Iraq was largely compliant, although only begrudgingly.
We didn't find Iraq to be innocent and clean, but we only found them to be as guilty and dirty as they told us they were. We didn't believe them and as a result overthrew their government, seized their military and economy and found out all of the above.
We went in on the basis that the UN inspectors were missing something despite multiple sources corroborating on their conclusions.
Can IBM sue specifically for stock rather than for cash?
I'd love to see SCO so desperate to get media attention, drive up their stock price in hopes of selling out and then have to give it away to IBM for free.
You don't sue the plumber much less charge him with a felony when your water supply tastes off. You get a filter, you complain to the water company, you blame someone who has responsibility and do something *useful* about it.
If you want to insist that the burden should be on the content producers that might be legit *but* ISPs are not the content producers.
Under this law everybody pays so that some parents can abdicate responsibility for content filtering to the state and ISPs instead of having those parents taking a proactive stance and actually seeking out and potentially paying for content filtering on their own.
And forcing ISPs to pay for a product that the concerned parents could just as easily get for themselves.
If they hadn't legislated providing the means to filter the content, it would have been fine.
Actually... they should have just produced the list and then certified whatever software complied with the list. Let parents choose whatever software or filtering set up they want and pay for it themselves but gain the benefit of a standard list that is up for public scrutiny unlike the current offerings.
You preserve community standards, you offer the parents a solution and you don't force anybody to pay for anything unless you want to complain about the couple of cents on the dollar of your taxes being used to produce the list.
Isn't NetNanny or the like *already* available commercially? Are the computers in Utah propietary such that they can't run the filtering software readily available from any retail software vendor?
Why should the ISP be forced to provide the software, particularly when it's coming out of their pocket? Are the parents in Utah unable or unwilling to protect their own children? If so, why should someone else be forced to do it for them? Shouldn't they be going out and aquiring the means to do their jobs as parents?
An ISP could and maybe should offer such a service, but it should be voluntary, not legislated and it shouldn't be foisted off on all of the ISP's customers to pay for those who want it.
Thought I should add... I wasn't using "monkey" as a derogatory term at all. I literally meant hiring a monkey to do the coding is an improvement over some of the service offerings available.
Being able to hire a monkey to write more/improved code for a product is an improvement over some of the stuff out there now.
It's a sad thing but OSS support doesn't have to be good to be better than what's out there now. The nature of OSS also means that support for a product could be a competitive industry without the vendor-lock which dominates the current landscape. This almost guarantees an increase in the quality of service relative to the cost.
This may be a false assumption but I expect that the big support customers are companies who are already paying exorbitant amounts of money for crappy support.
The company I worked for a couple years ago installed this retarded ERP system. It was badly documented, it didn't do what we needed it to do and the interface for customizing it left our IT people completely baffled. Talking to the company that produced it offered us one solution, spend another $100,000 for the upgrade to the version which *supposedly* did everything we needed it to do. Options were: muddle through and make the $150,000 investment worthwhile by somehow working out the kinks or pay $100,000 more sight unseen for an upgrade with the same crappy support but supposedly better features. The company was actually considering shelling out the $100,000 which would bring the software vendors take up to $250,000 for a product we *know* is crappy but are now locked into.
With some combination of training/installation and renewable service contracts the Open Source alternative could have easily netted the majority of that cash and potentially a continuing revenue stream had it been mature and "out there" at the time of this crappy wheeling and dealing.
People pay out the ass for crappy service now, what makes you think they wouldn't pay for good service?
I don't support this aspect of the electoral voting system either.
The parent poster suggested that he and his wife taken together would somehow be less enfranchised than they would be as individuals.
Now, those who "can't get out of work" are fooling themselves. In the US we have absentee ballots and federal laws requiring employers to give time off to vote anywhere it is necessary. In effect, anyone who doesn't have time to vote has chosen not to have time to vote.
I don't really believe that voting by prozy is legitimate either. This lends itself readily to so many forms of abuse and misdirection that it doesn't appear it could be made trustworthy. Individuals who want their vote counted need to put it in the ballot (or mail) box themselves.
