North of the U.S. boder? This is the same country that regularly prosecutes people who say things that aren't "politically correct" (deemed offensive to women, minorities, Jews, etc.), right?
Not that I wouldn't move there in a minute, if I could stand cold weather. (Since I can't, I moved to Arizona instead -- anti-education geezers, desert sunshine, and anti-everything Republicans, oh well, one out of three ain't bad!).
The kill ratio for F-16's should be more than 4-1 when used by properly trained pilots with modern weapons against poorly-trained PRC pilots flying archaic fighters -- *IF* there's a place for the F-16's to run to where they can get refueled and reloaded with missiles without getting bombed while on the ground, and *IF* there's an adequate supply of such missiles in the first place. Big "ifs".
These are Vietnam-era designs with outdated avionics and weapons systems, and poor fuel economy. Their flight performance is reasonable (just don't expect much range from them!), but F-16's kick their rear in a variety of ways, as has been demonstrated in combat over Lebanon against Syrian-flown MiG-21's. Heck, even F-4 Phantoms are competitive against MiG-21's (again demonstrated in combat by the Israelies).
Modern fighters are airborne anti-aircraft missile launch platforms first, and dogfighters second. The MiG-21 is a reasonable dogfighter, but that doesn't matter if it's been swept from the sky by a missile before ever reaching cannon range. And a crew properly trained to take advantage of that ordinance and avionics advantage can make a single F-16 the equal of four MiG-21's (if it could carry more ordinance the advantage could be even more).
I don't know the state of Taiwan's air force, whether they have the up-to-date training and ordinance to take advantage of the platform, and the numbers advantage definitely goes to the PRC, but to state that the MiG-21 is somehow "on par" with the F-16 is a joke.
It's possible to monitor the decision makers only if you have spare time, energy, and money. The decision makers make sure that the majority of people have neither, that the majority of people work long hours or multiple jobs and are propogandized to believe that they need many luxury items (like these computers that we're typing on!) that require slaving like a dog and spending every bit of money they get and more (debt) so that they don't have time to check on who REALLY owns their elected "representative" (most of whom are in the pockets of big business).
Bread and circuses, baby. Bread and circuses. The wonder of modern American life is that the corporacracy has figured out how to make the American public pay out of its own pocket for the bread and circuses that keep it tranquilized and sedate!
I agree about the lack of good GTK documentation. But the QT documentation is first-class. I suggest you go to http://www.troll.no and browse it for yourself. Yeah, it's not paper, but it's still thorough and understandable (a combo that doesn't happen too often!).
As for "the QT book" that you refer to, it was intended for tutorial purposes, not as a comprehensive reference work. See the Troll Tech documentation for the comprehensive documentation.
There hasn't really been a big problem with QT changing every time you update your system either. Unlike GTK+.
This is sort of what Linux International was set up to do. As far as I know, Linus has assigned the administration of the trademark to LI, with the mission being to protect the value of the Linux name for LI's members and the Linux community as a whole.
Having LI administer the trademark isn't perfect. LI's charter states that LI's mission is to benefit its member companies, and LI was originally created in order to do the Linux Pavilion at Comdex, rather than as a generic Linux oversight group. Still, it can be argued that fostering a strong Linux community is in the best interests of LI's member companies.
An "attempt to defraud" is needed in order to invoke the cybersquatting laws. Unfortunately, proving that in the case of LinuxOne is a bit difficult, because they do have a Linux product to sell (albeit that it's a repackaged version of someone else's product!).
I do notice, from the trademark database, that LinuxOne has not filed for a trademark on their name or on their product's name. In other words, they have no legitimate basis for using said name. I wonder if their IPO filing mentions that anywhere? If not, the SEC can whack them down for fraudulent filing! (the SEC doesn't need a court case to cancel an IPO, they have the authority to do it in and of themselves).
The trademark is administered by Linux International (thus why you send co-branding fees etc. to LI). WorkGroup Solutions (LinuxMall.com) is a founding member of Linux International. 'Nuff said.
Note that Linus is letting Linux International administer the trademark (thus the part about "the fees go to Linux International"). VA Research was a founding member of Linux International. 'Nuff said.
In the past Slashdot has gotten anonymous responses from insiders at Microsoft, Intel, and other big corporations who revealed information that, if their identity was known, would have gotten them fired. Should we give up those insights?
What makes Australia so attractive is that nobody hates Australia. That's a unique situation in the Asia-Pacific area, where almost everybody hates everybody else. Everybody hates the Japanese because of what they did during WW2, the Japanese despise the Filipinos and Koreans, the Vietnamese hate the Chinese, etc. etc. etc... if you set your regional HQ in Taiwan, you peeve the mainland Chinese, if you put it in Japan, you peeve everybody, if you put it in mainland China, you peeve the Vietnamese and Taiwanese and maybe even the South Koreans (at least their government, which still has a grudge about being overrun by Chinese "volunteers" back during the Korean "conflict"),...
