you've highlighted perfectly how linux dev's and advocats simply don't appreciate the problem - and arguablly won't for a few more years to come.
You're the one assuming mom and pop not being able to use Linux is a problem. Personally, I see that as a blessing and am enjoying every minute of not having the Great Unwashed Masses jumping on the bandwagon. Oh, it'll happen, just like AOL. Remind me again why were in a hurry to convert them?
My brother, Choadzilla, is always going on about Linux "problems" and about how it doesn't work on his laptop. After a while I gave up on him.
As far as I'm concerned Choadzilla, mom and pop, and the rest can stay with Wintendo. Sooner or later someone will dumb down an appliance they can use and brag to their friends they're using Linux. Until then they can stay safe and sound inside the walls of Castle Redmondore.
Actually, there are a lot of problems with that dogmatic, simple-minded mentality, but I'll try to keep it easy and just focus one obvious point: With the increasing burden of regulation there are more and more rules to break. Between Congress, state legislatures, county and cities we're being taxed and regulated to death and having more of our behavior legally restricted. Which tends to be more of a burden on people who care about obeying the laws than those who don't.
I think the real question is should we be spending legal and criminal resources on people taking camcorders into a theater? The same with burdening the legal system with two consenting adults having sex in the car? Unless the car happens to be parked on a grade school playground during recess, I'd say no to both of those.
Personally, I'd rather see police and legal resources being directed against the big problems like violent crime, identity theft, burglary and terrorism, not busting kids with camcorders at the movies. There are civil courts for that and in most cases simply confiscating their equipment would be punishment enough.
But I'm really glad life is so simple in your world, where you apparently have an infinite amount of resources to put people in jail and manage the criminal justice system. Because in mine we're going broke putting people in jail for stupid shit like this and our honest citizens are laboring under an increasing weight of legislation directed at nit-picky bullshit.
I'm not sure which is more frightening: Your attiude, or the +5 insightful mod it got?
I hear what you're saying and agree for the most part. There's only one observation I'd add. Around here if the browser didn't play and support every video, graphics widget and audio stream, management would see that as a bonus. They're spending a lot of time and effort locking down the desktops so people can't access all that and install spyware gadgets like weather bug. If Linux desktop didn't support any of that, they'd be delighted.
It's sometimes easy to confuse what you want in a home PC with what you need at the office.
There's always a good reason for privacy invasion. For your safety, for the children, for your protection. Our behavior is being regulated down to a finer and finer degree, and always, of course, for your protection.
I don't think it's tinfoil hat territory to suggest technology is advancing faster than our ability to come to grips with using it wisely.
One decent compromise around here has been red light cameras. They're not being used to spy on people routinely, just to take pictures of cars not minding the light. And, for the most part, it has worked. People were terrible about running lights, accidents all over the place, you couldn't drive home during rush hour without a near miss. It's not perfect, but it's not bad. Where I have a problem is any mass monitoring of thousands of innocent people looking for a few troublemakers. Drug testing, RFID's in cars, seat belt check points, tracking people with their cell phones when the cops aren't looking for them, facial recognition scanners in Tampa, things along those lines.
But where a navigable river is concerned it's sometimes easier to go with solar or wind. But if you can get a permit for a dock, there are options for low head hydro power. If you have to use a paddle wheel it would complicate things a bit.
I've been using linux so long at home that I have a hard time doing anything beyond the most basic level with windows.
I know exactly how you feel. Everything at home is Linux, everything at the customer site is Windows. It's like going from a sleek private jet to a C-130 on a daily basis. Everything in Windows seems so...lumbering and noisy by comparison.
What was funny was being in.NET class a while ago and all the workstations had XP. The teacher was like okay, now set this and that, I was totally lost. Everything is 2000 at the customer site and it was the first time I'd actually had to do anything besides use IE on XP. I caught up, but the initial disorientation was a little flustering.
