I just wasted someone's bandwith downloading a pdf in a language I do not speak or read. A simple change in the story headlines labeling it as german would have prevented this. Hint.
Anyway, I wonder why people are surprised. Too much under the table cash available to not have software patents become "the law" everywhere, no nation or group of nations is immune to corruption in government. In fact, I'd go so far as to state as it's more fact than not that all governments are by default corrupt. Anytime you have individuals in charge of making a decision, and there are billions of *monetary units* in the mix, some of those units will change hands to get reality morphed. "Government" is just as much a for-sale business as any other human endeavor. Altruism basically only exists in the dictionary, it doesn't exist in the global marketplace, especially in the markets known as "governments". Patents, DRM other sorts of schemes will continue to increase in scope, all over. In fact, I'd say things like the SCO deal going on right now are just the first of many that will make it harder and harder to have free and open source software of any quality, it's only a matter of time before the developers start finding themselves in court. Big international software business is not going to remain passive, even with a few large companies giving the illusion of support for FOSS right now. That is temporary, and the proof is that you see zero efforts by those billion buck companies to lobby for any change in the laws. If they were serious, you'd see them sponsoring and lobbying for a change to the IP patent laws, and they aren't.
funny you say that. I have a still unread "richard bachman" novel (The Regulators) sitting right next to me.
"so and so was found dead in his home today" joke any second now....
What's the actual legal status of that though, should your prime publisher find out? Seems like you might be in just as much hot water, as you have to use your real name for legal tax purposes and suchlike.
but it's easier to build a portfolio of prio art for patents, already issued and otherwise, and forward it in digital form to the patent office, maybe directly to the patent examiners involved in issuing questionable patents, and in bulk form to select members of congress and the media. And keep doing it.
Frankly, I don't see any way out of the illegitmate and unreasonable "IP" patent mess now other than to keep showing what a complete farce it is. It is just too expensive to try and beat the big companies at their own game now,by accumulating "open source and free" patents, it's long past that time and isn't going to happen in any practical quantities. Relying on alleged "whitehat" corporations to always be the good guys is wishful thinking, not when push comes to shove, they will revert back to being complete predators.
The best bet is to simply embarass the patent office and congress to the point that we might get reasonable patent reform, including retroactive revocation of IP patents. It was a bad idea to go that route in the first place--just extrapolate it ten years from now, what sort of computer society will we have, how will you be able to do anything without having a full time personal IP lawyer?
IP patents are killing the goose that laid the golden egg, short term yee haww mega profits for some, long time dismal results for everyone else. It's already effecting business and coding, how is it supposed to get better with THOUSANDS more IP patents being granted yearly? Who the heck besides a handful of the biggest players will be able to keep up and compete then? The current patent system will lead to a global monopoly of half a dozen or so large companies controlling everything, and that's about it.
I listened to some guy on a radio show a few years ago touting this idea. He wanted to have hilton hotels be the sponsor, and reuse the shuttle boosters as building blocks. I googled this now and found this about the hilton hotels, and this on reusing the shuttle tanks I think the latter is the guy I listened to on the radio. His idea makes a lot of sense, the shuttle booster tanks are pretty clean after expending the fuel, and are there for the using with a little attitude and altitude adjustment. Big ole nice structures going to waste.
and the big pharmcos will ignore any promising drugs that can't be patented (see the book "green medicine"), and will actually lobby against drugs and techniques that are cheap. All they want is the control and the profits, peoples health is tertiary (or lower) to them in their rankings of what is important. They will actually go so far as to de-legitimize useful products like nutrional supplements-vitamins and whatnot, and try to get legislation to make them "prescription only". They have tried that scam several times now.
Got news for you, too. My post was about grade schools and local property taxes, not colleges. Got more news for you too, college athletics are professional sports. Got even more news for you. Todays professional league sports addiction is akin to the roman empires citizenry addiction to the circus. The man-the fatcats, them guys- keeps the serfs-that would be you and me- addicted so he can rip you off and keep you from paying attention to your wallet and politics.
Want proof? easy! compare the effort required to get 50,000 people into a stadium on any given weekend, along with how much money they would drop, to any random political event of the same exact local level. there's no comparison, the sports addicts supporet their addictions, while the nations politics get ignored except for some bitching. Want more proof? Start asking people at random who their two senators are, who their state rep is, ask them to name the supreme court judges, ask them to rattle off executive branch cabinet heads. Now ask joe random to rqttle of the names of players on his favorite "team".