Australia must seem like a haven of sanity in the midst of all that hatred, and it's no surprise that people build their Asia-Pacific HQ there rather than in some place where they might peeve potential customers.
Red Hat has one advantage in going after contracts with big computer companies: They have one of the largest collections of Linux talent in the world on staff or on retainer. If you are IBM and you wish to support Linux with your new RAID card, will you deal with LinuxOne, which has no actual Linux kernel hackers on staff, or will you deal with Red Hat, where you have Linus's #2 man Alan Cox on staff? I know which company *I* would be dealing with!
With Linux, it's not the product, it's how much support you can expect for the product, and that's a direct function of how many top Linux people are on staff at the company you're dealing with. To underestimate the value of that talent would be a big mistake -- a mistake that IBM etc. are not likely to make.
SSL is still covered by the RSA patent until November of this year. Thus SSL source code cannot be legally posted here in the U.S. until after November.
My reading of the document says that there are no key length restrictions on Open Source programs provided as source code under a BSD-style license (i.e., a license that permits use of the source in a commercial product without restriction). Binaries, on the other hand, fall under other classifications.
I, too, saw the many references to 64-bit symmetric/1024-bit RSA products. (There is a clause in there somewhere that mentions 1024-bit RSA as being possible to export with a licence). So it appears that this is still not the liberalization we need. While 1024-bit RSA is strong enough for today, most modern symmetric algorithms are 128 bit algorithms. Thus most modern cryptographic software would still be illegal to export, if I'm reading this mass of verbiage correctly.
As mail administrator for my employer, I regularly forward complaints about SPAM to various ISP's. AOL is swift to yank spammers. @Home, on the other hand, doesn't seem to care.
That, and not the quantity of spam, is what gets the USENET Death Penalty rolling.
It doesn't help that there are maybe five people in the entire @Home company nationwide who know what the hell they're doing, and your chances of talking to one of those people are about the same as your chances of calling the White House and talking to the President. As with The Phone Company, @Home takes pains to make sure that their precious techies aren't bothered with anything as mundane as helping customers.
Easy way to get hung up on by @Home "technical service"... "Hello, I'm running Linux and...".
Well, the 150M isn't going into the Linux desktop/server business, it's going to the embedded systems side (the side that got DR-DOS when Caldera Inc. was split up).
I *am* rather surprised by the large loss that Caldera Systems racked up last year ($9M, according to the IPO filing that I just saw). Caldera has always struck me as sort of the SCO of Linux, a very conservative company more interested in building a VAR network than in competing with other vendors. That kind of company would not be interested in building up debt. I guess that things have changed up there in Utah since the last time I looked.
The Caldera Inc. that got the money, and the Caldera Systems that got the investments, are two different companies. The Linux desktop and server business was spun off as Caldera Systems, and got the investments and is planning the IPO. The rest of Caldera's operations -- the old DR-DOS operation, the Lineo embedded OS operation -- are related to Caldera Systems only in that they have common stockholders.
Caldera has a lot of internal EMAILs and such subpoena'ed from Microsoft that can be used as evidence, including a "smoking gun" EMAIL that had a top Microsoft executive basically telling his engineers "see if we can find some way to make Windows break if it runs on top of DR-DOS". While none of this evidence is directly usable for any other action I can think of, it could (and would) be entered into evidence as part of the process of "establishing a pattern of behavior" in any similar case against Microsoft.
Not that I can think of such a case at the moment, except maybe the Netscape vs. MS case (where did that ever go anyhow?). Microsoft's been on good behavior the last couple of years, probably trying to keep from being dismantled by the DoJ.
VA does have case designers on staff. I wouldn't be expecting an SGI workstation case out of them anytime soon, though -- they primarily sell servers, and I'd expect to see better server cases first.
I suspect that volume is what's holding up introduction of new case designs. Their stuff is already overpriced without havng to pay twice the price to a sheetmetal basher for the same style case as their competitors buy off-the-shelf.
I, too, learned on a crappy computer (Commodore VIC-20, then Commodore 64). I even made crappy hardware to plug into its crappy little expansion port. That was an experience.
The closest I can get to that experience today is Linux. And the free BSD's, of course. You can go down to the kernel level and see exactly what's happening, and even write your own device drivers if desired.
If I had kids, I wouldn't think twice about plunking a bare Linux box on their desk and saying "have at it".
