I lived in the shadow of refineries for years and, yes, we had HUGE explosions and fires every so often, to say nothing of the massive piles of soot that would get blown all over creation. Sixty miles south is the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Not a single problem since it was built, except for a little more plankton in the water due to the warm current coming off it -- and the heat-exchange system isolates the sea water from the internal coolant, so we're not flushing radiation into the ocean, contrary to popular belief behind the glowing waves. It's bioluminescence, not radioactivity -- bioluminescence that would be the first to go with the slightest hint of radioactive material from SONGS, BTW.
OTOH, coal combustion releases more radioactive material than nuclear fission, discuss:
Tell that to Bernard Goetz who got off on attempted murder but got slapped with 250 days in jail for his illegal handgun and a FORTY-THREE MILLION DOLLAR judgment in the civil suit that followed for the kid he paralyzed over five bucks.
Worth it? You may think the law is fscked up, but those remain the stakes.
"o/~ You gotta know when told hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run... o/~"
Man, I live in Washington, DC. Statistically, this is one friggen lethal city. I've been at gunpoint before, in Los Angeles, and believe me I offered that dude everything including a BMW. With the barrel of Glock at my temple, sitting down, fsck yeah, I'm going to play nice. Hey, my life or my car? Take the car. Incidentally, he walked with the $25 I had in my wallet. Didn't even take the leather jacket or watch I offered him -- not even the wallet itself -- let alone the BMW. So it came down to that. TWENTY-FIVE BUCKS. So, the risk of a stolen car wasn't worth it to him, so murder DEFINITELY wasn't on his agenda. Had I pulled a gun, it quickly would have made it to the #1 spot.
I don't live in fear, I just make value judgements when threatened. Is chancing if I'm going to get shot, stabbed or beaten worth it over anything I could be carrying on me? Hardly. If the threat really is against my life, sure, but if it's 99.9% against my stuff? Please, I'd rather duke it out with the insurance carrier. That's not fear. That's just good sense. No, I don't go flinging my wallet at everyone who walks up to me, but if there really is a question of whether I'm going to get into a violent scenario, it's just not worth it.
Most petty criminals will make the same judgement. If they get caught with your stuff, they're risking a few months jail time, or maybe a few years. If they get caught with your stuff having maimed or killed you, they'll go to prison never to return or (in the U.S.) probably fry for it. The fact is, there is very little robbery-murder. Look at the FBI uniform crime reports to see the numbers on how many robberies actually result in murder. It's practically zero. Most result in no physical harm or a rough-up. RARELY is your LIFE actually at risk, unless you level the playing field where your attacker thinks THEIR life is in jeopardy -- and you better be damned sure there isn't someone on point ready to ice your ass if you're going to use lethal force. Pulling a gun is an excellent way to convince a robber that killing you is in their best interest. You simply stand a MUCH better chance of coming out unscathed by just handing over your stuff. It just isn't a gamble in which raising the stakes is a good strategy. Ask ANY policeman and that is exactly what they will tell you.
All that said, yeah, I've seriously considered moving to Canada -- hell, just about anywhere in the commonwealth... you know, "civilization."
If your life really is in danger of being ended, fine, that's justifiable manslaughter. They're going to kill you, so you kill them. A-Okay. They stole your iPod so you shot 'em in the back? Not bueno, muchacho.
Thank you for the best response yet to those who think that:
A) All computer science degree holders are [good] programmers B) All [good] programmers are CS degree holders C) Anyone bereft of a CS degree could not possibly be a [good] programmer.
A Bachelor's in CS generally gives you two years of liberal arts and only one year of applications programming (at best). A large number of CS departments heavily load the degree (often 50% or more) with higher math, of which the vast majority of programmers will use about 5%. IMHO, it's a bit silly to educate your entry-level programmers on a par with your physicists. But, that's the difference between computer science and mere mortal programming -- and largely why you have CS graduates who haven't the foggiest how to apply much of anything.
Seriously, no matter how depraved the criminal, it comes off as equally as depraved to value your iPod more than a human life -- after all, isn't that what you're ostensibly defending against -- someone who values your iPod more than YOUR life? If it really was your life they were after, that's an even trade, but clearly, what they're after is your stuff, not your life, so taking a life in order to protect your gizmo is the same trade the criminal is making.
