Do you have any idea of how big that company is? In how many countries it's incorporated? And you want to blame all on one tiny part - if teh allegation turns out to be actually true?
Halliburton is a big company and operates in a lot of countries. Nonetheless, it is an US company owned by USians and led by USians. The company's decision-makers are USians. Having a subsidiary or a small office in some country or controlling some company which was bought off from some non-USian doesn't make it non-USian.
And by the way, for your information, just because the news doesn't coincide with your personal views or ruin your personal flavour of reality it doesn't mean that they should be conveniently labelled as false. Nonetheless, and keeping the topic of this discusion in mind, your actions towards unflattering news is very telling.
You're not terribly smart, are you?
Claiming that Halliburton isn't an US company just because it is big and operates in lots of of countries isn't exactly a demonstration of intelligence.
Does anyone else out there have the feeling that/. is increasingly an anti-American, leftist swamp, of no real importance to anyone?
Slashdot isn't "increasingly anti-US". It is, however, receiving more and more visits from non-USian readers who not only register but also comment on issues. As the US's foreign relations has been going down the crapper in the last decade or so and therefore becoming more and more isolated, it is expectable that the entire world expresses an opinion which doesn't coincide with the opinions of some americans.
And slashdot isn't "increasingly a leftist swamp". If you didn't noticed, there isn't any "left" on the US political scene at all. There is only the extreme far left, embodied by the US's republican party and the not so extreme far left, embodied by the US's democratic party. What elected US official publicly supports programs like housing or public transportation programs? Any republican? Any democrat? What about basic worker's rights like job protection or unemployment subsidy? Heck, the american political scene still believes that free and unencumbered access to healthcare services and treatments, supported by the state through american taxes, is some sort of "communist blasphemy". With a political scene so saturated with the right-wing way of thinking, naturally some americans see issues and opinions which don't toe the far-right line (the US's mainstream way of thinking) as "leftist" or even "communist".
And that jab at the supposed importance of slashdot, the only thing that it demonstrates is your attitude towards the opinions that aren't parallel to yours, along with those who express them. You are claiming that this blog is losing importance because you aren't being served with the mainstream points of view and opinions that you have been accustomed to. You are not being served with a string of homogeneous "OMG ME TOO!" followup comments. Instead, you are seeing an ever increasing amount of replies which defend different opinions. As you aren't being served with what you wish to read, which is your own personal point of view on things, then, instead of keeping an open mind or even trying to debate and expose your ideas based on reasoning, you prefer to simply ridicule those who do not share your personal set of values and views by labelling them with small, baseless offensive tags. And quite frankly, if someone isn't capable of dealing with differences of opinions then I do believe that the best they can do is keep out of activities which are based exactly on the exchanging of different opinions.
I feel your pain. Once I heard the news I darted onto Dell's Portugal site and when I search for "ubuntu" I get a "Sorry, No Results." To make matters worse, when I search for "Inspiron E1505n" on Dell's USA site I also get that "Sorry, No Results." message. So how come there are claims about Dell selling linux laptops and once we look for those products there is absolutely nothing there?
More to the point, and as this story indicates, apparently the companies who handle their employees as cattle are the U.S. ones. After all, as this case shows, it seems that IBM just fired hundreds of their employees with no good reason besides the rumour of the CEO doing it as some sort of whim.
But as the rich get richer, they drag the poor up with them. That's why someone in the US who we call "poor" is still one of the most wealthy and privileged human beings in the history of the world.
That's a pretty ignorant statement to make. Look at Russia, where billionaires are popping out like flowers in the spring. Nonetheless, the entire population is left in a worse position than they were in the pre-capitalist phase.
Really? Last time I checked, the schools discredit all such education. If you do not believe me, try to get anywhere in life without official certificates.
That is a very dumb statement to make. First of all, the reason why you don't "get anywhere" with your self taught bag of tricks is not because of any school discrediting it. There isn't a single school in the world who would spend a second of it's time to try to stop you from applying for a job based on your self taught bag of tricks. The reason why you do not "get anywhere" without any official certificates is that the people who you are trying to get a job from do not believe that your self-taught bag of tricks offers them any assurance. To put it in other words, you "don't get anywhere" because you do not offer any employer an assurance that you know how to do your job.