My biggest frustration, when I was teaching, was that the administration plopped those computers into my classroom, but gave me no support in figuring out how to USE the bloody things as instructional devices. Yeah, there were math games and drills on the things -- but they were totally unrelated to the curriculum that the state department of education required me to teach (the curriculum that would be on the exit exam that the students were required to pass in order to get their high school diploma).
And I have a degree in Computer Science.
Yes, computers are not being used properly in the schools. But it's not always the teacher's fault. If the software is not related to the curriculum that teachers are required to teach, or if there's no instructional materials for teachers to know what software relates to what topics in the state curriculum, what are teachers supposed to do? Most teachers eventually, on their own, figure out something to do with the computers, but without leadership it's being done on an inconsistent and haphazard basis.
It is a very rare school that has both the resources and the strong leadership needed for excellence, and often that's despite, not because of, the district-level leadership. Suburban schools fare better because their higher pay means less turnover and adds the ability to "cream skim" the inner city and rural school districts, (e.g., in Houston ISD, half the teachers seemed to have applications on file in Forest Park ISD or other suburban districts, and Houston ISD actually pays quite well compared to most urban school districts). Even there, mediocrity is the norm -- I did my student teaching in some of the best public schools out there, and they were good despite of, not because of, their leadership. There were individually a lot of good teachers, but they rarely had the books, material, and administrative support that they needed to do their job to the utmost (which requires challenging students -- which means discipline problems, which means the administration coming down on the teacher for "being too hard on the kids). Not to mention that the whole system is based on quantity, not quality -- teachers are expected to be on their feet for six hours straight and be as effective at the end of that time as they were at the beginning. It doesn't work that way -- teaching (the right way as vs. 'here's a worksheet, fill it out', anyhow) is exhausting work, and without lengthy rest breaks between classes, you can practically see the teachers drooping at the end of the day.
The wonder is that most students come out of this system with an adequate, if mediocre, education (even our best and brightest don't get the level of education that the best and brightest in other countries get). The sadness, however, is that it could be so much better -- if we properly focused priorities and organized schools for quality rather than as babysitting academies tied to the bus schedule.
Obligatory story:
A very good assistant principal was promoted to the principalship after the former principal retired. This guy was GOOD. He did not tolerate nonsense, but he had the patience of Job and great ideas for how to better our school, ideas that made sense (as vs. "fad of the day"). Anyhow, he decided that it'd be great if we could extend the school day in order to give both students and teachers more of a break between classes.
No could do. The Transportation Director blew a fuse. "You'll mess up all my bus routes!". At the end of the year, this great principal was demoted to 6th grade teacher for the crime of "rocking the boat" on this as well as on other issues (such as, his willingness to discipline kids whose parents were influential in the community).
Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" novels had a Galactic Empire like that, where nobody knew how the stuff worked anymore, "it just works" was their response if asked WHY it worked. As a result, they did stupid things like forward hoax virus warnings and run cute executables from people they didn't know:-). Just kidding on the last, but you get the picture. Dr. A. was commenting upon the fallacy that "children don't need to learn the nuts and bolts of technology, they just need to know how to use it."
I think Woz's point was that children DO need to learn something about the internals of computers -- not just how to be a user of black boxes, but someone who knows what's inside the box. Maybe not in excrutiating detail, but enough to know WHY you don't want to run cute executables from people you don't know.
Of course, I suspect people will heed Woz's warnings about as much as they heeded Doctor A's warnings -- i.e., not much at all. -E
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Not that I wouldn't move there in a minute, if I could stand cold weather. (Since I can't, I moved to Arizona instead -- anti-education geezers, desert sunshine, and anti-everything Republicans, oh well, one out of three ain't bad!).
-E
-E
Modern fighters are airborne anti-aircraft missile launch platforms first, and dogfighters second. The MiG-21 is a reasonable dogfighter, but that doesn't matter if it's been swept from the sky by a missile before ever reaching cannon range. And a crew properly trained to take advantage of that ordinance and avionics advantage can make a single F-16 the equal of four MiG-21's (if it could carry more ordinance the advantage could be even more).
I don't know the state of Taiwan's air force, whether they have the up-to-date training and ordinance to take advantage of the platform, and the numbers advantage definitely goes to the PRC, but to state that the MiG-21 is somehow "on par" with the F-16 is a joke.
-E
Bread and circuses, baby. Bread and circuses. The wonder of modern American life is that the corporacracy has figured out how to make the American public pay out of its own pocket for the bread and circuses that keep it tranquilized and sedate!
-E
As for "the QT book" that you refer to, it was intended for tutorial purposes, not as a comprehensive reference work. See the Troll Tech documentation for the comprehensive documentation.
There hasn't really been a big problem with QT changing every time you update your system either. Unlike GTK+.