Individuals must not be taught that they can't be responsible for their own interests or be accountable for their own choices and I believe this would be the eventual product of prozy voting. People who are unable to make a choice for themselves should reserve judgement rather than give over their power wholly to other parties.
Is it better for a democracy to have 100% turnout and 50% of votes effectively giving random advantage on one side or the other of an issue or is it better to have 50% turnout of informed individuals making reasoned decisions?
What he said was that an organization that is not accountable to the same standards as an individual should not be allowed to have the same influence as an individual.
For a simple example, take a 100 vote pool. Put 50 voters into a "corporation" and 50 voters in as indviduals. Now figure a 50% turnout to the vote. Again, for simplicity purposes let's say that the vote is exactly split between the incorporated voters and the individual voters.
Now the 25% of voters who are incorporated get 50% of the votes. The 25% of voters who are not incorporated get 25% of the vote.
If everyone was counted as an individual, we would have a tie. If corporations are allowed to vote it can only tie if there is 100% turnout and will otherwise always go the incorporated voters way.
Now to apply that in closer to real-life terms we have to switch to money instead of votes. But now we also have to accept that some of that money comes from overseas. Now we're not only giving corporations the "win or tie" deal, we're including influence from parties who aren't even citizens.
Take into account the distribution of wealth at home and abroad and it becomes pretty obvious that corporations are taking small investor dollars and applying them to big investor agendas.
Now why do you think you should get 2 votes anytime your wife doesn't care to leave the house?
I played CoH on someone else's account for awhile and finally did get a copy of the game for myself when I finally got hired.
I was really dismayed to find out that the "free" one month trial in the box was actually a "subscribe and we'll give you another month free". It was *not* a "Play for a month and pay us if you want to keep playing" *trial*.
I was really looking forward to being able to collect *a* paycheck before being forced to subscribe but wound up having my brother pay for a month so I could get my free month while I establish my own income. In all I owe him just the $15 but even that hassle could have been avoided with a *real* trial rather than simple bait.
I don't mean to imply it's a CoH only thing either. None of the MMOs out there will let you play their free month without signing up for a subscription up front. It really ought to just be labeled "Buy one month, get another month free!" rather than a trial.
My suspicion is that companies want more visas because they want to be able to hire more overqualified help for less money.
In my area (South Bay, California) companies are regularly asking for a Bachelor's degree for first tier tech support and don't consider anyone less qualified than that for *anything*. If they need a degree to answer a phone and be unhelpful it's news to me.
In any case, I would expect that the companies pushing for more H1-Bs are setting their qualificatinos arbitrarily high in order to demonstrate the "need" for more visa-slaves who can be paid less, given fewer benefits and can't quit for fear of being deported.
It's not like there aren't thousands of out of work techies in the Silicon Valley, it's just that they expect a standard of living and benefits better than the average McDonald's grillworker.
It's really frustrating to see that American companies are actively seeking to export jobs and money.
The previous post about the "flaw" of the correlation said, accurately, that correlation is not causation. Then you said this isn't a "real" correlation.
This is a *real* correlation but whether it's causative is the only part that is suspect. Correlation is easy, *meaningful* correlation is not.
SWG wasn't a level treadmill. Customizing your character's profession template was actually quite entertaining and left a lot of room for different types of gamers. A friend of mine *loved* to do tailoring, I tried it and absolutely detested it but she couldn't play my template either.
The problems with SWG were on the Management side.
They lied about Jedi. They lied about the development priorities. They told the players not to worry, the Combat Rebalance would be here in a month or 2 last November and last I heard it'll be another 6 or 7 months for *the* most important fix they've ever considered. They told the players that *no* Live development resources would be shifted to JTL so everything in the Live game should stay on schedule and then 6 months later admitted the schedule had slipped because they had transferred resources to JTL.
The creature AI was relatively good but the humanoid NPC AI was typically very bad. Their solution was to simply give more health and damage output to high level NPCs to make them take longer to kill without any significant increase in difficulty for the actual tactics. You just stand and shoot longer is all.