Check your states elected and appointed and hired on people ethics laws. All states have them, and they are a big variable. Then really take a close look at those figures again. If you can PROVE that the sports teams just cost money and don't make money, you *might* have grounds for an ethics complaint against any of the officials pushing those schemes, especially if you can get up a pissed off group of property tax victims to do it as a mass class action. The economy is getting weird, people aren't so cavalier about prioperty taxes any more, it's starting to hurt, and taxpayer subsidised public school "farm teams" for the profitable pro sports leagues is an easy target.
The last place I was living a group did that, and it resulted in a lot of changes in the local power structure including the head county honcho. It wasn't over sports in the schools, it was a different matter,still some taxes and duties they supposedly had, but by finding local ethics violations the state was *forced* to get involved, they are required by law to actually conduct an investigation, and the conclusions were almost mandatory with just a cursory glance. And it only took a few people total to pull it off, it's amazing what you can do if you really try.
Another time a long time ago I became an almost victim of some local political fatcats. WELL, they picked on the wrong guy. I eventually found over 500 violations these elected dudes were guilty of,and it resulted in me winning the case-with NO LAWYER, I did it all meself, and we got a new mayor and a lot of new town selectmen out of it. It CAN be done, you CAN fight the local power structure once they get into bogusness and corruption and malfeasance.
... this company coulda rolled their own custom distro, have it do exactly what they want it to do. they could have started with any generic pick of distros and customised, or just a raw kernel and built and added on their own packages, then reproduced the image and shipped them out to their servers and desktops in a controlled orderly manner. That's a significiant sum to have to play with to just hand it over to microsoft for some marginal differences in what they already have.
Sorry, I don't believe their cost studies, I smell a rat and some behind the scenes cash-ola "consultation fees" involved with this decision.
I would imagine that you are correct for most tactical situations, partially correct on strategic. I guess it depends on what you want then, do you want a nation that is primarily concerned with rote "no questions asked" style order following and team-work aggression.... or not.
I am not naieve when it comes to self defense or national defense,( on the self defense part, been there, done that numerous times now ), but I just question how much we have been really invaded and attacked and put in peril legitmately (no political/economic scam-foolery involved) compared to the number of wars we have found ourselves in over the last century.
A certain other infamous regime that is non PC to mention by name on a forum was well known for extraordinarily efficient team work, centralised strong command and control, strict hierachial structure and massive and pervasive rote "order following", but history has shown us it was an incorrect, dangerous and harmful societal stance for them to take.
I am wondering now how historians hundreds of years from now will judge us with this now-similar philosophy and bent.
...want an alternative? Anything you can physically hold in your hand or touch = OK to patent. Some theoretical concept, process, algorithym, arrangement, etc commonly referred to as an "intellectual property" = *not* OK to patent, but OK to copyright if the creator chooses to.
..just their brand of bas, which is automagically "fair" to their way of thinking.
Look around, people don't want to read/hear/view news that upsets their pre conceived notions. The iraq war is a prime example of this, people made up their minds early on, now it's settled, some support it, some don't, the numbers have only changed minutely. Look at talk radio, a bastion of news junkies. People get into a rut of listening to the talker who most closely reflects their preconceived notions, at the level of intellectualism they are comfortable at. Look at popular political web boards and forums, they are groupings of almost identical thinkers,and the posts are basically examples of bashing those e-vile "other guys" who cause all the problems.
People-basic human nature- by and large *don't* seek out any radically opposing views. Once folks hit comfortable semi stable adulthood, they become pretty set in their ways, they support "their sports team" "their political party" "their view on economics" "their favorite tv shows" "their brands of beer and whatnot" and etc. "news" is and will be the same, no matter how many choices they have. Change is scary to people, they don't like to do it.
News is the same, google or msn or any other aggregator, people will wind up sticking to the same small group of channels/websites/outlets that they are comfortable with, news that supports their version of reality, they want to feel like they are correct in what they believe. And as to what they pick to look at, they will hit one of the top number displayed-just like web searching-and rarely go beyond that. How many articles on google are just rehashes of the same AP feed most of the time? How many people really click on the "... xxx big number more" link and seek out 20 different versions of the same story from all over the planet on any single news worty item, as opposed to just mashing one link from one of the top few displayed on the main page?