Although I have the best excuse in the world for not helping friends with their computer problems. The biggest gripe seems to be XP slowing down over time. I just say, "Sorry, I don't do Windows."
save the ramifications for keeping an amicable relationship with the RIAA pigopolists.
It might have been a contractual requirement as part of the distribution deal. I agree, it's hard to see how Apple has a dog in this fight otherwise.
Besides, what's to stop someone from patching their iPod earphone output into an adapter and running it into the recording device of their choosing? Or mounting my matched Schoeps in front of the studio monitors? Or have they solved that problem? And did they solve in such a way that a signal pre-processor couldn't strip out the analog signature?
They can't win this battle and they're dead anyway. Artists don't need record companies to succeed anymore. They can sell their music online, direct to consumers and...*gasp*...make money off record sales.
It makes me sad to think of all those poor record company execs who are losing their cocaine, limos, private jets and porn star girlfriends. What will they do? How will they get by without the beach house in Malibu? I'm starting to tear up a little just thinking about it.
If we changed "Email" to "mail" and made the same statements? Do we grant ourselves the right to read every piece of postal mail that goes through the US? Why stop there? Why not search mail and packages? And luggage...oops, we already do that one. Where does it stop? The Supreme Court has never met an unreasonable search.
It's all well and good when the bad guys get caught...right up until the definition of "bad guys" gets changed. Yesterday there was an article about the DOJ labeling pornographers as "bad guys." There's no logical end. What's to stop someone being labeled as a bad guy for not going to church, or not supporting the government, or not going along with whatever intrusion-of-the-day on your privacy? It's not that big of a change from where we are now.
Whether it's the Muslim Taliban or Christian Taliban it's all the same. Ironic the religious right can't see it in the same terms.
Although it's not fair to color them all with the same mental crayon. I have friends in that community and they're good people, conservative but tolerant of those with different beliefs. But if push came to shove, they'd go along with the religious right trying to legislate their agenda.
In short, RM can be classified as a sort of really bad MIDI of Video
Well said and exactly right. And I'd add to that the company is annoying to deal with. At least the last time I had anything to do with them, which was around 2000. Freaking hate them.
I play fair, which means I have to pay more to make up the difference from the people screwing over their own government.
If that was the way it worked, I'd be all for it. But the facts are you don't end up paying any less. Remember product activation? How piracy was costing honest users billions of dollars? How much have you saved because of product activation? Let me answer that for you: Dick. Zip, zero, bupkis. You get the burden of the intrusion and proof and get dick in return.
You don't pay any less, they just make more. It works the same way in government. The bottom line is they're using data technology to spy on millions of innocent people going after a few tax cheats they could catch with more traditional investigations. There's always a good reason for prying into people's lives.
I'd call it simple theft. Try to pretty it up with names like "shaving" or whatever, but it still boils down to good 'ol garden variety stealing. I'm not sure why this is being handled in civil court instead of criminal court. They had motif, intent and opportunity and should be facing the same sanctions as employees caught boosting goods out of the warehouse.
You're totally right about responsibility. As long as some groups can have their criminal behavior regulated to civil court, nothing will change. Because most of the time they can get away with stealing for years and litigate a fine when, and if, they caught. There's no incentive to change.
I am wondering if Red Hat might be on the way out in the enterprise?
Unlikely. RH has a very compelling enterprise product and a good name. But if Novell/SUSE/Ximian/IBM come up with an integrated server/desktop/mobile device management system, they'll kick everyone, RH included. IBM has the juice to put business apps many companies already use on an integrated platform. Hell, yeah, I'd be afraid of that. RH on it's way out, I don't think so. But the potential for a downside, oh yeah.
You can always use the excuse "we're protecting oursleves" to justify any intrusion. Mug shots, fingerprints, GPS tags...all the same. If we could make cheap enough GPS trackers, they'd be embeding them in visas. Because, according to your mentality, we're just protecting ourselves. They're free to roam around, we just want to keep tabs on where they are.