There are plenty of people on the world who are hired based on their "non-certified" expertise. They are hired because they demonstrate that they can do their job better than any competing professional, including "certified" professionals. Yet, no school is involved there too. Therefore there goes your conspiracy theory.
He should not be called upon his actions because, as you are well aware, generally, nobody gives a damn about what some dude says on his private Web page.
As you may understand, each and every legal action is taken by those who in fact "give a damn". With this legislation, if a Canadian school "gives a damn" about what a student is writing about it, whether it is about some fellow student or a teacher, then that school will be able to deal directly with the student.
If that is a gibberish of the type "my principal is a monkey", then one must be insane to take offence. If that is a libel: "my principal raped me", then we have courts for that. If that is a fair criticism: "my principal verbally abused students on many occasions", then... that is what they are after. They do not want students to behave like responsible adults.
Every school has the obligation to implement and maintain a healthy learning environment. As it is easy to see, if a student's actions are directly affecting the school's learning environment, whether those actions are targeted at teachers or fellow students, then the school should have the right to protect itself from it and the tools to use in that situation. If some smart ass student thinks that assaulting his colleagues, teachers or even school is a reasonable thing to do then why should any school tolerate it? Should a school simply "turn the other cheek" and accept that student with open arms eventhough he is continuously F'ing them up the A?
And as you stated, the school can also sue the bully or even setting up criminal charges. Yet, shouldn't it be simpler if the school could simply expell that student? There wouldn't be a lengthy and expensive court process and justice would be served. If the bully believes that the charges were unwarranted then he may sue. It's a win-win. On the other hand, as even you may understand, eventhough a school is suing a student, at the moment no one can stop that particular student from attending class or even from entering school grounds. What good will a expensive lawsuit do if the bullies could still freely do their own bidding with impunity?
Cyber-bullying is just another word they made up. What they are trying to control and eliminate is the free expression and the will to learn outside of the school.
It is unthinkable that any student will be prosecuted for learning outside of the school. In fact, that accusation is too retarded even to take into account. Do you really believe that setting up sites dedicated to accusing student A or teacher B of, for example, being gay is some sort of valuable learning experience? Do you really believe that the schoolboard would prosecute the student who created such a site not because of it's content but because the student learned HTML and/or CSS? Obviously not.
As it is easy to see, this move has nothing to do with "controlling the will to learn outside of the school". It's objective is to not let a few rotten students jeopardise the school climate. If a student dedicates his time to denigrate and smear the reputation of his fellow students and/or teachers, why shouldn't he be called upon his actions? Why would the school tolerate such destructive behaviour, pretend that there isn't anything wrong with it and carry on?
You talk about freedom of expression but you sure are forgetting that freedom of expression also involves accountability for your own actions. If a student spends his time trying to humiliate any of his peers or teachers he sure is asking to get himself into trouble. And he should be, too.
Good. Go take a look at the source code for Jabber. Isn't it nice how the default is to store your passwords in clear-text and leave them legible to anyone on the Jabber server? And to send them unencrypted over an open channel? And you as a client will never know or be able to tell if they're doing this?
Jabber is a protocol and not a piece of random software. Therefore, as it is easy to understand, directing someone to check out "jabber's source code" does not make any sense. As a consequence, all that fear-inflicting warning about possible security issues is very silly, to say the least. Moreover, security through SASL and TLS is present even in the core Jabber specifications and nowadays every decent Jabber client (Pidgin, Kopete, Psi, Adium X, Google Talk, etc etc etc...) supports encryption. So, as it easy to see, your fearmongering regarding the big bad wolf of unencrypted communication is completely groundless. Do you even have a clue of what is this thing called Jabber?
Are you really sure this is the standard you want to promote for remote communications?
Why yes. Yes, I do. It's an open protocol, it is very extensive, it has a solid support for secure connectivity and encryption and there are tons of great clients to use. If that wasn't enough, it not only supports text messaging but also VoIP. How do you beat that? You don't.