It's a rare person who will struggle constantly to actually seek out extremely differing viewpoints from their own. Some do to a small degree, but that's it, some, and I would bet it's a very small number.
I meant at the local public school level, where your property taxes go. Grade school, junior and senior high. That's where the professional leagues and their advertisers set the hook for the life long addiction and profits. At college/university level, it's professional, and I think 99% of the public has accepted that decades ago, just they technically claim it's still amature. I'm aware that sports make money at the college level and is wildely supported by "the masses" guy. I think it's embarassing for our society, but to each their own. Mores the pity that that is what it takes in our society to even give a semblance of academic support and to drum up any enthusiasm for education.
... just to be called a "unix"? Is this necessary, or just for coolness factor, are businesses demanding it, what? I really don't know, it's a legit question.
When I am running something,right now fedora core 2, I don't even think "fedora core 2 gnu/linux a unix type system" I just think and say "fedora". What do I again if I can say "I am running unix" instead of saying "fedora"?
...funding their local "education" establishment and huge amounts of those monies going to subsidise the NFL and NBA "farm teams" in the schools? since when is getting children addicted to professional sports part of an "education"? Aren't there other athletic and fun pursuits that might cost less available? Why not make those businesses fund them instead? Why should people on pensions-more or less pretty fixed incomes, be asked to support professional sports leagues to perpetuate the societal addiction to team sports? If these profitable businesses have enough to pay salaries in the millions per year to "sports stars",it seems like they can fund local schools "teams" then, don't ask the tax payers to do it.
... any sort of central searchable repository of source code? Not complete apps, just raw code? something like a google for code? Or just a way to do it if not in a centralised location?
Just seems like an idea to make developing easier. I was thinking about this reading the difficulties in testing and the various tecnhiques. I keep thinking perhaps "better solutions" might be out there, but hidden in non related apps to what any developer looking for code might be working on, so he wouldn't even bother looking there. A searchable database might be a good tool. Say some aspect of an app is doing a particular thing that would be useful in some other totally unrelated project, so maybe the person trying to develop for it might not even be aware of it, but if he could search for it in some manner it might already exist.
It's like patent searching in a way, it should be easier to search, and it should be *there* to search.
probably not and certainly not over night or even in a year. but if there's an escrow account *legitimate* bounty that companies can contribute too, it might spark some interest..then, who knows? Open source has proven it can do the job when there's some serious brains and efforts behind a project. For every closed source app and use out there, there's a desire for it to be open source and cheaper/freer. Developers just want to know it will be appreciated, and their work will be appreciated, and some cash is certainly some appreciation. If a few dozen major concerns expressed a willingness and a desire for some open source design apps, then perhaps... no one will know unless it's tried. And like gimp versus photoshop, it's feature sets and what you need. No one says gimp is a total equivalent, but it's slowly getting there, and for some applications it's good enough now. and money is always nice...
The only autocad story I have is their customer service SUCKS. I bought a still shrinkwrapped version of 97lt for cheap, but it's legit,I thought "hmm, cool, still got an actual legal version of nt4 kicking around, too, so I can install it". got NT4installed no problem, went to then install autocad, this was going to be a standalone, just for autocad machine on a spare box I have. Go to install it, it gives me an error message that I now need the "activation key" which is NOT with the shrinkwrapped stuff. I finally get customer support on the telephone, they generate me a key after I give them all my info, I try it right then and there with the person on the phone waiting, it balks and gives an error message. I say I will fool with it some more. Try it out several times, no matter what I do it won't take it. I call back, indian call center, no getting around it. They admit my copy is legit, never installed before, yet it gives me an error message and won't let me insert the activation key, so no install. Grumble... I sent a nice snail mail letter to autodesk, all the exact details, no response from them ever, zero. I offer to SHIP the entire boxed set to them to prove it's legit and not a scam, no dice. So I unistalled NT4, and forogt about autocad. I wanted to try it out, else I wouldn't have bought the thing. Autodesk can byte me, they suck, I don't care how good their stuff is, and I don't do crackz or serialz or warez, I am a legit user, always have been.
Offer a bounty and let it be known inside your industry peer group there is a bounty available for an open source autocad-like app, and perhaps others will chip in as well. 6500$ a seat is tempting, could the design industry in all it's flavors get up a seriously significant bounty to offer developers? Put it on a webpage someplace, or even source forge. Maybe you will interest some developers if your cash is green.
