If you're an European writing in English for an international audience, it's not pretentious OR normal, it's moronic and stupid. Chinese and Indians writing in English for international audiences routinely use the correct form, why shouldn't Europeans?
> Yes but, I don't really consider time frame a "technical reason" as far as this goes. Thats more of an economical reason, wouldn't you agree?
Only on/. could this be modded +5. Imagine this conversation in the 70s: Why does Unix treat a file as a stream of bytes when many mainframe OSes support block record-type files? Surely it wouldn't be too much trouble to add record-oriented I/O to stdio? Or, a more modern twist: how technically feasible is it to make Edgy Eft have a case-insensitive filesystem?
Dig deep enough any technical reason in software is really an economic reason in disguise because software (unlike physical structures like say bridges) do not have to obey physical laws. If you really want to, anything in software can be solved with an abstraction layer.
So maybe you'd like to quit splitting hairs over dictionary definitions and look and the semantics behind what the GP's saying.
High quality discussions most of the time. Obviously it's not as busy as Slashdot, but hey -- most people come to/. to vent, not have high-quality discussions;-)
Yo, Krugman Junior, I really don't want to hear how good you are, or how bad Fox News/Bush/The Loch Ness Monster is. Just provide your credentials and a link to your Google Scholar page, and preferably some peer reviews so we laymen can get a sense of what your peers think about you. Then we can make up our own minds and be suitably impressed about your "top 20" education.
Oh go sod yourself and your "top 20" university education in Economics. If you really want us to be impressed, link to your Google Scholar page and your peer reviews. Then we might be impressed. But your ranting and amazing felicity for calling everyone who disagrees with you a 'republican shill' makes me doubt your credentials.
Mandatory registration definitely sucks, but IMO you're making a mountain out of a molehill.
> The BBC is one of the best mainstream news sites out there and in general the idiots who think their news is worth mandatory registration for just that
The BBC can afford to do that because every UK television-owning household is paying for it -- over $250 a year IIRC. And a lot of them do chafe at what they're getting in the bargain. And if you think the BBC doesn't have an agenda, you're seriously deluded. (That doesn't mean the BBC doesn't run good stories, but that people who think 'the Beeb' is the be-all and end-all of news are unknowningly trapping themselves into the BBC's worldview without even knowing it.)
Me, I'll continue to get my news from the maximum number of sources that's feasible for me. And frankly, I do my newsreading on my laptop (why would I be looking for news in the server room at work?) so it's simply not a big deal.
but to build decent enterprise applications you NEED more than just an unstructured file storage engine.
I don't really care about Notes/Domino either way (find it too weird), but its unstructured storage engine is a thing of beauty. Ironically re your point about 'decent enterprise apps', many enterprises have adopted Notes for their document workflow management (GE comes to mind), simply by running many Domino instances at multiple departmental levels. Yeah, you can pay top $$$ and get 'enterprise document management' or you can evaluate your needs and decide you don't *really* need all the top-end features and buy something cost-effective (to a Fortune 50 company, at least) like Domino.
- A stable power grid (if it's not there, build a small one yourself) - An oversupply of labor with high population growth (to keep that oversupply rolling) - A sufficient percentage of English-speaking workers.
And a government not run by a guy known for his misgovernance. Which pretty much rules Zimbabwe out.
Notes is a nightmare like Emacs is a nightmare-- the interface's crap but those who know the rationale behind the interface (or can look beyond the not-so-pretty face) will discover a remarkably powerful scriptable workflow engine that incidentally is also an email client. I have personally razzed Notes before (I used it for my email for 6+ years and had to end up learning how to program it to make it bearable) but in the end I do appreciate the amount of flexibility the environment gives you. Add to that the number of good ideas Notes pioneered in the early 80s, and it's no wonder a lot of Notes folk end up like Lisp programmers, muttering 'heh, we did it first' whenever any workflow/unstructured-data 'innovation' is announced.
Back on topic, it's common knowledge among the Notes community that Ozzie was responsible for the Notes engine and backend, not the interface (that was Lotus standards, and later IBM's) -- given that I think he deserves a lot more credit than you give him.