Get insurance, take reasonable precautions (like, maybe, don't carry around $6,500 in electro-goodies at 3:30AM in Brixton) and when someone tries to mug you, look at it as an upgrade opportunity. That's what insurance is for and it's cheaper than the lawyer it will take to keep you out of pound-me-in-the-ass-prison when the muggers family sues you for manslaughter.
At the end of the day there's a simple equation: carry around only what you are willing to lose either by accident or by force -- essentially, nothing worth more than you'd be comfortable carrying in your wallet. If it's insured, assume you're carrying your deductible, so $10,000 in stuff is like $500 in cash. When it comes down to $500 or a human life, you'd have to be an absolute barbarian to kill for it.
...my point was more to the effect that some of the greatest minds in the world were and are everywhere on the continuum from so-called "normal" to outright psychotic. The flip side of this argument is that if we "correct" everyone, you will potentially be losing people like Mozart (a manic-depressive alcoholic), Tesla (borderline psychotic), John Nash ("A beautiful mind"), nearly all religious prophets ("Divine Madness" anyone?) etc.
I think the part you miss is that the crazy guy babbling on the street occasionally IS (or was) one of the Einsteins of the world. Sometimes madness is the price the individual, not society, pays for "enlightment..."
Pardon, but the BSOD DOES exist in XP. I get BSODed once every couple months on my XP laptop, which coincidentally runs Linux just fine and has NEVER frozen, spontaneously reset or failed to shutdown or restart completely when ordered to. "Shutdown" on XP routinely means coming back an hour later and find the battery has been drained while windows idles on some "I can't close the calculator" or some other such nonsense. I prefer an OS where "Shutdown NOW" means NOW, not "when you get around to it after I hit fifteen sequential confirmations, ctl-alt-delete to forcibly end the tasks you can't be bothered to kill, usually having to kill them five or six times before you get the hint, and then still have the possibility I'll have to just cut the power because something still hasn't terminated correctly."
You know, if I hadn't been dealing with these problems in Microsoft products for TWENTY YEARS, I might think I was being a bit irrationally harsh. But no, when there are many, many choices out there now that do not involve these problems, it's inexcusable to have to put up with them.
There was a period of time some years ago when I felt alone. I would become manic and pore over a stack of books four feet high in a week. I'd drink to excess and chain smoke. I would become hostile to those I lived with at the drop of a hat and confide in complete strangers with my deepest thoughts. I couldn't go ten minutes without thinking about sex. I sometimes would stay awake for several days and find my appetite waning to almost nil. I'd suffer debilitating anxiety followed by periods of irrational overconfidence.
Of course, I was a college student crammed into a prison cell of a room with four other people, eating a terrible cafeteria diet while working and studying full time and thus getting about four hours sleep. Basically, I was rather a typical case for the environment.
This is the danger with any psych evaluation --- EVERYONE is to some degree paranoid, schizotypal, manic, depressive, whatever. That's the rub with any prognosis -- it is a prediction fraught with chance, conjecture and flat out guesswork. The danger is in misdiagnosing someone who is quite literally driving themselves crazy, but simply needs a little behavior modification (read: get some sleep, eat a decent diet, exercise a little, and most of all RELAX a little), not a mountain of pills.
There are plenty of people who are in serious trouble for whom clinical treatment is absolutely warranted, but it's disturbing to see people rush to hand out the meds everytime someone behaves irrationally.
Scotchlite makes for great front-projections, but it is decidedly not new--it has been around since the fifties. I had rolls and rolls of this material in my personal photo setup when I was eighteen (I'm now in my thirties) and was doing front projections all the time. The fact that they highlight the "high-tech" material and imply that it somehow is their idea is just sad.
I would be impressed if they pulled this off using fabric with embedded OLEDs and CMOS image sensors. This, however, is nothing more than a kid's haunted house trick. It's pathetic that they are acting like they've accomplished something significant.
No, I do see a difference. I just saw much more evidence that this was a personal battle where there was more blatant evidence of petty malice behind the accusation than evidence of what was being accused.
As for being a shill, no, I like JBoss, but in production environments, although I *would* use it, I've been forced to work with shoddy products costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars that are complete crap *cough*iPlanet*cough*. There are other options out there and I'm by no means a campaigner for JBoss and I certainly have ZERO professional affiliation with them. I just think the guy raising all this hell is out more to exact a personal vendetta for something totally unrelated to his accusations, which is every bit as unethical (actually, I find it worse becasue it is so petty) as what he's trumpeting around about.