I also suspect that you don't spend much time on the IRC warez or cracker channels: rootkits installing IRC servers are still a major problem for a lot of us to deal with, and I've never seen this for jabber.
That is pretty much irrelevant to this discussion, isn't it?
We geeks can rattle our Open Standards flag all we want, but I think Jabber (and clients. and Google, of course) still has a long way to get Dick, Smith and Harry from sticking with what their friends use.
Long way? Not at all, at least to me. Let's ignore Google Talk for a moment. My ISP already offers a Jabber IM service and has been offering it for years. Granted, it isn't as popular as MS's messenger service but a lot of people do use it and I do mean a lot (more than IRC). It is also normal to find my ISP's jabber client present on library and school computers.
I live in an european country (Portugal) where the current government is planning on building two major transportation facilities, one being a new national airport (Ota airport) and the other being a high speed train that crosses the country and connects it to the rest of Europe's high speed train network (as France's TGV). Both projects are very expensive and at the moment there is an ongoing debate about them. Moreover, Portugal is not a rich country. Yet, both projects will not come even close at "bankrupting the country". What makes you believe that France's TGV network bankrupted them but a tiny, poor country like Portugal can support not only a high speed train but also a new national airport?
I tell you what. Ignorance, prejudice and stupidity.
I believe we already have that. It isn't underground but it pretty much works as you describe. In the transportation world it is called the personal transportation system, where things like cars, motorcycles and even taxis are included.
That's bullshit. In that article Phil Taylor states that the reason that DirectX 10 would not be made available to Windows XP and was exclusive to Vista was that XP was released on 2001 and the design of DirectX 10 was only solidified on late 2003. That is a very retarded statement to make.
According to the same article, Windows Vista, as we know it, was rebuilt from the ground up in 2004. That means that if DirectX 10 needed any special functionality to work then the Vista people had to rewrite Vista from the ground up with that in mind, which doesn't say much on it's own. On the other hand, XP's service pack 2 was released in 2004, which means that if XP really needed any special features to handle DirectX 10 that, since DirectX is being worked on from the time XP was first launched and the supposed target platform for which DirectX was built was scrapped, that there was absolutely no reason for Microsoft to not support DirectX on XP.
So, as it is easy to see, the only reason that DirectX is not supported in Windows XP is simply due to Microsoft's decision of not doing it. Microsoft does not want to support DirectX 10 on other OS besides Vista. Period. For crying out loud, it's a fucking API. A fucking interface to handle hardware. Who in their right mind claims that certain pieces of hardware can only work on Windows Vista and not on Windows XP?
Social services were tacked on as an after thought.
It may be in your country but there are quite a few countries in the world where social services, free and unencumbered services given to the people by the state, are even a big part of the country's constitution.
Screw that. A sub $200 laptop would be excellent. Period. I've bought a 1300 laptop a couple of years ago and and about 90% of the work I do with it is simply text editing, access email, jabber IM and browse the web, stuff that I can do very well with any used sub-100 PC from eBay (which I'm actually using at the moment). On the other hand, you can't even buy a used laptop in working order for less than 250. Not even the sub 800MHz oldies.
I, for one, would easily pay 200 for a laptop that could handle that type of work. It doesn't need to run half life or be "vista-ready". It just needs to have a wireless internet connection, have a decent battery life and handle basic work without any problem. I would be very happy if someone picked up the 100$ laptop, dropped the cheesy design in favor of something more sensible (thinkpad-ish?), sticked any random off-the-web linux distribution on it (*cof* Kubuntu *cof*) and sold it. Very happy.
Ubuntu will not be ready for any decent work while it still has bugs like the infamous overheating bug. I mean, I love Kubuntu and I adopted it as my main OS but seriously, it still suffers from a showstopping overheating bug which is almost 2 years old. I mean, what good is an OS for if it simply can't cope with any mildly CPU-intensive application (i.e., compiling, encoding sound files, running any 3D application, etc...) before hanging, crashing and endangering the hardware itself?
