You know this is all very good, I'm all for impoverished people having access to better jobs. But don't you wonder where the savings made go? i.e. why don't things get cheaper? Let me give an example: I live in Australia, about ten years ago you used to be able to buy clothes that were made in Australia. Now it's nearly impossible to find clothes made here, even if it's an Australian brand, everything is made in China, Indonesia, Fiji, etc. Now given that companies are saving money on wages, wouldn't you expect the price of clothing to get cheaper? Yeah right, the prices have gone up. So where did the money go? The answer must be profit, bonuses for executives, etc. So Australian textile workers have lost their jobs, some poor people in developing countries have hopefully gotten slightly better off (which is a good thing) but some other people must be getting very rich. It's the same for Nike runners, did they get cheaper when they got made in sweatshops? My opinion is that the net result of what is happening is that wealth is gradually being shifted from the middle classes in developed countries, some of it is going to the poor in developing countries, but most of it is being concentrated into the hands of a relatively small group of very rich people.
I agree with the orignal poster. It may be an attempt at humour but it has racist undertones. i.e. some of the jokes are based on these supposed premises: (a) Nigerians are stupid because they can't spell English. (b) Nigerians don't have enough to eat, besides their food is primitive. (c) Nigeria is a primitive backward country.
btw, I seriously doubt that the Princess Fofana email actually came from Nigeria.
Actually, the way it works in Australia, the prices are still given to cents, but they're rounded to the nearest five cents when you pay. i.e if you buy some milk for 2.49 and a can of baked beans for 98 cents, 3.57 is rounded to 3.55.
Yes, if you have too much time you can scam. There was once a story of an unemployed guy who would "buy" one bean at a time, which came to 2 cents which meant he didn't have to pay anything.
Actually, there was an attempted hijack in India a couple of weeks ago and that's pretty much exactly what happened - some guy was apparently trying to hijack a plane and he got overpowered by the crew and passengers. Here's some links to the story:
Sorry to nit-pick, but Bangladesh isn't a "small country." Quite small in land area and small economically but a huge group of people: Population: 131,269,860 (July 2001 est.) - from the CIA Factbook That's over twice as many people as live in the UK.
Other 4%
- this seems a little high! If other OSes like BeOS, BSD, Solaris, etc. add up to 4% I'd be very surprised. Which raises the question: what does "Other" mean?
Great post but I disagree with your rosy assessment of R&D at Australian universities.
On R&D:
... most really innovative stuff in Oz gets done by the CSIRO (commonwealth science and industry research organisation) and the universities....
As a computer science PhD student at an Australian university I can tell you that research is in crisis. Research at Australian universities used to be really top class. But the government has been slashing university funding for years, while at the same time student numbers have drastically increased. The net result is that most academics have to spend all their time teaching and have almost zero time for research.
There was recently a dispute between Melbourne University's management and the academic staff. Here's what one disgruntled academic had to say.
Sorry about being a little offtopic, but does anyone have any theories on the meaning of the title: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?
The hidden dragon is obviously Jen, but who is the crouching tiger allured to? Maybe the Jade Fox, or maybe it symbolises the restrained strength of Li Mu Bai? Anyone have any insights? Any Mandarin speakers out there?
Thanks for the tip-off. I downloaded, installed and tried Konqueror after seeing your post. And I agree with your assessment: it's fast, it's stable and it renders most pages just fine. And it supports SSL and plug-in-able Java. All this from a beta. There are still a few minor rendering bugs sometimes, but hopefully they'll be sorted out. I'm giving it a try as my standard browser.
But what I really like about Konqueror is being able to set your cookie acceptance/rejection policy differently for each site, and on the fly. No more giving information about my browsing habits to doubleclick.
Java is one of the most cross-platform languages currently available.
There are free Java implementations available such as Kaffe. We will ensure that Freenet is always compatible with these versions even if Sun attempts to make it more difficult for free Java implementations to keep up with their proprietary versions.
Java has excellent network support.
Java is easier to debug than other languages such as C++. This lets us get on with the business of implementing Freenet quickly and reliably!
In addition: if you know C and/or C++ Java is extremely easy to learn. The Java standard libraries provide heaps of functionality for free. Java is a higher level programming language than C, meaning lots of stuff is taken care for you, meaning you can write the programs quicker.
I once worked on a project where they tried to do this. The application being developed was a sophisticated artifical intelligence analysis tool. The project was divided into 2 parts. Our group was to write the backend, and a group of overseas programmers were to write the user interface. This seems like a fairly simple and straight forward division of the problem, but it turned out to be a nightmare.