Choice? where is it? for years whenever I walked into any store selling computers they sold boxes with windows installed. For 99% of the people out there, there hasn't been any "choice" beyond this theoretical "if you maybe heard of another operating system and maybe could track it down and maybe get it installed then maybe you had a "choice"". People don't run windows because they comparison shopped, they run windows because that's what came on their computers. I know people who have never even *seen* a macintosh, let alone anything different on the x86 platform.
Don't confuse slashdot readership (that would also inlcude you and me) with the "market" in general. Microsoft got where they are via industry collusion, bribes, threats, kickbacks, etc in some very high places, not from normal consumer "choice" at the computer store. Heck, I've even got an older 1996 IBM computer here I bought severely discounted but still brand new in a sealed box, it didn't have os2 on it, it had NT on it when I bought it.
"Choice" is only relative when it actually exists in enough of a widespread manner that it is available to most consumers where they shop. It is only in the last two years that there has been any significant breakthrough in operating systems choice, and even now it is still mighty thin on the ground. I did a look in my area, there are 6 stores total that sell computers near me, none of them carry anything but XP boxes, nor are there even any alternative OSes on the shelf with the various software for sale. This is NOT "consumer choice selecting the best product".
I agree. It's just like with a lot of the P2P traffic, good for some, bad for others, the "powers that be" will try to ban it some (soon maybe) day.
Double click ads don't bother me as much as some other places, I can tolerate them, plus, I want the content and some websites to remain free to view. Like over the air TV, I tolerate the ads because I don't want to pay for satellite. I don't mind a small fuel tax because the alternative is expensive toll roads everyplace.
heh heh heh I wish there was a separate propoper noun for USA styled english, with the various dialects. Around here where I live you hear "bubba" "ebonics" and "spanglish". I myself still have enough northern midwestern to stand out as different, even though this year marks 20 years living in the south. People go "where you from boy?".
Dang, thought I might "pass" by now....
Anyway, USian as a person or language doesn't quite cut it, we need a new word, and ya'all can have "english" back then.
a large number of english speaking as a second language source
first paragraph on the page, then a huge breakdown of all the various languages there:
Republic of India, Bharat. National or official languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, English (Associate Official). 1,000,000,000 (1999 IMA). 7% classified as tribals. Indo-Aryan languages: 491,087,116, 74.24%, Dravidian languages: 157,836,723, 23.86%, Austro-Asiatic languages 7,705,011, 1.16%, Tibeto-Burman languages 4,071,701,.62% (1987 Mahapatra). 15 national languages. 1,683 'mother tongues' (official figure). An estimated 850 languages in daily use (Todd and Hancock 1986). Literacy rate 36% to 52%. Also includes Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, Armenian 560, Burushaski, Western Farsi 18,000, Geman Deng, Lisu 1,000, Northern Pashto 15,000, Portuguese 250,000, Russian 1,036, Thami, Chitwania Tharu, Kathoriya Tharu, Uyghur, Walungge, Arabic, Chinese. Information mainly from G. Marrison 1967; R. Hugoniot 1970; C. Masica 1991; K.S. Singh 1994, 1995; J. Matisoff et al. 1996; R. Breton 1997; R. Burling ms. (1999). Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, traditional religion, Buddhist. Blind population 9,000,000. Deaf population 1,500,000 to 55,773,718 (1998). Deaf institutions: 149. Data accuracy estimate: B, C. The number of languages listed for India is 398. Of those, 387 are living languages and 11 are extinct. Diversity index 0.93.
Talk to people who use customer service-it's very difficult to engage in coversations and be understood adequately, both ways, more often than not. Close but no cigar is still "no cigar". There's a rather large difference between the english dialect used in India and United States styled dialects. It is such a big difference there's still a language problem.
Huh? How are people who speak English as a second language supposed to write a legible set of user guides? Although to be fair it didn't say what language the guides are written in, maybe they are doing all the languages there.
Anyway....years ago I was warning white collar folks who kept laughing at me and saying I needed to "adjust my tin foil hat" when I said their jobs were next to be outsourced. That's back when "the new X-citing computar infotainment age" was going to make the blue collar jobs obsolete and everyone in the USA would be a computer operator of some kind, that those were the replacement jobs. OK, if the blue collar jobs get outsourced, and then the white collar jobs, what's left?
I wonder how many of those folks who were dissin me are still laughing now?
Anyway, point is moot, no matter WHAT they try to outsource, there are some jobs that HAVE to be done inside CONUS, now if we can get a handle on the borders better.....