15.8 billion euros, and a workforce of 60.000 (before the projected "synergy benefits", that will cut costs 1,5 billions
Whoa. I don't think I've ever seen such screwed-up number formatting on/.
Dear submitters, since the editors will obviously not fix such obvious errors, do take a look at number formatting on Wikipedia and number accordingly (hint: Slashdot is published in English from a 'Dot Country'.)
Microsoft had to re-engineer Internet Explorer to stop a technology known as ActiveX automatically starting when users visit some websites.
Huh? Flash would be out of business then. What the post-Eolas IE actually does is prevents the user from interacting with the ActiveX control until 'activated' with a click. (The control's running fine meanwhile, which means it can also be a security risk.) Also, this applies to controls put on pages with an honest-to-gosh [object] tag. If you write your [object] tag dynamically, say via Javascript, users can interact with your object without activating it first.
Not a major problem out on the Internet, but many Corporates have internal web apps where this patch is going to screw things up royally.
IIRC, the workaround is to make sure your [object] tag is written out using (Java|VB)script. If you visit macromedia.com they use this technique and have a tutorial about it written up. And to be fair, MSDN's been letting developers know about this for ages.
So your minister of culture is (to put it crudely) a fanboy. Does that mean every minister in the world has to be?
Also, LOL at the poster who compared RMS to Ghandi. RMS isn't even close. Ghandi didn't get famous for wearing weird clothes, if he did _just_ that we'd remember him today as the half-naked Indian fakir Churchill described him to be. Ghandi went to jail, was beat up by the police, went on hungerstrikes-- *that's* why we remember him, despite his choice in clothes and his habit of sleeping naked with his niece.
I'll always remember RMS as the guy who went around saying "accept a substandard 70s-era OS and toolchain! because it's Free!". There's a reason real innovators like Bill Joy and James Gosling (who've been there and done that) detest him.
RMS seriously needs to get that going around like a disheveled lunatic works well if you're fighting for your country's freedom (or you're a rock star). Just because some Gnufanatics treat him like one doesn't mean he'll get treated the same way by everyone in the real world.
I know UK companies that have set up offshore centres in Eastern Europe and India and fired staff in the UK. Maybe the reason given was that market realities forced to set up shop elsewhere?
> Out-sourcing to workers outside your country is a betrayal.
[This is not specifically directed to the parent, it applies to all of you.]
If you are able to eat 100% american food, wear 100% american clothes, use 100% american consumer electronics, use 100% american software -- then I'll concede you the moral high ground of calling outsourcers 'betrayers'. In the meantime, if you're like the rest of us, your Intel processor is being fabbed in Malaysia (I've no idea where AMD fabs), your iPod in Taiwan; your clothes probably come from Chinese or South Asian sweatshops and your food comes from all over the world. And there's an increasing chance you drive a foreign car.
Every day you commit several betrayals against good, decent American jobs. Why would you expect the public to feel any special sympathy for tech support workers when you didn't support the farmers, autoworkers and shoe-manufactureres who suffered before you?
Training your replacement is standard operating procedure for many jobs. If you don't like it, the time to argue about it is when your work contract is being signed. The fact that the replacements are Indians is a red herring here -- it'd be the same if the jobs were being moved to the Appalachians.
Once upon a time autoworkers and shipbuilders were considered high-skill workers. Hell, look back far enough (1800s) and button-manufacturing was high tech. The commoditization of IT is happening faster than the commoditization of these old-line businesses. So we should get out of the notion that 'internal tech support' is somehow a 'high tech' job that requires local presence all the time. Yeah, a portion of tech support jobs will remain local (until the smart robots take over, heh) but most of the jobs will go to where the cheap smarts are.
> I think Microsoft is missing a serious opportunity here. It's called branching.