You haven't even read the article, have you? The gripe isn't about how the "closed" journals should be made available for free. The "closed" journals aren't even considered here. If you spent a few seconds skimming through the article you would realize that what is being demanded here is that the papers which are produced by public research institutions, papers which are funded by public money, should be made freely available and that their access should not be restricted and much less the exclusive property of private publishers. Do you understand your miss-interpretation here? No one is demanding that the private publishers offer their publications for free. The demand is that papers written by public research institutions should be made available to the general public as soon as they are made available to those private publishers.
Of course the private publishers are against it. Until now they had the monopoly and complete control on scientific publications and their content's distribution. As soon as the gross of it's content can be made available to the general public they start to get forced out of the loop. Heck, as soon as someone creates a central public repository of scientific publications where anyone and everyone can access, which will reinforce the peer-review process (which is naturally hindered by the way the old style scientific publications work), the publishers, as they currently are, will become totally irrelevant.
You don't even have to have any software install. You can simply subscribe to the recent changes' news feed. it's available in RSS and atom form. Just subscribe to it, refresh the feeds and there you go. A nice list of what's changing in wikipedia and who is changing it.
I was rather stunned after reading your post. After all, the company in question (nVidia) is selling a product which is advertised to work with another product (Microsoft Windows Vista) and after it is pointed out that actually the product doesn't work at all as advertised and it is broken to boot you claim that not only it is normal but also should be expected?
Wow... Just... Wow...
It just goes to show the state in where we find ourselves today. Like the parent poster, there are quite a few people who buy hardware, find out that it is broken and doesn't work as advertised and when faced with that, their reaction is "thank you, sir. May I have another, sir?".
It is not ok. The consumer pays for a product because he wishes the functionality which is advertised. If the product ends up not providing it then he was lead on by a lie. It is fraud. It is not ok. What if it was the case with the automotive industry? What if a car was advertised to be an all-terrain vehicle and then ends up not even being capable of going through a sidewalk? Should we all jus say "oh well we should be grateful it even runs".
And how many PC users are running two year old systems or younger? I'm not. I have a 3-year old laptop with 512MB RAM, a 7-year old desktop with 1024MB RAM and a 10 year old deskop with 256MB RAM. If I wanted to run Vista do you really believe that I wouldn't have to upgrade a single piece of hardware?
There are direct and indirect indexes about certain society details which are widely adopted by census organizations and government bodies. For example, child nutrition levels are evaluated through the population's tallness, development indexes is measured through the number of bathrooms per house and, as we seen here in slashdot a while ago, some people even measure the cost of living through the iPod prices. So why wouldn't Broadband deployment be used as an intelligence index?
The demand for broadband is mainly due to people who spend a good deal of time online. Spending time online means reading and accessing information (useful stuff or not? Technical? Art? Entertainment? It doesn't matter.) and as far as I see it, that sure is a sign of intelligence.
Linux is GPL. Qt is GPL. The Greenphone's community SDK is GPL. If it was only possible to run Qt applications on the Greenphone, which is a Linux device, where exactly would that make it non-open?
Perhaps you would be able to understand if you read the Greenphone pricing plan. You see, Trolltech only charges for the commercial release of the SDK. The community SDK is free and released under the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Halliburton is a big company and operates in a lot of countries. Nonetheless, it is an US company owned by USians and led by USians. The company's decision-makers are USians. Having a subsidiary or a small office in some country or controlling some company which was bought off from some non-USian doesn't make it non-USian.
And by the way, for your information, just because the news doesn't coincide with your personal views or ruin your personal flavour of reality it doesn't mean that they should be conveniently labelled as false. Nonetheless, and keeping the topic of this discusion in mind, your actions towards unflattering news is very telling.Claiming that Halliburton isn't an US company just because it is big and operates in lots of of countries isn't exactly a demonstration of intelligence.
Slashdot isn't "increasingly anti-US". It is, however, receiving more and more visits from non-USian readers who not only register but also comment on issues. As the US's foreign relations has been going down the crapper in the last decade or so and therefore becoming more and more isolated, it is expectable that the entire world expresses an opinion which doesn't coincide with the opinions of some americans.