-E
Having LI administer the trademark isn't perfect. LI's charter states that LI's mission is to benefit its member companies, and LI was originally created in order to do the Linux Pavilion at Comdex, rather than as a generic Linux oversight group. Still, it can be argued that fostering a strong Linux community is in the best interests of LI's member companies.
-E
I do notice, from the trademark database, that LinuxOne has not filed for a trademark on their name or on their product's name. In other words, they have no legitimate basis for using said name. I wonder if their IPO filing mentions that anywhere? If not, the SEC can whack them down for fraudulent filing! (the SEC doesn't need a court case to cancel an IPO, they have the authority to do it in and of themselves).
-E
-E
-E
-E
Australia must seem like a haven of sanity in the midst of all that hatred, and it's no surprise that people build their Asia-Pacific HQ there rather than in some place where they might peeve potential customers.
-E
With Linux, it's not the product, it's how much support you can expect for the product, and that's a direct function of how many top Linux people are on staff at the company you're dealing with. To underestimate the value of that talent would be a big mistake -- a mistake that IBM etc. are not likely to make.
-E
-E
-E
I, too, saw the many references to 64-bit symmetric/1024-bit RSA products. (There is a clause in there somewhere that mentions 1024-bit RSA as being possible to export with a licence). So it appears that this is still not the liberalization we need. While 1024-bit RSA is strong enough for today, most modern symmetric algorithms are 128 bit algorithms. Thus most modern cryptographic software would still be illegal to export, if I'm reading this mass of verbiage correctly.
-E
That, and not the quantity of spam, is what gets the USENET Death Penalty rolling.
It doesn't help that there are maybe five people in the entire @Home company nationwide who know what the hell they're doing, and your chances of talking to one of those people are about the same as your chances of calling the White House and talking to the President. As with The Phone Company, @Home takes pains to make sure that their precious techies aren't bothered with anything as mundane as helping customers.
Easy way to get hung up on by @Home "technical service"... "Hello, I'm running Linux and ...".
-E
I *am* rather surprised by the large loss that Caldera Systems racked up last year ($9M, according to the IPO filing that I just saw). Caldera has always struck me as sort of the SCO of Linux, a very conservative company more interested in building a VAR network than in competing with other vendors. That kind of company would not be interested in building up debt. I guess that things have changed up there in Utah since the last time I looked.
-E
-E
Not that I can think of such a case at the moment, except maybe the Netscape vs. MS case (where did that ever go anyhow?). Microsoft's been on good behavior the last couple of years, probably trying to keep from being dismantled by the DoJ.
-E
-E
I suspect that volume is what's holding up introduction of new case designs. Their stuff is already overpriced without havng to pay twice the price to a sheetmetal basher for the same style case as their competitors buy off-the-shelf.
-E
The closest I can get to that experience today is Linux. And the free BSD's, of course. You can go down to the kernel level and see exactly what's happening, and even write your own device drivers if desired.
If I had kids, I wouldn't think twice about plunking a bare Linux box on their desk and saying "have at it".
_E
And I have a degree in Computer Science.
Yes, computers are not being used properly in the schools. But it's not always the teacher's fault. If the software is not related to the curriculum that teachers are required to teach, or if there's no instructional materials for teachers to know what software relates to what topics in the state curriculum, what are teachers supposed to do? Most teachers eventually, on their own, figure out something to do with the computers, but without leadership it's being done on an inconsistent and haphazard basis.
-E
The wonder is that most students come out of this system with an adequate, if mediocre, education (even our best and brightest don't get the level of education that the best and brightest in other countries get). The sadness, however, is that it could be so much better -- if we properly focused priorities and organized schools for quality rather than as babysitting academies tied to the bus schedule.
Obligatory story:
A very good assistant principal was promoted to the principalship after the former principal retired. This guy was GOOD. He did not tolerate nonsense, but he had the patience of Job and great ideas for how to better our school, ideas that made sense (as vs. "fad of the day"). Anyhow, he decided that it'd be great if we could extend the school day in order to give both students and teachers more of a break between classes.
No could do. The Transportation Director blew a fuse. "You'll mess up all my bus routes!". At the end of the year, this great principal was demoted to 6th grade teacher for the crime of "rocking the boat" on this as well as on other issues (such as, his willingness to discipline kids whose parents were influential in the community).
That's what we're up against, folks!
-E
I think Woz's point was that children DO need to learn something about the internals of computers -- not just how to be a user of black boxes, but someone who knows what's inside the box. Maybe not in excrutiating detail, but enough to know WHY you don't want to run cute executables from people you don't know.
Of course, I suspect people will heed Woz's warnings about as much as they heeded Doctor A's warnings -- i.e., not much at all. -E