Seriously, anyone who has ever worked a commercial sales or support line has had to pretend that their product is just the bestest thing ever even if they thought it was complete crap. Really, so what if employees at any level are going out and saying the same thing? JBoss can't afford the kind of marketing that is behind Websphere or SunOne. Can you really blame them for using other avenues to toot their own horns?
IMHO, all the shit this guy is tossing around about them is a hell of a lot more reprehensible than anything he's accused them of...
It looks more like the parent poster is just pissed off that the guys/gals of JBoss have different opinions. None of the referenced posts appeared to be FUD or PR. Every post I saw in that thread was what I would expect the personal opinions of those individuals to be. What, if you participate in business, you must at all times put your professional reputation -- and that of your entire corporation -- on the line? Bull.
I almost never post 'anonymously,' however, I put a pretty hefty distance between my online postings and my actual professional life. In fact, in many cases, my personal opinions have been restrained by contract. I can't post "I, an employee of XYZ organization involved in ABC project feel this way." That's what corporate PR departments are for and it is such standard practice to curtail officila public comments--for good reasons--that it smacks as pretty ignorant to start whining that someone isn't slapping their corporate logo on every utterance.
JBoss is a solid product and their licensing and revenue models are downright charitable. The posts addressing those issues were absolutely on the mark and perfectly justifiable. So there was some petty personal squabble. Big deal. Someone doesn't like you. Wah. This whole conspiracy theory comes off as pretty fscking childish in that context.
They want to make money AND give something away and you don't like that for some reason.
It also prevents someone from passing as the person whose passport they've stolen. As someone who has had a passport stolen, anything that makes it more difficult, hopefully impossible, for someone to use my passport is a welcome advance, not least because it makes it less attractive to steal it in the first place as it would effectively be worthless to anyone that can't match the biometrics. As it stands now, it's basically a crisp $500 bill.
Perfect? No. Better than the current standard? By a long shot.
Having been a case manager for a gaggle of social workers dealing with indigents for many years, suffice it to say, my experience differs from your speculation.
It's observably clearer (and hence, possibly, although not necessarily, cleaner) than it was twenty years ago. LA's air is generally pristine now compared to how disgusting it was in 1984. This has been seen in numerous big cities. Ever see pictures of Chicago and New York in the 1930's? YIKES. Now THAT'S pollution.
Unfortunately, it's a democracy. In a democracy, millions of idiots and their legislative representatives can decide to do really, really stupid things. If this was a dictatorship, we could sit back and bitch about all the evil thinsg our glorious leader has done to us. It's not (despite all evidence to the contrary), so we now must sit back and think, fuck, we let this happen. In fact, we, through our elected representatives, actually voted explicitly to authorize this. So, it's not that we merely allowed this to happen, we actually, in effect, asked for this to happen. Mercifully, some of our illustrious representatives are doing public and private mea culpas over this and hopefully we can roll it back...eventually.
The problem is making sure people don't BECOME homeless. We're trying to "fix" the homeless instead of preventing people from _becoming_ homeless. The problem with American social insurance is that if you lose your corporate job, unless you have children or are EXTREMELY disabled, you are completely S.O.L. This isn't off-topic at all. It is part of the stress of the American corporate culture where you a scared to death of losing your health insurance and over the weekend becoming completely indigent. Part of the originial poster's concerns were very much to do with the social structure of Canada, which is very similar to that of, among other places, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Sweden, Iceland, Norway... etc. etc. You'll see more homeless in two blocks walking through D.C. than you will walking across the whole of western/nothern Europe. That's as good a reason as any to choose a place to live and work, IMO.
Perhaps someone should tell all the murderers, rapists and drug users, 'cause I haven't seem 'em. You'd be more likely to find the drug users at Denny's... and you'll find more of the other two in the legislature than on the beach.
But if you are someone who is tired of the U.S. -- not tired of corporate life -- then it is perfectly advisable to get out of Dodge.