And slashdot isn't "increasingly a leftist swamp". If you didn't noticed, there isn't any "left" on the US political scene at all. There is only the extreme far left, embodied by the US's republican party and the not so extreme far left, embodied by the US's democratic party. What elected US official publicly supports programs like housing or public transportation programs? Any republican? Any democrat? What about basic worker's rights like job protection or unemployment subsidy? Heck, the american political scene still believes that free and unencumbered access to healthcare services and treatments, supported by the state through american taxes, is some sort of "communist blasphemy". With a political scene so saturated with the right-wing way of thinking, naturally some americans see issues and opinions which don't toe the far-right line (the US's mainstream way of thinking) as "leftist" or even "communist".
And that jab at the supposed importance of slashdot, the only thing that it demonstrates is your attitude towards the opinions that aren't parallel to yours, along with those who express them. You are claiming that this blog is losing importance because you aren't being served with the mainstream points of view and opinions that you have been accustomed to. You are not being served with a string of homogeneous "OMG ME TOO!" followup comments. Instead, you are seeing an ever increasing amount of replies which defend different opinions. As you aren't being served with what you wish to read, which is your own personal point of view on things, then, instead of keeping an open mind or even trying to debate and expose your ideas based on reasoning, you prefer to simply ridicule those who do not share your personal set of values and views by labelling them with small, baseless offensive tags. And quite frankly, if someone isn't capable of dealing with differences of opinions then I do believe that the best they can do is keep out of activities which are based exactly on the exchanging of different opinions.
I feel your pain. Once I heard the news I darted onto Dell's Portugal site and when I search for "ubuntu" I get a "Sorry, No Results." To make matters worse, when I search for "Inspiron E1505n" on Dell's USA site I also get that "Sorry, No Results." message. So how come there are claims about Dell selling linux laptops and once we look for those products there is absolutely nothing there?
I call shenanigans.
More to the point, and as this story indicates, apparently the companies who handle their employees as cattle are the U.S. ones. After all, as this case shows, it seems that IBM just fired hundreds of their employees with no good reason besides the rumour of the CEO doing it as some sort of whim.
That's a pretty ignorant statement to make. Look at Russia, where billionaires are popping out like flowers in the spring. Nonetheless, the entire population is left in a worse position than they were in the pre-capitalist phase.
Indeed. And the fact that a totally free OS is equated to a 250$ plus OS in the mainstream press is something to be remembered.
Now, how can anyone justify spending gobs of cash on an OS which in effect does exactly the same as a free OS?
That is a very dumb statement to make. First of all, the reason why you don't "get anywhere" with your self taught bag of tricks is not because of any school discrediting it. There isn't a single school in the world who would spend a second of it's time to try to stop you from applying for a job based on your self taught bag of tricks. The reason why you do not "get anywhere" without any official certificates is that the people who you are trying to get a job from do not believe that your self-taught bag of tricks offers them any assurance. To put it in other words, you "don't get anywhere" because you do not offer any employer an assurance that you know how to do your job.
There are plenty of people on the world who are hired based on their "non-certified" expertise. They are hired because they demonstrate that they can do their job better than any competing professional, including "certified" professionals. Yet, no school is involved there too. Therefore there goes your conspiracy theory.
As you may understand, each and every legal action is taken by those who in fact "give a damn". With this legislation, if a Canadian school "gives a damn" about what a student is writing about it, whether it is about some fellow student or a teacher, then that school will be able to deal directly with the student.
Every school has the obligation to implement and maintain a healthy learning environment. As it is easy to see, if a student's actions are directly affecting the school's learning environment, whether those actions are targeted at teachers or fellow students, then the school should have the right to protect itself from it and the tools to use in that situation. If some smart ass student thinks that assaulting his colleagues, teachers or even school is a reasonable thing to do then why should any school tolerate it? Should a school simply "turn the other cheek" and accept that student with open arms eventhough he is continuously F'ing them up the A?
And as you stated, the school can also sue the bully or even setting up criminal charges. Yet, shouldn't it be simpler if the school could simply expell that student? There wouldn't be a lengthy and expensive court process and justice would be served. If the bully believes that the charges were unwarranted then he may sue. It's a win-win. On the other hand, as even you may understand, eventhough a school is suing a student, at the moment no one can stop that particular student from attending class or even from entering school grounds. What good will a expensive lawsuit do if the bullies could still freely do their own bidding with impunity?