I was getting just a ton of bad rendering(overlapping tables/bars whatever) and non page completetion problems on slashdot(page would only partly load, leaving huge blank areas), so I switched to the low resolution format, now it's fine. Took me around 15 minutes to get used to it, but now it looks normal to me and has the same functionality and loads much faster with no errors.
Slashdot Mirror
I just wasted someone's bandwith downloading a pdf in a language I do not speak or read. A simple change in the story headlines labeling it as german would have prevented this. Hint.
Anyway, I wonder why people are surprised. Too much under the table cash available to not have software patents become "the law" everywhere, no nation or group of nations is immune to corruption in government. In fact, I'd go so far as to state as it's more fact than not that all governments are by default corrupt. Anytime you have individuals in charge of making a decision, and there are billions of *monetary units* in the mix, some of those units will change hands to get reality morphed. "Government" is just as much a for-sale business as any other human endeavor. Altruism basically only exists in the dictionary, it doesn't exist in the global marketplace, especially in the markets known as "governments". Patents, DRM other sorts of schemes will continue to increase in scope, all over. In fact, I'd say things like the SCO deal going on right now are just the first of many that will make it harder and harder to have free and open source software of any quality, it's only a matter of time before the developers start finding themselves in court. Big international software business is not going to remain passive, even with a few large companies giving the illusion of support for FOSS right now. That is temporary, and the proof is that you see zero efforts by those billion buck companies to lobby for any change in the laws. If they were serious, you'd see them sponsoring and lobbying for a change to the IP patent laws, and they aren't.
funny you say that. I have a still unread "richard bachman" novel (The Regulators) sitting right next to me.
"so and so was found dead in his home today" joke any second now....
What's the actual legal status of that though, should your prime publisher find out? Seems like you might be in just as much hot water, as you have to use your real name for legal tax purposes and suchlike.
but it's easier to build a portfolio of prio art for patents, already issued and otherwise, and forward it in digital form to the patent office, maybe directly to the patent examiners involved in issuing questionable patents, and in bulk form to select members of congress and the media. And keep doing it.
Frankly, I don't see any way out of the illegitmate and unreasonable "IP" patent mess now other than to keep showing what a complete farce it is. It is just too expensive to try and beat the big companies at their own game now,by accumulating "open source and free" patents, it's long past that time and isn't going to happen in any practical quantities. Relying on alleged "whitehat" corporations to always be the good guys is wishful thinking, not when push comes to shove, they will revert back to being complete predators.
The best bet is to simply embarass the patent office and congress to the point that we might get reasonable patent reform, including retroactive revocation of IP patents. It was a bad idea to go that route in the first place--just extrapolate it ten years from now, what sort of computer society will we have, how will you be able to do anything without having a full time personal IP lawyer?
IP patents are killing the goose that laid the golden egg, short term yee haww mega profits for some, long time dismal results for everyone else. It's already effecting business and coding, how is it supposed to get better with THOUSANDS more IP patents being granted yearly? Who the heck besides a handful of the biggest players will be able to keep up and compete then? The current patent system will lead to a global monopoly of half a dozen or so large companies controlling everything, and that's about it.
I listened to some guy on a radio show a few years ago touting this idea. He wanted to have hilton hotels be the sponsor, and reuse the shuttle boosters as building blocks. I googled this now and found this about the hilton hotels, and this on reusing the shuttle tanks I think the latter is the guy I listened to on the radio. His idea makes a lot of sense, the shuttle booster tanks are pretty clean after expending the fuel, and are there for the using with a little attitude and altitude adjustment. Big ole nice structures going to waste.
and the big pharmcos will ignore any promising drugs that can't be patented (see the book "green medicine"), and will actually lobby against drugs and techniques that are cheap. All they want is the control and the profits, peoples health is tertiary (or lower) to them in their rankings of what is important. They will actually go so far as to de-legitimize useful products like nutrional supplements-vitamins and whatnot, and try to get legislation to make them "prescription only". They have tried that scam several times now.
Got news for you, too. My post was about grade schools and local property taxes, not colleges. Got more news for you too, college athletics are professional sports. Got even more news for you. Todays professional league sports addiction is akin to the roman empires citizenry addiction to the circus. The man-the fatcats, them guys- keeps the serfs-that would be you and me- addicted so he can rip you off and keep you from paying attention to your wallet and politics.