There are plenty who just can't seem to fathom how anyone would tire of the US. Generally, though, those people haven't been anywhere else or they've just come from somewhere so god forsaken that the U.S. seems like heaven by comparison. If you've ever been down-and-out, the US can be a pretty vicious place and the evidence of that can get pretty damned tiring when you're not and when you've lived places where homelessness and destitute indigence just don't exist--especially when you realize that the social cost of eliminating those scourges is practically nil AND that the US per capita budget so far exceeds the places that have dealt with those issues that there is no excuse for the amount of social darwinism you experience here.
That said, a person can tire of any place. Switzerland has few if any of these problems, yet , for instance, Aldous Huxley repeatedly referred to it as a dark, stifling and painful place to live. The point is, it isn't a sign of some sort of personal failure that you feel like living elsewhere. If you feel like leaving, leave and be happy that you had the resources to do so rather than feeling trapped in a place you can't stand anymore.
...when you've been using them for 25 years, you tend to accumulate them and it hardly takes a sizable income to do so. Some people spend their paper-route money on basball cards and comicbooks, I spend mine on computers. For that matter, some people have furniture...and children...and pets... But really, you can buy a retail machine for around $250. That's around ten bucks per month if you buy one every other year.
Those who don't live in Southern California (I no longer do, but did for 25 years), have pictures of what it was about, oh, 20 years ago. You could walk or fish at night on just about every beach. Now, in order to protect you, you can't be on the beach after 10:00 at night beacuse only murderers, rapists and drug users do that sort of thing.
There's a place for managing public spaces to ensure they are not destroyed. If in the process you end up preventing the public from enjoying those spaces, though, you might as well sell it off to the highest bidder and wrap it in chain link.
That said, I'm all for any sort of emergency response system that would identify me only as a person in need and only when either I conciously activate it or after some period of time that *I* have determined should elapse before calling the cavalry. Anything beyond that adds unnecessary and potentially unreliable complexity, not to mention some serious privacy concerns in an environment that most people go to in order to get away from exactly that sort of intrusion.
Because I have to use various Windows software in order to makea living, what I find myself doing is using SSH+XForwarding into my Linux machines, thus mooting the argument.
With Wine or VMWare or whatever, I take a pretty huge performance hit and have no guarantees that anything will actually work. By pulling my Linux apps onto my Windows desktop via X-Forwarding, I end up with a VERY powerful desktop where EVERYTHING works. I thus have ZERO use for any Windows binaries mucking up my Linux machines.
There seems to be a common thread here that if you didn't do a degree in math, not only are you "just a code monkey" but you're also not a "well-rounded" individual and you're clearly not using your brain.
Suffice it to say, there are those with other-than-cs degrees out there that must program as a function of their fields on a daily basis. NO, they're not computer scientists, but it's pretty fscking arrogant to imply that anyone programming a computer that doesn't have a paltry Bachelor's in CS (whoopee) is somehow an undermench incapable of abstract thought.
Get over yourselves...
Re:Tell that to the average person...
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They are saying "it doesn't really matter if it is 'actual' or 'simulated' to someone who is only spending a hundred bucks." If I take a 640x480 file in Photoshop and blow it up to a 6400x4800 file, it is effectively 6400x4800, but it is of no higher quality than the original 640x480. I don't _know_ what they define "optimised" as, but it bears questioning as NONE of their professional products make that claim and those are marketed toward those for whom it DOES matter.
Re:Tell that to the average person...
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The highest end Epson printers, the Stylus Pro 4000, 9600 and 10600, max out at 2880x1440 -- and the cheapest of that bunch (the SP4000) is $1800. Keep in mind that for their consumer-grade they may be giving interpolated figures. When dpi has ANY adjectives next to it (in this case "optimized") you know you're being fed bullshit. It might be a "little white lie," but they're at best stretching the truth and at worst they're full of shit.
The top of the Epson line does not exceed 2880dpi. If their hardware really could produce 5760, you bet your ass the $10,000 production equipment would do it -- and prominently advertise the fact. It's like the rest of this topic. A camera can advertise xMegapixels and output complete crap because it's interpolating, compressing and using all-around shitty components. Quite simply, you get what you pay for. That said, have a look at the 2880dpi output from the SP4000, SP9660 and SP10600 (1440dpi on the last). FSCKING INCREDIBLE... and don't knock 1440dpi--when it's four feet wide.