It is unthinkable that any student will be prosecuted for learning outside of the school. In fact, that accusation is too retarded even to take into account. Do you really believe that setting up sites dedicated to accusing student A or teacher B of, for example, being gay is some sort of valuable learning experience? Do you really believe that the schoolboard would prosecute the student who created such a site not because of it's content but because the student learned HTML and/or CSS? Obviously not.
As it is easy to see, this move has nothing to do with "controlling the will to learn outside of the school". It's objective is to not let a few rotten students jeopardise the school climate. If a student dedicates his time to denigrate and smear the reputation of his fellow students and/or teachers, why shouldn't he be called upon his actions? Why would the school tolerate such destructive behaviour, pretend that there isn't anything wrong with it and carry on?
You talk about freedom of expression but you sure are forgetting that freedom of expression also involves accountability for your own actions. If a student spends his time trying to humiliate any of his peers or teachers he sure is asking to get himself into trouble. And he should be, too.
Long way? Not at all, at least to me. Let's ignore Google Talk for a moment. My ISP already offers a Jabber IM service and has been offering it for years. Granted, it isn't as popular as MS's messenger service but a lot of people do use it and I do mean a lot (more than IRC). It is also normal to find my ISP's jabber client present on library and school computers.
I live in an european country (Portugal) where the current government is planning on building two major transportation facilities, one being a new national airport (Ota airport) and the other being a high speed train that crosses the country and connects it to the rest of Europe's high speed train network (as France's TGV). Both projects are very expensive and at the moment there is an ongoing debate about them. Moreover, Portugal is not a rich country. Yet, both projects will not come even close at "bankrupting the country". What makes you believe that France's TGV network bankrupted them but a tiny, poor country like Portugal can support not only a high speed train but also a new national airport?
I tell you what. Ignorance, prejudice and stupidity.
I believe we already have that. It isn't underground but it pretty much works as you describe. In the transportation world it is called the personal transportation system, where things like cars, motorcycles and even taxis are included.
That's bullshit. In that article Phil Taylor states that the reason that DirectX 10 would not be made available to Windows XP and was exclusive to Vista was that XP was released on 2001 and the design of DirectX 10 was only solidified on late 2003. That is a very retarded statement to make.
According to the same article, Windows Vista, as we know it, was rebuilt from the ground up in 2004. That means that if DirectX 10 needed any special functionality to work then the Vista people had to rewrite Vista from the ground up with that in mind, which doesn't say much on it's own. On the other hand, XP's service pack 2 was released in 2004, which means that if XP really needed any special features to handle DirectX 10 that, since DirectX is being worked on from the time XP was first launched and the supposed target platform for which DirectX was built was scrapped, that there was absolutely no reason for Microsoft to not support DirectX on XP.
So, as it is easy to see, the only reason that DirectX is not supported in Windows XP is simply due to Microsoft's decision of not doing it. Microsoft does not want to support DirectX 10 on other OS besides Vista. Period. For crying out loud, it's a fucking API. A fucking interface to handle hardware. Who in their right mind claims that certain pieces of hardware can only work on Windows Vista and not on Windows XP?
It may be in your country but there are quite a few countries in the world where social services, free and unencumbered services given to the people by the state, are even a big part of the country's constitution.
Screw that. A sub $200 laptop would be excellent. Period. I've bought a 1300 laptop a couple of years ago and and about 90% of the work I do with it is simply text editing, access email, jabber IM and browse the web, stuff that I can do very well with any used sub-100 PC from eBay (which I'm actually using at the moment). On the other hand, you can't even buy a used laptop in working order for less than 250. Not even the sub 800MHz oldies.
I, for one, would easily pay 200 for a laptop that could handle that type of work. It doesn't need to run half life or be "vista-ready". It just needs to have a wireless internet connection, have a decent battery life and handle basic work without any problem. I would be very happy if someone picked up the 100$ laptop, dropped the cheesy design in favor of something more sensible (thinkpad-ish?), sticked any random off-the-web linux distribution on it (*cof* Kubuntu *cof*) and sold it. Very happy.