I really enjoyed my time as a Ranger/Creature Handler and made Endor my second home. I had some very good hunts and enjoyed them a lot but end-game was really PvP. The setting of the Galactic Civil War was absolutely perfect and gave the Developers *everything* they could have ever wanted in terms of backstory. However, humanoid PvP and PvE combat was utterly unchallenging because of the extreme class imbalances.
Based on your profession template you either win or lose, no skill necessary. When Jedi came out that only got worse as they are an *intentionally* unbalanced combat profession. (That's right, Jedi is a *combat* profession. No diplomacy or intelligence needed here, just lightsaber smackdown.)
If you're going to be down on SWG, the level treadmill isn't the reason. If you mastered the right profession you could be happy doing it forever with no "levelling" necessary. If not, you could sell back your skills and pick one to your liking. If however you wanted interesting tactical combat or meaningful GCW based interactions with the world or other players then you would be sorely disappointed.
SWG wasn't a level treadmill. Customizing your character's profession template was actually quite entertaining and left a lot of room for different types of gamers. A friend of mine *loved* to do tailoring, I tried it and absolutely detested it but she couldn't play my template either.
The problems with SWG were on the Management side.
They lied about Jedi. They lied about the development priorities. They told the players not to worry, the Combat Rebalance would be here in a month or 2 last November and last I heard it'll be another 6 or 7 months for *the* most important fix they've ever considered. They told the players that *no* Live development resources would be shifted to JTL so everything in the Live game should stay on schedule and then 6 months later admitted the schedule had slipped because they had transferred resources to JTL.
The creature AI was relatively good but the humanoid NPC AI was typically very bad. Their solution was to simply give more health and damage output to high level NPCs to make them take longer to kill without any significant increase in difficulty for the actual tactics. You just stand and shoot longer is all.
I really enjoyed my time as a Ranger/Creature Handler and made Endor my second home. I had some very good hunts and enjoyed them a lot but end-game was really PvP. The setting of the Galactic Civil War was absolutely perfect and gave the Developers *everything* they could have ever wanted in terms of backstory. However, humanoid PvP and PvE combat was utterly unchallenging because of the extreme class imbalances. Based on your profession template you either win or lose, no skill necessary. When Jedi came out that only got worse as they are an *intentionally* unbalanced combat profession. (That's right, Jedi is a *combat* profession. No diplomacy or intelligence needed here, just lightsaber smackdown.)
If you're going to be down on SWG, the level treadmill isn't the reason. If you mastered the right profession you could be happy doing it. If not, you could sell back your skills and pick one to your liking. If however you wanted interesting tactical combat or meaningful GCW based interactions with the world or other players then you would be sorely disappointed.
As I pointed out above, Libertarians typically never allow for the *current* reality in their models.
If we all started out Libertarian and the free market was truly free from the get-go, we'd probably be fine. Now that we have well established monsters in various markets how would we switch to an unregulated market?
A free market is the vaccine, not the cure. If we're already sick, how much help is the vaccine without a cure?
Slashdot Mirror
EA: "I'm tired of trying to make competitive games, can I just have a monopoly?"
NFL: "Okay!"
EA: "Hooray!"
The /etc problem is still stickier but the "days-long recomplie update" is easily solved.
/etc stuff can be relatively easily handled. Most changes are going to be universal or at least nearly so, dhcpcd or ntpd configs for example. Any orphan machine that requires any significant individual tweaking is probably not one worth spending time or money on anyway.
Maintain a local test machine with whatever updates you like and when the package passes your approval you push it to an internal update server in pre-compiled form to which your clients sync.
Assuming these aren't people's personal machines, i.e. student laptops, even the
I hope you were joking.
The ML was part of a model/part number while the actual unit given on the volume was ml.
Ther are problems aside from cost though, the guy who actually tried Fluoroinert in a PC cooling setup found that it turned to jelly if it got too cold and burned out the pump he was using to circulate it.
Your citations only refute the layman's assumption that the inspectors were there to "find anything".