Want proof? easy! compare the effort required to get 50,000 people into a stadium on any given weekend, along with how much money they would drop, to any random political event of the same exact local level. there's no comparison, the sports addicts supporet their addictions, while the nations politics get ignored except for some bitching. Want more proof? Start asking people at random who their two senators are, who their state rep is, ask them to name the supreme court judges, ask them to rattle off executive branch cabinet heads. Now ask joe random to rqttle of the names of players on his favorite "team".
... that IBM was developing their own distro? It's called blue something? Any IBM AC insiders wish to confirm or deny that?
Check your states elected and appointed and hired on people ethics laws. All states have them, and they are a big variable. Then really take a close look at those figures again. If you can PROVE that the sports teams just cost money and don't make money, you *might* have grounds for an ethics complaint against any of the officials pushing those schemes, especially if you can get up a pissed off group of property tax victims to do it as a mass class action. The economy is getting weird, people aren't so cavalier about prioperty taxes any more, it's starting to hurt, and taxpayer subsidised public school "farm teams" for the profitable pro sports leagues is an easy target.
The last place I was living a group did that, and it resulted in a lot of changes in the local power structure including the head county honcho. It wasn't over sports in the schools, it was a different matter,still some taxes and duties they supposedly had, but by finding local ethics violations the state was *forced* to get involved, they are required by law to actually conduct an investigation, and the conclusions were almost mandatory with just a cursory glance. And it only took a few people total to pull it off, it's amazing what you can do if you really try.
Another time a long time ago I became an almost victim of some local political fatcats. WELL, they picked on the wrong guy. I eventually found over 500 violations these elected dudes were guilty of,and it resulted in me winning the case-with NO LAWYER, I did it all meself, and we got a new mayor and a lot of new town selectmen out of it. It CAN be done, you CAN fight the local power structure once they get into bogusness and corruption and malfeasance.
Good luck!
... this company coulda rolled their own custom distro, have it do exactly what they want it to do. they could have started with any generic pick of distros and customised, or just a raw kernel and built and added on their own packages, then reproduced the image and shipped them out to their servers and desktops in a controlled orderly manner. That's a significiant sum to have to play with to just hand it over to microsoft for some marginal differences in what they already have.
Sorry, I don't believe their cost studies, I smell a rat and some behind the scenes cash-ola "consultation fees" involved with this decision.
aaak, I guess me olden tymes practical penny pincher nature is too much for that figure.
Good quality hitmen are a LOT cheaper than that!
I would imagine that you are correct for most tactical situations, partially correct on strategic. I guess it depends on what you want then, do you want a nation that is primarily concerned with rote "no questions asked" style order following and team-work aggression.... or not.
I am not naieve when it comes to self defense or national defense,( on the self defense part, been there, done that numerous times now ), but I just question how much we have been really invaded and attacked and put in peril legitmately (no political/economic scam-foolery involved) compared to the number of wars we have found ourselves in over the last century.
A certain other infamous regime that is non PC to mention by name on a forum was well known for extraordinarily efficient team work, centralised strong command and control, strict hierachial structure and massive and pervasive rote "order following", but history has shown us it was an incorrect, dangerous and harmful societal stance for them to take.
I am wondering now how historians hundreds of years from now will judge us with this now-similar philosophy and bent.
...want an alternative? Anything you can physically hold in your hand or touch = OK to patent. Some theoretical concept, process, algorithym, arrangement, etc commonly referred to as an "intellectual property" = *not* OK to patent, but OK to copyright if the creator chooses to.
simple easy solution
..just their brand of bas, which is automagically "fair" to their way of thinking.
Look around, people don't want to read/hear/view news that upsets their pre conceived notions. The iraq war is a prime example of this, people made up their minds early on, now it's settled, some support it, some don't, the numbers have only changed minutely. Look at talk radio, a bastion of news junkies. People get into a rut of listening to the talker who most closely reflects their preconceived notions, at the level of intellectualism they are comfortable at. Look at popular political web boards and forums, they are groupings of almost identical thinkers,and the posts are basically examples of bashing those e-vile "other guys" who cause all the problems.
People-basic human nature- by and large *don't* seek out any radically opposing views. Once folks hit comfortable semi stable adulthood, they become pretty set in their ways, they support "their sports team" "their political party" "their view on economics" "their favorite tv shows" "their brands of beer and whatnot" and etc. "news" is and will be the same, no matter how many choices they have. Change is scary to people, they don't like to do it.