Ubuntu will not be ready for any decent work while it still has bugs like the infamous overheating bug. I mean, I love Kubuntu and I adopted it as my main OS but seriously, it still suffers from a showstopping overheating bug which is almost 2 years old. I mean, what good is an OS for if it simply can't cope with any mildly CPU-intensive application (i.e., compiling, encoding sound files, running any 3D application, etc...) before hanging, crashing and endangering the hardware itself?
You haven't even read the article, have you? The gripe isn't about how the "closed" journals should be made available for free. The "closed" journals aren't even considered here. If you spent a few seconds skimming through the article you would realize that what is being demanded here is that the papers which are produced by public research institutions, papers which are funded by public money, should be made freely available and that their access should not be restricted and much less the exclusive property of private publishers. Do you understand your miss-interpretation here? No one is demanding that the private publishers offer their publications for free. The demand is that papers written by public research institutions should be made available to the general public as soon as they are made available to those private publishers.
Of course the private publishers are against it. Until now they had the monopoly and complete control on scientific publications and their content's distribution. As soon as the gross of it's content can be made available to the general public they start to get forced out of the loop. Heck, as soon as someone creates a central public repository of scientific publications where anyone and everyone can access, which will reinforce the peer-review process (which is naturally hindered by the way the old style scientific publications work), the publishers, as they currently are, will become totally irrelevant.
You don't even have to have any software install. You can simply subscribe to the recent changes' news feed. it's available in RSS and atom form. Just subscribe to it, refresh the feeds and there you go. A nice list of what's changing in wikipedia and who is changing it.
I was rather stunned after reading your post. After all, the company in question (nVidia) is selling a product which is advertised to work with another product (Microsoft Windows Vista) and after it is pointed out that actually the product doesn't work at all as advertised and it is broken to boot you claim that not only it is normal but also should be expected?
Wow... Just... Wow...
It just goes to show the state in where we find ourselves today. Like the parent poster, there are quite a few people who buy hardware, find out that it is broken and doesn't work as advertised and when faced with that, their reaction is "thank you, sir. May I have another, sir?".
It is not ok. The consumer pays for a product because he wishes the functionality which is advertised. If the product ends up not providing it then he was lead on by a lie. It is fraud. It is not ok. What if it was the case with the automotive industry? What if a car was advertised to be an all-terrain vehicle and then ends up not even being capable of going through a sidewalk? Should we all jus say "oh well we should be grateful it even runs".
Just... Wow.
And how many PC users are running two year old systems or younger? I'm not. I have a 3-year old laptop with 512MB RAM, a 7-year old desktop with 1024MB RAM and a 10 year old deskop with 256MB RAM. If I wanted to run Vista do you really believe that I wouldn't have to upgrade a single piece of hardware?
There are direct and indirect indexes about certain society details which are widely adopted by census organizations and government bodies. For example, child nutrition levels are evaluated through the population's tallness, development indexes is measured through the number of bathrooms per house and, as we seen here in slashdot a while ago, some people even measure the cost of living through the iPod prices. So why wouldn't Broadband deployment be used as an intelligence index?
The demand for broadband is mainly due to people who spend a good deal of time online. Spending time online means reading and accessing information (useful stuff or not? Technical? Art? Entertainment? It doesn't matter.) and as far as I see it, that sure is a sign of intelligence.
Actually Ubuntu's first release was nicknamed "Dirty Sanchez", which was the source of that distribution's distinguished choice of color scheme.
Linux is GPL. Qt is GPL. The Greenphone's community SDK is GPL. If it was only possible to run Qt applications on the Greenphone, which is a Linux device, where exactly would that make it non-open?
Perhaps you would be able to understand if you read the Greenphone pricing plan. You see, Trolltech only charges for the commercial release of the SDK. The community SDK is free and released under the GPL.
The website states the following:
First one? I beg to differ. Should I point out Trolltech's Qtopia Greenphone? I believe it precedes OpenMoko by a considerable notch.