Here were the main problems:
The communication overhead was huge. Most people on the team probably averaged about 2 hours everyday writing email to the overseas group.
There were constant misunderstandings. It is very difficult to communicate effectively only by email.
There were language difficulties. The native language of the overseas programmers was Spanish. Some of them didn't speak English at all.
The project ran over time, and the end result was a user interface that we couldn't use. It didn't integrate with our code, it didn't do what it was supposed to do and the code was commented in Spanish.
I'm certainly not saying it can't work. But the project needs to be very effectively organised. This is what I think are the key points for it to work (maybe):
The outsourced part of the project needs to be specified precisely to the finest detail. The slightest ambiguity will snowball into an avalanche.
For the previous point to be possible the design needs to be at a very advanced stage.
... all these "environmentalists" were, even then, claiming that all the pollutantants that we're spewing into the atmosphere was going to drastically affect the global climate. Tricky bit was, the doomsayers were NOT talking about global warming... they were saying that industrial soceity was bringing about global COOLING!!!...
Well, come on guys... which is it?
You can't have it both ways.
If environmentalists were predicting a climate change 50 years ago that's actually pretty insightful. That the direction of the change was wrong is hardly surprising, given the massive complexity to predicting weather. We can't even reliably predict the weather for the next day! What would have been clear 50 years ago was that we were pumping massive amounts of waste into the atmosphere (and rivers etc.), so much that we were changing its composition. It's good to know that some people back then had the foresight to realise that this may have effects on the climate.
As for all the comments that doubt that global warming is going on, you only have to do a simple web search to find some statistics on how the mean temperature has risen over the past 100 years.
And there is heaps and heaps more evidence if you care to look.
The fact that the world leaders had a conference in Kyoto to discuss global warming means that the evidence is clear enough to worry them. It should probably worry everyone else too.
This may be a defensive move by Microsoft. That's my theory. At the moment Linux has a lot of momentum behind it. This may or may not translate to a major share of the desktop market in the future. In Linux succeeds, they'll have a product ready. They may lose share in the OS market but hopefully (for them) they'll be able to hold onto their Office suite dominance. Microsoft is spending a relatively small amount of money to cover all the bases, so that no matter what happens, they'll still be in a good position to make lots of money. Does anybody remember when Wordperfect was the dominant word processor? Then everyone switched to Windows, and Wordperfect didn't have a product ready? Microsoft is making sure a similar scenario cannot happen to them.
Spreading or threatening to spread bad PR about Advanced customers is thuggery. And thuggery is not something we want associated with the Linux/open source community.
Slashdot Mirror
You know this is all very good, I'm all for impoverished people having access to better jobs. But don't you wonder where the savings made go? i.e. why don't things get cheaper? Let me give an example: I live in Australia, about ten years ago you used to be able to buy clothes that were made in Australia. Now it's nearly impossible to find clothes made here, even if it's an Australian brand, everything is made in China, Indonesia, Fiji, etc. Now given that companies are saving money on wages, wouldn't you expect the price of clothing to get cheaper? Yeah right, the prices have gone up. So where did the money go? The answer must be profit, bonuses for executives, etc. So Australian textile workers have lost their jobs, some poor people in developing countries have hopefully gotten slightly better off (which is a good thing) but some other people must be getting very rich. It's the same for Nike runners, did they get cheaper when they got made in sweatshops? My opinion is that the net result of what is happening is that wealth is gradually being shifted from the middle classes in developed countries, some of it is going to the poor in developing countries, but most of it is being concentrated into the hands of a relatively small group of very rich people.
I agree with the orignal poster. It may be an attempt at humour but it has racist undertones. i.e. some of the jokes are based on these supposed premises:
(a) Nigerians are stupid because they can't spell English.
(b) Nigerians don't have enough to eat, besides their food is primitive.
(c) Nigeria is a primitive backward country.
btw, I seriously doubt that the Princess Fofana email actually came from Nigeria.
Actually, the way it works in Australia, the prices are still given to cents, but they're rounded to the nearest five cents when you pay. i.e if you buy some milk for 2.49 and a can of baked beans for 98 cents, 3.57 is rounded to 3.55.
Yes, if you have too much time you can scam. There was once a story of an unemployed guy who would "buy" one bean at a time, which came to 2 cents which meant he didn't have to pay anything.
Maybe the public is realizing you can get a very formidible windows based computer ...
Now there's an oxymoron if I've ever heard one. This has got to be a troll.
Trash can??? P-leaze! .bashrc
Whate everyone needs is this line in their
alias rm="rm -rf"
Let's have none of this pansy crap.