Slashdot Mirror
I lived in the shadow of refineries for years and, yes, we had HUGE explosions and fires every so often, to say nothing of the massive piles of soot that would get blown all over creation. Sixty miles south is the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. Not a single problem since it was built, except for a little more plankton in the water due to the warm current coming off it -- and the heat-exchange system isolates the sea water from the internal coolant, so we're not flushing radiation into the ocean, contrary to popular belief behind the glowing waves. It's bioluminescence, not radioactivity -- bioluminescence that would be the first to go with the slightest hint of radioactive material from SONGS, BTW.
x t/ colmain.html
OTOH, coal combustion releases more radioactive material than nuclear fission, discuss:
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/te
Tell that to Bernard Goetz who got off on attempted murder but got slapped with 250 days in jail for his illegal handgun and a FORTY-THREE MILLION DOLLAR judgment in the civil suit that followed for the kid he paralyzed over five bucks.
Worth it? You may think the law is fscked up, but those remain the stakes.
"o/~ You gotta know when told hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run... o/~"
Man, I live in Washington, DC. Statistically, this is one friggen lethal city. I've been at gunpoint before, in Los Angeles, and believe me I offered that dude everything including a BMW. With the barrel of Glock at my temple, sitting down, fsck yeah, I'm going to play nice. Hey, my life or my car? Take the car. Incidentally, he walked with the $25 I had in my wallet. Didn't even take the leather jacket or watch I offered him -- not even the wallet itself -- let alone the BMW. So it came down to that. TWENTY-FIVE BUCKS. So, the risk of a stolen car wasn't worth it to him, so murder DEFINITELY wasn't on his agenda. Had I pulled a gun, it quickly would have made it to the #1 spot.
I don't live in fear, I just make value judgements when threatened. Is chancing if I'm going to get shot, stabbed or beaten worth it over anything I could be carrying on me? Hardly. If the threat really is against my life, sure, but if it's 99.9% against my stuff? Please, I'd rather duke it out with the insurance carrier. That's not fear. That's just good sense. No, I don't go flinging my wallet at everyone who walks up to me, but if there really is a question of whether I'm going to get into a violent scenario, it's just not worth it.
Most petty criminals will make the same judgement. If they get caught with your stuff, they're risking a few months jail time, or maybe a few years. If they get caught with your stuff having maimed or killed you, they'll go to prison never to return or (in the U.S.) probably fry for it. The fact is, there is very little robbery-murder. Look at the FBI uniform crime reports to see the numbers on how many robberies actually result in murder. It's practically zero. Most result in no physical harm or a rough-up. RARELY is your LIFE actually at risk, unless you level the playing field where your attacker thinks THEIR life is in jeopardy -- and you better be damned sure there isn't someone on point ready to ice your ass if you're going to use lethal force. Pulling a gun is an excellent way to convince a robber that killing you is in their best interest. You simply stand a MUCH better chance of coming out unscathed by just handing over your stuff. It just isn't a gamble in which raising the stakes is a good strategy. Ask ANY policeman and that is exactly what they will tell you.
All that said, yeah, I've seriously considered moving to Canada -- hell, just about anywhere in the commonwealth... you know, "civilization."
If your life really is in danger of being ended, fine, that's justifiable manslaughter. They're going to kill you, so you kill them. A-Okay. They stole your iPod so you shot 'em in the back? Not bueno, muchacho.
Thank you for the best response yet to those who think that:
A) All computer science degree holders are [good] programmers
B) All [good] programmers are CS degree holders
C) Anyone bereft of a CS degree could not possibly be a [good] programmer.
A Bachelor's in CS generally gives you two years of liberal arts and only one year of applications programming (at best). A large number of CS departments heavily load the degree (often 50% or more) with higher math, of which the vast majority of programmers will use about 5%. IMHO, it's a bit silly to educate your entry-level programmers on a par with your physicists. But, that's the difference between computer science and mere mortal programming -- and largely why you have CS graduates who haven't the foggiest how to apply much of anything.
1) Backup your data
2) Get Insurance
3) Profit!
Seriously, no matter how depraved the criminal, it comes off as equally as depraved to value your iPod more than a human life -- after all, isn't that what you're ostensibly defending against -- someone who values your iPod more than YOUR life? If it really was your life they were after, that's an even trade, but clearly, what they're after is your stuff, not your life, so taking a life in order to protect your gizmo is the same trade the criminal is making.