I run into this misconception a lot. The reality is, a very small fraction of total users want to stick with their 8-year-old operating systems/computers and yet want new stuff for it. Out of that, the fraction that'll actually pay for support of their old software, or backports to their old OS, is small. So your 'opportunity' hinges on a fraction of a fraction. Microsoft is in the business of selling mass-market software and it's just not economical for them to do it.*
A good analogy would be like ready-to-wear clothes. Microsoft's like Tommy Hilfiger. Linux (the kernel devs), Gnu and the MoFo are like wholesalers who sell cloth by the yard. Some OSS vendors use them to create their own-brand shirts (Redhat, SuSE) and sell it for cheaper than Microsoft (although Red Hat Enterprise Linux is pricey, yow). And the shop that's supporting old versions of Linux/Firefox/etc is like a tailor who makes a custom-made suit for you -- he does good business but Hilfiger makes lots more $$$ than he does.
* That said, I understand that Vista Home Basic and Vista Starter are designed to run well on low-end PCs (no Aero, etc). So people reluctant to upgrade their hardware will have a software upgrade path.
> I live in the US and I love soccer(football), people ask why haven't we really adopted soccer as widely as the rest of the world did
I think it's the 2x45 minute playtimes. Makes it hard on TV companies to promote (less time for ads) and requires a lot of stamina for a casual player.
If you tune into any channel in the UK, or indeed any of their innumerable tabloids, it's "football" all the way. I don't know *who* uses the word 'soccer' in Britain, but America-returned Brits would come to mind.
From what I understand a lot of children are taught spelling phonetically these days ('phonics' is some sort of new English-teaching fad) and it's no surprise a lot of them spell as pronounced (your/you're, shoe-in/shoo-in, straight-laced/strait-laced etc).
Yeah, just like Hitler and Idi Amin prove Homo Sapiens to be an inherently monstrous species. Not. Cherry-pick your samples and you can make _anything_ look bad.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're an European writing in English for an international audience, it's not pretentious OR normal, it's moronic and stupid. Chinese and Indians writing in English for international audiences routinely use the correct form, why shouldn't Europeans?
> Yes but, I don't really consider time frame a "technical reason" as far as this goes. Thats more of an economical reason, wouldn't you agree?
/. could this be modded +5. Imagine this conversation in the 70s: Why does Unix treat a file as a stream of bytes when many mainframe OSes support block record-type files? Surely it wouldn't be too much trouble to add record-oriented I/O to stdio? Or, a more modern twist: how technically feasible is it to make Edgy Eft have a case-insensitive filesystem?
Only on
Dig deep enough any technical reason in software is really an economic reason in disguise because software (unlike physical structures like say bridges) do not have to obey physical laws. If you really want to, anything in software can be solved with an abstraction layer.
So maybe you'd like to quit splitting hairs over dictionary definitions and look and the semantics behind what the GP's saying.
> What else is there?
/. to vent, not have high-quality discussions ;-)
Ars Technica.
High quality discussions most of the time. Obviously it's not as busy as Slashdot, but hey -- most people come to
Yo, Krugman Junior, I really don't want to hear how good you are, or how bad Fox News/Bush/The Loch Ness Monster is. Just provide your credentials and a link to your Google Scholar page, and preferably some peer reviews so we laymen can get a sense of what your peers think about you. Then we can make up our own minds and be suitably impressed about your "top 20" education.
Until then, quit tooting your own horn.
Oh go sod yourself and your "top 20" university education in Economics. If you really want us to be impressed, link to your Google Scholar page and your peer reviews. Then we might be impressed. But your ranting and amazing felicity for calling everyone who disagrees with you a 'republican shill' makes me doubt your credentials.
> Even though Bitstream Vera is free and kicks mscorefont's ass?
Care to back that up? Or is more reflexive OSS-boosting, like "Dia kicks Visio's ass!"?
Mandatory registration definitely sucks, but IMO you're making a mountain out of a molehill.
> The BBC is one of the best mainstream news sites out there and in general the idiots who think their news is worth mandatory registration for just that
The BBC can afford to do that because every UK television-owning household is paying for it -- over $250 a year IIRC. And a lot of them do chafe at what they're getting in the bargain. And if you think the BBC doesn't have an agenda, you're seriously deluded. (That doesn't mean the BBC doesn't run good stories, but that people who think 'the Beeb' is the be-all and end-all of news are unknowningly trapping themselves into the BBC's worldview without even knowing it.)