Until it probably gets over-turned on appeal MS police have the right to enter your property without a warrant for a "safety inspection." That just makes it easier to track down people breaking the law, right? So what's the big deal. It's not like they're knocking down your door.
Freedom doesn't get stripped away in one big blast, it gets peeled away like layers in an onion. And at every layer there's someone like you saying, "We're just protecting ourselves."
It's not the size of the intrusion, it's the mentality it represents.
It is truly sad when fear leads us to acts that insult and degrade our guests. Out of the millions of people a year who visit the US, how many actually mean us harm? A handful. And they have other ways in and out of the country besides the major ports.
I really don't blame anyone for not wanting to come here. When visiting other countries the worst part of the trip was coming home through US Customs. It was bad before 9-11 and that was for US citizens.
It does feel more right wing and intrusive lately. I love my country, but I'm really concerned by the spread of quasi-religious angry dogmatism of the right. We're losing the image of the US being the greatest place in the world to live. More people are now thinking, "Whew, glad I don't live there." And for many here the American dream has gone from a house in the country to a house in another country.
We were seriously thinking about moving to NZ before 9-11. The other day I saw a bumper sticker that said, "If you don't like it, get out." It reminded me to get my application of interest ready.
I have to use MS and *gag*.NET at the office, but I've completely abandoned it anywhere else. My last MS purchase was a retail copy of Win2K, the last Wintendo partition on the home network. And even some of the commercial customers are starting to incorporate MS alternatives. I see the same errosion of their market. Like acid they can't wash off. A lot of little nibbles add up to a big bite.
It's beginning to look more and more like MSFT against the rest of the computing world. Though I'm sure they'll come out in a couple years saying they always had a Linux strategy. But it'll be different this time.
We've been going at this all wrong, looking for code samples. If you put your ear next to a SCO Unix box and a Linux box you can hear the infringement.
That's what we've doing wrong! lol. Hey, I wonder if you ran it through a Dolby 5.1 decoder you could FEEL the infringement? Surround code. HAHAHAHAHA!
The ads are a little tacky and unprofessional. I'm disappointed SUSE even inclued them in the beta. If they were trying to make Wintendo users feel at home they could've included spyware and a virus as well.
If you want to present a professional image to prospective users, a dating service ad probably isn't a great introduction.
It may not be bad the first year, but what about the second and third? If you label five as IR, are you going to label the same five next year? Or do you have to pick a new five? The actual number below average is 25 out of a hundred. And that might actually work if you were taking a slice of the general population. But this isn't a cross section of the general population. One would guess, if your hiring practices were up to grade, this is the fraction of society that's educated, generally follow the rules, and have some background in the profession. So you have to find 25 below average out of a pool of 100 who were above average to start with.
I've never seen any system that tries to rank employees contribute to anything except turnover. Either the person is right for the job or they're not. Either they have some skills worth keeping or you can live without them. That's simple enough even the HR department can follow it.
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You're the one assuming mom and pop not being able to use Linux is a problem. Personally, I see that as a blessing and am enjoying every minute of not having the Great Unwashed Masses jumping on the bandwagon. Oh, it'll happen, just like AOL. Remind me again why were in a hurry to convert them?
My brother, Choadzilla, is always going on about Linux "problems" and about how it doesn't work on his laptop. After a while I gave up on him.
As far as I'm concerned Choadzilla, mom and pop, and the rest can stay with Wintendo. Sooner or later someone will dumb down an appliance they can use and brag to their friends they're using Linux. Until then they can stay safe and sound inside the walls of Castle Redmondore.
I think the real question is should we be spending legal and criminal resources on people taking camcorders into a theater? The same with burdening the legal system with two consenting adults having sex in the car? Unless the car happens to be parked on a grade school playground during recess, I'd say no to both of those.
Personally, I'd rather see police and legal resources being directed against the big problems like violent crime, identity theft, burglary and terrorism, not busting kids with camcorders at the movies. There are civil courts for that and in most cases simply confiscating their equipment would be punishment enough.