Get insurance, take reasonable precautions (like, maybe, don't carry around $6,500 in electro-goodies at 3:30AM in Brixton) and when someone tries to mug you, look at it as an upgrade opportunity. That's what insurance is for and it's cheaper than the lawyer it will take to keep you out of pound-me-in-the-ass-prison when the muggers family sues you for manslaughter.
At the end of the day there's a simple equation: carry around only what you are willing to lose either by accident or by force -- essentially, nothing worth more than you'd be comfortable carrying in your wallet. If it's insured, assume you're carrying your deductible, so $10,000 in stuff is like $500 in cash. When it comes down to $500 or a human life, you'd have to be an absolute barbarian to kill for it.
...my point was more to the effect that some of the greatest minds in the world were and are everywhere on the continuum from so-called "normal" to outright psychotic. The flip side of this argument is that if we "correct" everyone, you will potentially be losing people like Mozart (a manic-depressive alcoholic), Tesla (borderline psychotic), John Nash ("A beautiful mind"), nearly all religious prophets ("Divine Madness" anyone?) etc.
I think the part you miss is that the crazy guy babbling on the street occasionally IS (or was) one of the Einsteins of the world. Sometimes madness is the price the individual, not society, pays for "enlightment..."
Pardon, but the BSOD DOES exist in XP. I get BSODed once every couple months on my XP laptop, which coincidentally runs Linux just fine and has NEVER frozen, spontaneously reset or failed to shutdown or restart completely when ordered to. "Shutdown" on XP routinely means coming back an hour later and find the battery has been drained while windows idles on some "I can't close the calculator" or some other such nonsense. I prefer an OS where "Shutdown NOW" means NOW, not "when you get around to it after I hit fifteen sequential confirmations, ctl-alt-delete to forcibly end the tasks you can't be bothered to kill, usually having to kill them five or six times before you get the hint, and then still have the possibility I'll have to just cut the power because something still hasn't terminated correctly."
You know, if I hadn't been dealing with these problems in Microsoft products for TWENTY YEARS, I might think I was being a bit irrationally harsh. But no, when there are many, many choices out there now that do not involve these problems, it's inexcusable to have to put up with them.
There was a period of time some years ago when I felt alone. I would become manic and pore over a stack of books four feet high in a week. I'd drink to excess and chain smoke. I would become hostile to those I lived with at the drop of a hat and confide in complete strangers with my deepest thoughts. I couldn't go ten minutes without thinking about sex. I sometimes would stay awake for several days and find my appetite waning to almost nil. I'd suffer debilitating anxiety followed by periods of irrational overconfidence.
Of course, I was a college student crammed into a prison cell of a room with four other people, eating a terrible cafeteria diet while working and studying full time and thus getting about four hours sleep. Basically, I was rather a typical case for the environment.
This is the danger with any psych evaluation --- EVERYONE is to some degree paranoid, schizotypal, manic, depressive, whatever. That's the rub with any prognosis -- it is a prediction fraught with chance, conjecture and flat out guesswork. The danger is in misdiagnosing someone who is quite literally driving themselves crazy, but simply needs a little behavior modification (read: get some sleep, eat a decent diet, exercise a little, and most of all RELAX a little), not a mountain of pills.
There are plenty of people who are in serious trouble for whom clinical treatment is absolutely warranted, but it's disturbing to see people rush to hand out the meds everytime someone behaves irrationally.
http://projects.star.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/MEDI A/xv/oc.html
Scotchlite makes for great front-projections, but it is decidedly not new--it has been around since the fifties. I had rolls and rolls of this material in my personal photo setup when I was eighteen (I'm now in my thirties) and was doing front projections all the time. The fact that they highlight the "high-tech" material and imply that it somehow is their idea is just sad.
I would be impressed if they pulled this off using fabric with embedded OLEDs and CMOS image sensors. This, however, is nothing more than a kid's haunted house trick. It's pathetic that they are acting like they've accomplished something significant.
No, I do see a difference. I just saw much more evidence that this was a personal battle where there was more blatant evidence of petty malice behind the accusation than evidence of what was being accused.