Me, I'll continue to get my news from the maximum number of sources that's feasible for me. And frankly, I do my newsreading on my laptop (why would I be looking for news in the server room at work?) so it's simply not a big deal.
but to build decent enterprise applications you NEED more than just an unstructured file storage engine.
I don't really care about Notes/Domino either way (find it too weird), but its unstructured storage engine is a thing of beauty. Ironically re your point about 'decent enterprise apps', many enterprises have adopted Notes for their document workflow management (GE comes to mind), simply by running many Domino instances at multiple departmental levels. Yeah, you can pay top $$$ and get 'enterprise document management' or you can evaluate your needs and decide you don't *really* need all the top-end features and buy something cost-effective (to a Fortune 50 company, at least) like Domino.
> (those penguins will work cheap )
I'm Free, never cheap.
--Tux.
- A stable power grid (if it's not there, build a small one yourself)
- An oversupply of labor with high population growth (to keep that oversupply rolling)
- A sufficient percentage of English-speaking workers.
And a government not run by a guy known for his misgovernance. Which pretty much rules Zimbabwe out.
Notes is a nightmare like Emacs is a nightmare-- the interface's crap but those who know the rationale behind the interface (or can look beyond the not-so-pretty face) will discover a remarkably powerful scriptable workflow engine that incidentally is also an email client. I have personally razzed Notes before (I used it for my email for 6+ years and had to end up learning how to program it to make it bearable) but in the end I do appreciate the amount of flexibility the environment gives you. Add to that the number of good ideas Notes pioneered in the early 80s, and it's no wonder a lot of Notes folk end up like Lisp programmers, muttering 'heh, we did it first' whenever any workflow/unstructured-data 'innovation' is announced.
Back on topic, it's common knowledge among the Notes community that Ozzie was responsible for the Notes engine and backend, not the interface (that was Lotus standards, and later IBM's) -- given that I think he deserves a lot more credit than you give him.
15.8 billion euros, and a workforce of 60.000 (before the projected "synergy benefits", that will cut costs 1,5 billions
/.
Whoa. I don't think I've ever seen such screwed-up number formatting on
Dear submitters, since the editors will obviously not fix such obvious errors, do take a look at number formatting on Wikipedia and number accordingly (hint: Slashdot is published in English from a 'Dot Country'.)
Heh. He already had a chair thrown in his honor -- photo (That's the IE team lead Dean Hachamovitch doing the honors).
Microsoft had to re-engineer Internet Explorer to stop a technology known as ActiveX automatically starting when users visit some websites.
Huh? Flash would be out of business then. What the post-Eolas IE actually does is prevents the user from interacting with the ActiveX control until 'activated' with a click. (The control's running fine meanwhile, which means it can also be a security risk.) Also, this applies to controls put on pages with an honest-to-gosh [object] tag. If you write your [object] tag dynamically, say via Javascript, users can interact with your object without activating it first.
Not a major problem out on the Internet, but many Corporates have internal web apps where this patch is going to screw things up royally.
IIRC, the workaround is to make sure your [object] tag is written out using (Java|VB)script. If you visit macromedia.com they use this technique and have a tutorial about it written up. And to be fair, MSDN's been letting developers know about this for ages.
So your minister of culture is (to put it crudely) a fanboy. Does that mean every minister in the world has to be?
Also, LOL at the poster who compared RMS to Ghandi. RMS isn't even close. Ghandi didn't get famous for wearing weird clothes, if he did _just_ that we'd remember him today as the half-naked Indian fakir Churchill described him to be. Ghandi went to jail, was beat up by the police, went on hungerstrikes-- *that's* why we remember him, despite his choice in clothes and his habit of sleeping naked with his niece.