News is the same, google or msn or any other aggregator, people will wind up sticking to the same small group of channels/websites/outlets that they are comfortable with, news that supports their version of reality, they want to feel like they are correct in what they believe. And as to what they pick to look at, they will hit one of the top number displayed-just like web searching-and rarely go beyond that. How many articles on google are just rehashes of the same AP feed most of the time? How many people really click on the "... xxx big number more" link and seek out 20 different versions of the same story from all over the planet on any single news worty item, as opposed to just mashing one link from one of the top few displayed on the main page?
It's a rare person who will struggle constantly to actually seek out extremely differing viewpoints from their own. Some do to a small degree, but that's it, some, and I would bet it's a very small number.
I meant at the local public school level, where your property taxes go. Grade school, junior and senior high. That's where the professional leagues and their advertisers set the hook for the life long addiction and profits. At college/university level, it's professional, and I think 99% of the public has accepted that decades ago, just they technically claim it's still amature. I'm aware that sports make money at the college level and is wildely supported by "the masses" guy. I think it's embarassing for our society, but to each their own. Mores the pity that that is what it takes in our society to even give a semblance of academic support and to drum up any enthusiasm for education.
... just to be called a "unix"? Is this necessary, or just for coolness factor, are businesses demanding it, what? I really don't know, it's a legit question.
When I am running something,right now fedora core 2, I don't even think "fedora core 2 gnu/linux a unix type system" I just think and say "fedora". What do I again if I can say "I am running unix" instead of saying "fedora"?
...funding their local "education" establishment and huge amounts of those monies going to subsidise the NFL and NBA "farm teams" in the schools? since when is getting children addicted to professional sports part of an "education"? Aren't there other athletic and fun pursuits that might cost less available? Why not make those businesses fund them instead? Why should people on pensions-more or less pretty fixed incomes, be asked to support professional sports leagues to perpetuate the societal addiction to team sports? If these profitable businesses have enough to pay salaries in the millions per year to "sports stars",it seems like they can fund local schools "teams" then, don't ask the tax payers to do it.
... any sort of central searchable repository of source code? Not complete apps, just raw code? something like a google for code? Or just a way to do it if not in a centralised location?
Just seems like an idea to make developing easier. I was thinking about this reading the difficulties in testing and the various tecnhiques. I keep thinking perhaps "better solutions" might be out there, but hidden in non related apps to what any developer looking for code might be working on, so he wouldn't even bother looking there. A searchable database might be a good tool. Say some aspect of an app is doing a particular thing that would be useful in some other totally unrelated project, so maybe the person trying to develop for it might not even be aware of it, but if he could search for it in some manner it might already exist.
It's like patent searching in a way, it should be easier to search, and it should be *there* to search.
probably not and certainly not over night or even in a year. but if there's an escrow account *legitimate* bounty that companies can contribute too, it might spark some interest..then, who knows? Open source has proven it can do the job when there's some serious brains and efforts behind a project. For every closed source app and use out there, there's a desire for it to be open source and cheaper/freer. Developers just want to know it will be appreciated, and their work will be appreciated, and some cash is certainly some appreciation. If a few dozen major concerns expressed a willingness and a desire for some open source design apps, then perhaps... no one will know unless it's tried. And like gimp versus photoshop, it's feature sets and what you need. No one says gimp is a total equivalent, but it's slowly getting there, and for some applications it's good enough now. and money is always nice...
The only autocad story I have is their customer service SUCKS. I bought a still shrinkwrapped version of 97lt for cheap, but it's legit,I thought "hmm, cool, still got an actual legal version of nt4 kicking around, too, so I can install it". got NT4installed no problem, went to then install autocad, this was going to be a standalone, just for autocad machine on a spare box I have. Go to install it, it gives me an error message that I now need the "activation key" which is NOT with the shrinkwrapped stuff. I finally get customer support on the telephone, they generate me a key after I give them all my info, I try it right then and there with the person on the phone waiting, it balks and gives an error message. I say I will fool with it some more. Try it out several times, no matter what I do it won't take it. I call back, indian call center, no getting around it. They admit my copy is legit, never installed before, yet it gives me an error message and won't let me insert the activation key, so no install. Grumble... I sent a nice snail mail letter to autodesk, all the exact details, no response from them ever, zero. I offer to SHIP the entire boxed set to them to prove it's legit and not a scam, no dice. So I unistalled NT4, and forogt about autocad. I wanted to try it out, else I wouldn't have bought the thing. Autodesk can byte me, they suck, I don't care how good their stuff is, and I don't do crackz or serialz or warez, I am a legit user, always have been.