For the most part the inspectors were there to ensure compliance with the orders to destroy the known stockpiles of weapons and ensure that whatever the UN had sealed would remain sealed.
What the UN and later the US inspectors found was that the UN seals were still in place, the stockpiles were as we had expected them to be and that no new weapons programs had been established, perhaps as your evidence suggests it was attempted, but not actually established as the mass production line which our government sent our troops to find and head off.
They didn't conclude that Iraq had no WMDs, they concluded they had no *hidden* WMDs.
They didn't conclude that Iraq was harmless, they did conclude that Iraq was largely compliant, although only begrudgingly.
We didn't find Iraq to be innocent and clean, but we only found them to be as guilty and dirty as they told us they were. We didn't believe them and as a result overthrew their government, seized their military and economy and found out all of the above.
We went in on the basis that the UN inspectors were missing something despite multiple sources corroborating on their conclusions.
Can IBM sue specifically for stock rather than for cash?
I'd love to see SCO so desperate to get media attention, drive up their stock price in hopes of selling out and then have to give it away to IBM for free.
The EULA of all MS software abdicates any responsibility for anything going wrong.
How is this any different?
Open Source advocates believe in informed consent.
Slashdotters don't believe that MS advocates have been informed.
Which Google beta did you pay to participate in?
ISPs are not the content producers.
You don't sue the plumber much less charge him with a felony when your water supply tastes off. You get a filter, you complain to the water company, you blame someone who has responsibility and do something *useful* about it.
If you want to insist that the burden should be on the content producers that might be legit *but* ISPs are not the content producers.
Under this law everybody pays so that some parents can abdicate responsibility for content filtering to the state and ISPs instead of having those parents taking a proactive stance and actually seeking out and potentially paying for content filtering on their own.
And forcing ISPs to pay for a product that the concerned parents could just as easily get for themselves.
If they hadn't legislated providing the means to filter the content, it would have been fine.
Actually... they should have just produced the list and then certified whatever software complied with the list. Let parents choose whatever software or filtering set up they want and pay for it themselves but gain the benefit of a standard list that is up for public scrutiny unlike the current offerings.
You preserve community standards, you offer the parents a solution and you don't force anybody to pay for anything unless you want to complain about the couple of cents on the dollar of your taxes being used to produce the list.
Isn't NetNanny or the like *already* available commercially? Are the computers in Utah propietary such that they can't run the filtering software readily available from any retail software vendor?
Why should the ISP be forced to provide the software, particularly when it's coming out of their pocket? Are the parents in Utah unable or unwilling to protect their own children? If so, why should someone else be forced to do it for them? Shouldn't they be going out and aquiring the means to do their jobs as parents?
An ISP could and maybe should offer such a service, but it should be voluntary, not legislated and it shouldn't be foisted off on all of the ISP's customers to pay for those who want it.
If sales turnover is already so low for these specific developers then why would they want to Open Source their product?
Not all products could use this model profitably but not all products are profitable with *any* model.
Didn't read the follow-up, didja?
Thought I should add... I wasn't using "monkey" as a derogatory term at all. I literally meant hiring a monkey to do the coding is an improvement over some of the service offerings available.
Being able to hire a monkey to write more/improved code for a product is an improvement over some of the stuff out there now.
It's a sad thing but OSS support doesn't have to be good to be better than what's out there now. The nature of OSS also means that support for a product could be a competitive industry without the vendor-lock which dominates the current landscape. This almost guarantees an increase in the quality of service relative to the cost.
Contract your work to someone or some company willing to do the support for your product.
You get paid, they do the support for you, win/win.
This may be a false assumption but I expect that the big support customers are companies who are already paying exorbitant amounts of money for crappy support.
The company I worked for a couple years ago installed this retarded ERP system. It was badly documented, it didn't do what we needed it to do and the interface for customizing it left our IT people completely baffled. Talking to the company that produced it offered us one solution, spend another $100,000 for the upgrade to the version which *supposedly* did everything we needed it to do. Options were: muddle through and make the $150,000 investment worthwhile by somehow working out the kinks or pay $100,000 more sight unseen for an upgrade with the same crappy support but supposedly better features. The company was actually considering shelling out the $100,000 which would bring the software vendors take up to $250,000 for a product we *know* is crappy but are now locked into.