Sorry to nit-pick, but Bangladesh isn't a "small country." Quite small in land area and small economically but a huge group of people:
Population: 131,269,860 (July 2001 est.) - from the CIA Factbook
That's over twice as many people as live in the UK.
Other 4%
- this seems a little high! If other OSes like BeOS, BSD, Solaris, etc. add up to 4% I'd be very surprised.
Which raises the question: what does "Other" mean?
I blame the system. Because we have a system that rewards this kind of practice.
That's an incredible statistic. Can you back that up with a link?
As a computer science PhD student at an Australian university I can tell you that research is in crisis. Research at Australian universities used to be really top class. But the government has been slashing university funding for years, while at the same time student numbers have drastically increased. The net result is that most academics have to spend all their time teaching and have almost zero time for research.
There was recently a dispute between Melbourne University's management and the academic staff. Here's what one disgruntled academic had to say.
Sorry about being a little offtopic, but does anyone have any theories on the meaning of the title: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?
The hidden dragon is obviously Jen, but who is the crouching tiger allured to? Maybe the Jade Fox, or maybe it symbolises the restrained strength of Li Mu Bai? Anyone have any insights? Any Mandarin speakers out there?
Thanks for the tip-off. I downloaded, installed and tried Konqueror after seeing your post. And I agree with your assessment: it's fast, it's stable and it renders most pages just fine. And it supports SSL and plug-in-able Java. All this from a beta. There are still a few minor rendering bugs sometimes, but hopefully they'll be sorted out. I'm giving it a try as my standard browser.
But what I really like about Konqueror is being able to set your cookie acceptance/rejection policy differently for each site, and on the fly. No more giving information about my browsing habits to doubleclick.
CNN has this story.
Wired has this one.
As said in the Freenet FAQ:
3.6. Why Java?
In addition: if you know C and/or C++ Java is extremely easy to learn. The Java standard libraries provide heaps of functionality for free. Java is a higher level programming language than C, meaning lots of stuff is taken care for you, meaning you can write the programs quicker.
Here were the main problems:
- The communication overhead was huge. Most people on the team probably averaged about 2 hours everyday writing email to the overseas group.
- There were constant misunderstandings. It is very difficult to communicate effectively only by email.
- There were language difficulties. The native language of the overseas programmers was Spanish. Some of them didn't speak English at all.
The project ran over time, and the end result was a user interface that we couldn't use. It didn't integrate with our code, it didn't do what it was supposed to do and the code was commented in Spanish.I'm certainly not saying it can't work. But the project needs to be very effectively organised. This is what I think are the key points for it to work (maybe):
... all these "environmentalists" were, even then, claiming that all the pollutantants that we're spewing into the atmosphere was going to drastically affect the global climate. Tricky bit was, the doomsayers were NOT talking about global warming... they were saying that industrial soceity was bringing about global COOLING!!!
Well, come on guys... which is it?
You can't have it both ways.
If environmentalists were predicting a climate change 50 years ago that's actually pretty insightful. That the direction of the change was wrong is hardly surprising, given the massive complexity to predicting weather. We can't even reliably predict the weather for the next day! What would have been clear 50 years ago was that we were pumping massive amounts of waste into the atmosphere (and rivers etc.), so much that we were changing its composition. It's good to know that some people back then had the foresight to realise that this may have effects on the climate.
As for all the comments that doubt that global warming is going on, you only have to do a simple web search to find some statistics on how the mean temperature has risen over the past 100 years.
Here's a few links I just found:
This graph of the mean world temperature over the last 150 years
From this report
Global Temperatures
A paper from the Proceedings of National Academy of Science
And there is heaps and heaps more evidence if you care to look.
The fact that the world leaders had a conference in Kyoto to discuss global warming means that the evidence is clear enough to worry them. It should probably worry everyone else too.
This may be a defensive move by Microsoft. That's my theory. At the moment Linux has a lot of momentum behind it. This may or may not translate to a major share of the desktop market in the future. In Linux succeeds, they'll have a product ready. They may lose share in the OS market but hopefully (for them) they'll be able to hold onto their Office suite dominance. Microsoft is spending a relatively small amount of money to cover all the bases, so that no matter what happens, they'll still be in a good position to make lots of money. Does anybody remember when Wordperfect was the dominant word processor? Then everyone switched to Windows, and Wordperfect didn't have a product ready? Microsoft is making sure a similar scenario cannot happen to them.
Spreading or threatening to spread bad PR about Advanced customers is thuggery. And thuggery is not something we want associated with the Linux/open source community.