Offer a bounty and let it be known inside your industry peer group there is a bounty available for an open source autocad-like app, and perhaps others will chip in as well. 6500$ a seat is tempting, could the design industry in all it's flavors get up a seriously significant bounty to offer developers? Put it on a webpage someplace, or even source forge. Maybe you will interest some developers if your cash is green.
Choice? where is it? for years whenever I walked into any store selling computers they sold boxes with windows installed. For 99% of the people out there, there hasn't been any "choice" beyond this theoretical "if you maybe heard of another operating system and maybe could track it down and maybe get it installed then maybe you had a "choice"". People don't run windows because they comparison shopped, they run windows because that's what came on their computers. I know people who have never even *seen* a macintosh, let alone anything different on the x86 platform.
Don't confuse slashdot readership (that would also inlcude you and me) with the "market" in general. Microsoft got where they are via industry collusion, bribes, threats, kickbacks, etc in some very high places, not from normal consumer "choice" at the computer store. Heck, I've even got an older 1996 IBM computer here I bought severely discounted but still brand new in a sealed box, it didn't have os2 on it, it had NT on it when I bought it.
"Choice" is only relative when it actually exists in enough of a widespread manner that it is available to most consumers where they shop. It is only in the last two years that there has been any significant breakthrough in operating systems choice, and even now it is still mighty thin on the ground. I did a look in my area, there are 6 stores total that sell computers near me, none of them carry anything but XP boxes, nor are there even any alternative OSes on the shelf with the various software for sale. This is NOT "consumer choice selecting the best product".
I agree. It's just like with a lot of the P2P traffic, good for some, bad for others, the "powers that be" will try to ban it some (soon maybe) day.
Double click ads don't bother me as much as some other places, I can tolerate them, plus, I want the content and some websites to remain free to view. Like over the air TV, I tolerate the ads because I don't want to pay for satellite. I don't mind a small fuel tax because the alternative is expensive toll roads everyplace.
pretty much, eh wot?
heh heh heh I wish there was a separate propoper noun for USA styled english, with the various dialects. Around here where I live you hear "bubba" "ebonics" and "spanglish". I myself still have enough northern midwestern to stand out as different, even though this year marks 20 years living in the south. People go "where you from boy?".
Dang, thought I might "pass" by now....
Anyway, USian as a person or language doesn't quite cut it, we need a new word, and ya'all can have "english" back then.
first paragraph on the page, then a huge breakdown of all the various languages there:
Republic of India, Bharat. National or official languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, English (Associate Official). 1,000,000,000 (1999 IMA). 7% classified as tribals. Indo-Aryan languages: 491,087,116, 74.24%, Dravidian languages: 157,836,723, 23.86%, Austro-Asiatic languages 7,705,011, 1.16%, Tibeto-Burman languages 4,071,701,
Talk to people who use customer service-it's very difficult to engage in coversations and be understood adequately, both ways, more often than not. Close but no cigar is still "no cigar". There's a rather large difference between the english dialect used in India and United States styled dialects. It is such a big difference there's still a language problem.
quote from article:
"preparing user guides"
Huh? How are people who speak English as a second language supposed to write a legible set of user guides? Although to be fair it didn't say what language the guides are written in, maybe they are doing all the languages there.
Anyway....years ago I was warning white collar folks who kept laughing at me and saying I needed to "adjust my tin foil hat" when I said their jobs were next to be outsourced. That's back when "the new X-citing computar infotainment age" was going to make the blue collar jobs obsolete and everyone in the USA would be a computer operator of some kind, that those were the replacement jobs. OK, if the blue collar jobs get outsourced, and then the white collar jobs, what's left?
I wonder how many of those folks who were dissin me are still laughing now?
Anyway, point is moot, no matter WHAT they try to outsource, there are some jobs that HAVE to be done inside CONUS, now if we can get a handle on the borders better.....
I was getting just a ton of bad rendering(overlapping tables/bars whatever) and non page completetion problems on slashdot(page would only partly load, leaving huge blank areas), so I switched to the low resolution format, now it's fine. Took me around 15 minutes to get used to it, but now it looks normal to me and has the same functionality and loads much faster with no errors.