With some combination of training/installation and renewable service contracts the Open Source alternative could have easily netted the majority of that cash and potentially a continuing revenue stream had it been mature and "out there" at the time of this crappy wheeling and dealing.
People pay out the ass for crappy service now, what makes you think they wouldn't pay for good service?
I don't support this aspect of the electoral voting system either.
The parent poster suggested that he and his wife taken together would somehow be less enfranchised than they would be as individuals.
Now, those who "can't get out of work" are fooling themselves. In the US we have absentee ballots and federal laws requiring employers to give time off to vote anywhere it is necessary. In effect, anyone who doesn't have time to vote has chosen not to have time to vote.
I don't really believe that voting by prozy is legitimate either. This lends itself readily to so many forms of abuse and misdirection that it doesn't appear it could be made trustworthy. Individuals who want their vote counted need to put it in the ballot (or mail) box themselves.
Individuals must not be taught that they can't be responsible for their own interests or be accountable for their own choices and I believe this would be the eventual product of prozy voting. People who are unable to make a choice for themselves should reserve judgement rather than give over their power wholly to other parties.
Is it better for a democracy to have 100% turnout and 50% of votes effectively giving random advantage on one side or the other of an issue or is it better to have 50% turnout of informed individuals making reasoned decisions?
Nor even remotely close to that.
What he said was that an organization that is not accountable to the same standards as an individual should not be allowed to have the same influence as an individual.
For a simple example, take a 100 vote pool. Put 50 voters into a "corporation" and 50 voters in as indviduals. Now figure a 50% turnout to the vote. Again, for simplicity purposes let's say that the vote is exactly split between the incorporated voters and the individual voters.
Now the 25% of voters who are incorporated get 50% of the votes. The 25% of voters who are not incorporated get 25% of the vote.
If everyone was counted as an individual, we would have a tie. If corporations are allowed to vote it can only tie if there is 100% turnout and will otherwise always go the incorporated voters way.
Now to apply that in closer to real-life terms we have to switch to money instead of votes. But now we also have to accept that some of that money comes from overseas. Now we're not only giving corporations the "win or tie" deal, we're including influence from parties who aren't even citizens.
Take into account the distribution of wealth at home and abroad and it becomes pretty obvious that corporations are taking small investor dollars and applying them to big investor agendas.
Now why do you think you should get 2 votes anytime your wife doesn't care to leave the house?
I played CoH on someone else's account for awhile and finally did get a copy of the game for myself when I finally got hired.
I was really dismayed to find out that the "free" one month trial in the box was actually a "subscribe and we'll give you another month free". It was *not* a "Play for a month and pay us if you want to keep playing" *trial*.
I was really looking forward to being able to collect *a* paycheck before being forced to subscribe but wound up having my brother pay for a month so I could get my free month while I establish my own income. In all I owe him just the $15 but even that hassle could have been avoided with a *real* trial rather than simple bait.
I don't mean to imply it's a CoH only thing either. None of the MMOs out there will let you play their free month without signing up for a subscription up front. It really ought to just be labeled "Buy one month, get another month free!" rather than a trial.
My suspicion is that companies want more visas because they want to be able to hire more overqualified help for less money.
In my area (South Bay, California) companies are regularly asking for a Bachelor's degree for first tier tech support and don't consider anyone less qualified than that for *anything*. If they need a degree to answer a phone and be unhelpful it's news to me.
In any case, I would expect that the companies pushing for more H1-Bs are setting their qualificatinos arbitrarily high in order to demonstrate the "need" for more visa-slaves who can be paid less, given fewer benefits and can't quit for fear of being deported.
It's not like there aren't thousands of out of work techies in the Silicon Valley, it's just that they expect a standard of living and benefits better than the average McDonald's grillworker.
It's really frustrating to see that American companies are actively seeking to export jobs and money.
Just nitpicky...