I'll always remember RMS as the guy who went around saying "accept a substandard 70s-era OS and toolchain! because it's Free!". There's a reason real innovators like Bill Joy and James Gosling (who've been there and done that) detest him.
RMS seriously needs to get that going around like a disheveled lunatic works well if you're fighting for your country's freedom (or you're a rock star). Just because some Gnufanatics treat him like one doesn't mean he'll get treated the same way by everyone in the real world.
I know UK companies that have set up offshore centres in Eastern Europe and India and fired staff in the UK. Maybe the reason given was that market realities forced to set up shop elsewhere?
> Out-sourcing to workers outside your country is a betrayal.
[This is not specifically directed to the parent, it applies to all of you.]
If you are able to eat 100% american food, wear 100% american clothes, use 100% american consumer electronics, use 100% american software -- then I'll concede you the moral high ground of calling outsourcers 'betrayers'. In the meantime, if you're like the rest of us, your Intel processor is being fabbed in Malaysia (I've no idea where AMD fabs), your iPod in Taiwan; your clothes probably come from Chinese or South Asian sweatshops and your food comes from all over the world. And there's an increasing chance you drive a foreign car.
Every day you commit several betrayals against good, decent American jobs. Why would you expect the public to feel any special sympathy for tech support workers when you didn't support the farmers, autoworkers and shoe-manufactureres who suffered before you?
Training your replacement is standard operating procedure for many jobs. If you don't like it, the time to argue about it is when your work contract is being signed. The fact that the replacements are Indians is a red herring here -- it'd be the same if the jobs were being moved to the Appalachians.
Once upon a time autoworkers and shipbuilders were considered high-skill workers. Hell, look back far enough (1800s) and button-manufacturing was high tech. The commoditization of IT is happening faster than the commoditization of these old-line businesses. So we should get out of the notion that 'internal tech support' is somehow a 'high tech' job that requires local presence all the time. Yeah, a portion of tech support jobs will remain local (until the smart robots take over, heh) but most of the jobs will go to where the cheap smarts are.
> I think Microsoft is missing a serious opportunity here. It's called branching.
I run into this misconception a lot. The reality is, a very small fraction of total users want to stick with their 8-year-old operating systems/computers and yet want new stuff for it. Out of that, the fraction that'll actually pay for support of their old software, or backports to their old OS, is small. So your 'opportunity' hinges on a fraction of a fraction. Microsoft is in the business of selling mass-market software and it's just not economical for them to do it.*
A good analogy would be like ready-to-wear clothes. Microsoft's like Tommy Hilfiger. Linux (the kernel devs), Gnu and the MoFo are like wholesalers who sell cloth by the yard. Some OSS vendors use them to create their own-brand shirts (Redhat, SuSE) and sell it for cheaper than Microsoft (although Red Hat Enterprise Linux is pricey, yow). And the shop that's supporting old versions of Linux/Firefox/etc is like a tailor who makes a custom-made suit for you -- he does good business but Hilfiger makes lots more $$$ than he does.
* That said, I understand that Vista Home Basic and Vista Starter are designed to run well on low-end PCs (no Aero, etc). So people reluctant to upgrade their hardware will have a software upgrade path.
> I live in the US and I love soccer(football), people ask why haven't we really adopted soccer as widely as the rest of the world did
I think it's the 2x45 minute playtimes. Makes it hard on TV companies to promote (less time for ads) and requires a lot of stamina for a casual player.
If you tune into any channel in the UK, or indeed any of their innumerable tabloids, it's "football" all the way. I don't know *who* uses the word 'soccer' in Britain, but America-returned Brits would come to mind.
From what I understand a lot of children are taught spelling phonetically these days ('phonics' is some sort of new English-teaching fad) and it's no surprise a lot of them spell as pronounced (your/you're, shoe-in/shoo-in, straight-laced/strait-laced etc).
> The question is: if we all really are such anti-social techno creeps, why haven't we done that already?
Jail time?
Yeah, just like Hitler and Idi Amin prove Homo Sapiens to be an inherently monstrous species. Not. Cherry-pick your samples and you can make _anything_ look bad.