As for being a shill, no, I like JBoss, but in production environments, although I *would* use it, I've been forced to work with shoddy products costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars that are complete crap *cough*iPlanet*cough*. There are other options out there and I'm by no means a campaigner for JBoss and I certainly have ZERO professional affiliation with them. I just think the guy raising all this hell is out more to exact a personal vendetta for something totally unrelated to his accusations, which is every bit as unethical (actually, I find it worse becasue it is so petty) as what he's trumpeting around about.
Seriously, anyone who has ever worked a commercial sales or support line has had to pretend that their product is just the bestest thing ever even if they thought it was complete crap. Really, so what if employees at any level are going out and saying the same thing? JBoss can't afford the kind of marketing that is behind Websphere or SunOne. Can you really blame them for using other avenues to toot their own horns?
IMHO, all the shit this guy is tossing around about them is a hell of a lot more reprehensible than anything he's accused them of...
It looks more like the parent poster is just pissed off that the guys/gals of JBoss have different opinions. None of the referenced posts appeared to be FUD or PR. Every post I saw in that thread was what I would expect the personal opinions of those individuals to be. What, if you participate in business, you must at all times put your professional reputation -- and that of your entire corporation -- on the line? Bull.
I almost never post 'anonymously,' however, I put a pretty hefty distance between my online postings and my actual professional life. In fact, in many cases, my personal opinions have been restrained by contract. I can't post "I, an employee of XYZ organization involved in ABC project feel this way." That's what corporate PR departments are for and it is such standard practice to curtail officila public comments--for good reasons--that it smacks as pretty ignorant to start whining that someone isn't slapping their corporate logo on every utterance.
JBoss is a solid product and their licensing and revenue models are downright charitable. The posts addressing those issues were absolutely on the mark and perfectly justifiable. So there was some petty personal squabble. Big deal. Someone doesn't like you. Wah. This whole conspiracy theory comes off as pretty fscking childish in that context.
They want to make money AND give something away and you don't like that for some reason.
Get over it.
It also prevents someone from passing as the person whose passport they've stolen. As someone who has had a passport stolen, anything that makes it more difficult, hopefully impossible, for someone to use my passport is a welcome advance, not least because it makes it less attractive to steal it in the first place as it would effectively be worthless to anyone that can't match the biometrics. As it stands now, it's basically a crisp $500 bill.
Perfect? No. Better than the current standard? By a long shot.
Having been a case manager for a gaggle of social workers dealing with indigents for many years, suffice it to say, my experience differs from your speculation.
It's observably clearer (and hence, possibly, although not necessarily, cleaner) than it was twenty years ago. LA's air is generally pristine now compared to how disgusting it was in 1984. This has been seen in numerous big cities. Ever see pictures of Chicago and New York in the 1930's? YIKES. Now THAT'S pollution.
Unfortunately, it's a democracy. In a democracy, millions of idiots and their legislative representatives can decide to do really, really stupid things. If this was a dictatorship, we could sit back and bitch about all the evil thinsg our glorious leader has done to us. It's not (despite all evidence to the contrary), so we now must sit back and think, fuck, we let this happen. In fact, we, through our elected representatives, actually voted explicitly to authorize this. So, it's not that we merely allowed this to happen, we actually, in effect, asked for this to happen. Mercifully, some of our illustrious representatives are doing public and private mea culpas over this and hopefully we can roll it back...eventually.
Sigh.
Off the mark.
Ever been to Northern Europe?
The problem is making sure people don't BECOME homeless. We're trying to "fix" the homeless instead of preventing people from _becoming_ homeless. The problem with American social insurance is that if you lose your corporate job, unless you have children or are EXTREMELY disabled, you are completely S.O.L. This isn't off-topic at all. It is part of the stress of the American corporate culture where you a scared to death of losing your health insurance and over the weekend becoming completely indigent. Part of the originial poster's concerns were very much to do with the social structure of Canada, which is very similar to that of, among other places, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Sweden, Iceland, Norway... etc. etc. You'll see more homeless in two blocks walking through D.C. than you will walking across the whole of western/nothern Europe. That's as good a reason as any to choose a place to live and work, IMO.
Off topic my ass.
Perhaps someone should tell all the murderers, rapists and drug users, 'cause I haven't seem 'em. You'd be more likely to find the drug users at Denny's... and you'll find more of the other two in the legislature than on the beach.
But if you are someone who is tired of the U.S. -- not tired of corporate life -- then it is perfectly advisable to get out of Dodge.