The previous post about the "flaw" of the correlation said, accurately, that correlation is not causation. Then you said this isn't a "real" correlation.
This is a *real* correlation but whether it's causative is the only part that is suspect. Correlation is easy, *meaningful* correlation is not.
SWG wasn't a level treadmill. Customizing your character's profession template was actually quite entertaining and left a lot of room for different types of gamers. A friend of mine *loved* to do tailoring, I tried it and absolutely detested it but she couldn't play my template either.
The problems with SWG were on the Management side.
They lied about Jedi. They lied about the development priorities. They told the players not to worry, the Combat Rebalance would be here in a month or 2 last November and last I heard it'll be another 6 or 7 months for *the* most important fix they've ever considered. They told the players that *no* Live development resources would be shifted to JTL so everything in the Live game should stay on schedule and then 6 months later admitted the schedule had slipped because they had transferred resources to JTL.
The creature AI was relatively good but the humanoid NPC AI was typically very bad. Their solution was to simply give more health and damage output to high level NPCs to make them take longer to kill without any significant increase in difficulty for the actual tactics. You just stand and shoot longer is all.
I really enjoyed my time as a Ranger/Creature Handler and made Endor my second home. I had some very good hunts and enjoyed them a lot but end-game was really PvP. The setting of the Galactic Civil War was absolutely perfect and gave the Developers *everything* they could have ever wanted in terms of backstory. However, humanoid PvP and PvE combat was utterly unchallenging because of the extreme class imbalances.
Based on your profession template you either win or lose, no skill necessary. When Jedi came out that only got worse as they are an *intentionally* unbalanced combat profession. (That's right, Jedi is a *combat* profession. No diplomacy or intelligence needed here, just lightsaber smackdown.)
If you're going to be down on SWG, the level treadmill isn't the reason. If you mastered the right profession you could be happy doing it forever with no "levelling" necessary. If not, you could sell back your skills and pick one to your liking. If however you wanted interesting tactical combat or meaningful GCW based interactions with the world or other players then you would be sorely disappointed.
SWG wasn't a level treadmill. Customizing your character's profession template was actually quite entertaining and left a lot of room for different types of gamers. A friend of mine *loved* to do tailoring, I tried it and absolutely detested it but she couldn't play my template either. The problems with SWG were on the Management side. They lied about Jedi. They lied about the development priorities. They told the players not to worry, the Combat Rebalance would be here in a month or 2 last November and last I heard it'll be another 6 or 7 months for *the* most important fix they've ever considered. They told the players that *no* Live development resources would be shifted to JTL so everything in the Live game should stay on schedule and then 6 months later admitted the schedule had slipped because they had transferred resources to JTL. The creature AI was relatively good but the humanoid NPC AI was typically very bad. Their solution was to simply give more health and damage output to high level NPCs to make them take longer to kill without any significant increase in difficulty for the actual tactics. You just stand and shoot longer is all. I really enjoyed my time as a Ranger/Creature Handler and made Endor my second home. I had some very good hunts and enjoyed them a lot but end-game was really PvP. The setting of the Galactic Civil War was absolutely perfect and gave the Developers *everything* they could have ever wanted in terms of backstory. However, humanoid PvP and PvE combat was utterly unchallenging because of the extreme class imbalances. Based on your profession template you either win or lose, no skill necessary. When Jedi came out that only got worse as they are an *intentionally* unbalanced combat profession. (That's right, Jedi is a *combat* profession. No diplomacy or intelligence needed here, just lightsaber smackdown.) If you're going to be down on SWG, the level treadmill isn't the reason. If you mastered the right profession you could be happy doing it. If not, you could sell back your skills and pick one to your liking. If however you wanted interesting tactical combat or meaningful GCW based interactions with the world or other players then you would be sorely disappointed.
As I pointed out above, Libertarians typically never allow for the *current* reality in their models.
If we all started out Libertarian and the free market was truly free from the get-go, we'd probably be fine. Now that we have well established monsters in various markets how would we switch to an unregulated market?
A free market is the vaccine, not the cure. If we're already sick, how much help is the vaccine without a cure?