There are plenty who just can't seem to fathom how anyone would tire of the US. Generally, though, those people haven't been anywhere else or they've just come from somewhere so god forsaken that the U.S. seems like heaven by comparison. If you've ever been down-and-out, the US can be a pretty vicious place and the evidence of that can get pretty damned tiring when you're not and when you've lived places where homelessness and destitute indigence just don't exist--especially when you realize that the social cost of eliminating those scourges is practically nil AND that the US per capita budget so far exceeds the places that have dealt with those issues that there is no excuse for the amount of social darwinism you experience here.
That said, a person can tire of any place. Switzerland has few if any of these problems, yet , for instance, Aldous Huxley repeatedly referred to it as a dark, stifling and painful place to live. The point is, it isn't a sign of some sort of personal failure that you feel like living elsewhere. If you feel like leaving, leave and be happy that you had the resources to do so rather than feeling trapped in a place you can't stand anymore.
...when you've been using them for 25 years, you tend to accumulate them and it hardly takes a sizable income to do so. Some people spend their paper-route money on basball cards and comicbooks, I spend mine on computers. For that matter, some people have furniture...and children...and pets... But really, you can buy a retail machine for around $250. That's around ten bucks per month if you buy one every other year.
Oh, the Croesian excess of it all...
Those who don't live in Southern California (I no longer do, but did for 25 years), have pictures of what it was about, oh, 20 years ago. You could walk or fish at night on just about every beach. Now, in order to protect you, you can't be on the beach after 10:00 at night beacuse only murderers, rapists and drug users do that sort of thing.
There's a place for managing public spaces to ensure they are not destroyed. If in the process you end up preventing the public from enjoying those spaces, though, you might as well sell it off to the highest bidder and wrap it in chain link.
That said, I'm all for any sort of emergency response system that would identify me only as a person in need and only when either I conciously activate it or after some period of time that *I* have determined should elapse before calling the cavalry. Anything beyond that adds unnecessary and potentially unreliable complexity, not to mention some serious privacy concerns in an environment that most people go to in order to get away from exactly that sort of intrusion.
Because I have to use various Windows software in order to makea living, what I find myself doing is using SSH+XForwarding into my Linux machines, thus mooting the argument.
With Wine or VMWare or whatever, I take a pretty huge performance hit and have no guarantees that anything will actually work. By pulling my Linux apps onto my Windows desktop via X-Forwarding, I end up with a VERY powerful desktop where EVERYTHING works. I thus have ZERO use for any Windows binaries mucking up my Linux machines.
There seems to be a common thread here that if you didn't do a degree in math, not only are you "just a code monkey" but you're also not a "well-rounded" individual and you're clearly not using your brain.
Suffice it to say, there are those with other-than-cs degrees out there that must program as a function of their fields on a daily basis. NO, they're not computer scientists, but it's pretty fscking arrogant to imply that anyone programming a computer that doesn't have a paltry Bachelor's in CS (whoopee) is somehow an undermench incapable of abstract thought.
Get over yourselves...
They are saying "it doesn't really matter if it is 'actual' or 'simulated' to someone who is only spending a hundred bucks." If I take a 640x480 file in Photoshop and blow it up to a 6400x4800 file, it is effectively 6400x4800, but it is of no higher quality than the original 640x480. I don't _know_ what they define "optimised" as, but it bears questioning as NONE of their professional products make that claim and those are marketed toward those for whom it DOES matter.
The highest end Epson printers, the Stylus Pro 4000, 9600 and 10600, max out at 2880x1440 -- and the cheapest of that bunch (the SP4000) is $1800. Keep in mind that for their consumer-grade they may be giving interpolated figures. When dpi has ANY adjectives next to it (in this case "optimized") you know you're being fed bullshit. It might be a "little white lie," but they're at best stretching the truth and at worst they're full of shit.
The top of the Epson line does not exceed 2880dpi. If their hardware really could produce 5760, you bet your ass the $10,000 production equipment would do it -- and prominently advertise the fact. It's like the rest of this topic. A camera can advertise xMegapixels and output complete crap because it's interpolating, compressing and using all-around shitty components. Quite simply, you get what you pay for. That said, have a look at the 2880dpi output from the SP4000, SP9660 and SP10600 (1440dpi on the last). FSCKING INCREDIBLE... and don't knock 1440dpi--when it's four feet wide.