But I'm really glad life is so simple in your world, where you apparently have an infinite amount of resources to put people in jail and manage the criminal justice system. Because in mine we're going broke putting people in jail for stupid shit like this and our honest citizens are laboring under an increasing weight of legislation directed at nit-picky bullshit.
I'm not sure which is more frightening: Your attiude, or the +5 insightful mod it got?
Is people will learn to drive around another 20 or 30 seconds before calling 911.
It's sometimes easy to confuse what you want in a home PC with what you need at the office.
I don't think it's tinfoil hat territory to suggest technology is advancing faster than our ability to come to grips with using it wisely.
One decent compromise around here has been red light cameras. They're not being used to spy on people routinely, just to take pictures of cars not minding the light. And, for the most part, it has worked. People were terrible about running lights, accidents all over the place, you couldn't drive home during rush hour without a near miss. It's not perfect, but it's not bad. Where I have a problem is any mass monitoring of thousands of innocent people looking for a few troublemakers. Drug testing, RFID's in cars, seat belt check points, tracking people with their cell phones when the cops aren't looking for them, facial recognition scanners in Tampa, things along those lines.
After Deep Thought has ingested all the knowledge on the Internet we can ask it the answer to life, the universe and everything.
hydro systems Has some low profile, low head units.
Might want to think about a combo system, depending on how much wattage you're after.
I know exactly how you feel. Everything at home is Linux, everything at the customer site is Windows. It's like going from a sleek private jet to a C-130 on a daily basis. Everything in Windows seems so...lumbering and noisy by comparison.
What was funny was being in .NET class a while ago and all the workstations had XP. The teacher was like okay, now set this and that, I was totally lost. Everything is 2000 at the customer site and it was the first time I'd actually had to do anything besides use IE on XP. I caught up, but the initial disorientation was a little flustering.
Although I have the best excuse in the world for not helping friends with their computer problems. The biggest gripe seems to be XP slowing down over time. I just say, "Sorry, I don't do Windows."
I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Smells like dead genetically modified creeping bentgrass.
It might have been a contractual requirement as part of the distribution deal. I agree, it's hard to see how Apple has a dog in this fight otherwise.
Besides, what's to stop someone from patching their iPod earphone output into an adapter and running it into the recording device of their choosing? Or mounting my matched Schoeps in front of the studio monitors? Or have they solved that problem? And did they solve in such a way that a signal pre-processor couldn't strip out the analog signature?
They can't win this battle and they're dead anyway. Artists don't need record companies to succeed anymore. They can sell their music online, direct to consumers and...*gasp*...make money off record sales.
It makes me sad to think of all those poor record company execs who are losing their cocaine, limos, private jets and porn star girlfriends. What will they do? How will they get by without the beach house in Malibu? I'm starting to tear up a little just thinking about it.
Every time I sit in on management team meeting it's quite an education.
It's all well and good when the bad guys get caught...right up until the definition of "bad guys" gets changed. Yesterday there was an article about the DOJ labeling pornographers as "bad guys." There's no logical end. What's to stop someone being labeled as a bad guy for not going to church, or not supporting the government, or not going along with whatever intrusion-of-the-day on your privacy? It's not that big of a change from where we are now.
John Ashcroft. Feel better now that you know?
Although it's not fair to color them all with the same mental crayon. I have friends in that community and they're good people, conservative but tolerant of those with different beliefs. But if push came to shove, they'd go along with the religious right trying to legislate their agenda.
Well said and exactly right. And I'd add to that the company is annoying to deal with. At least the last time I had anything to do with them, which was around 2000. Freaking hate them.
Somewhere down the line record companies started getting the idea they had a right to a living and stopped earning it.
If that was the way it worked, I'd be all for it. But the facts are you don't end up paying any less. Remember product activation? How piracy was costing honest users billions of dollars? How much have you saved because of product activation? Let me answer that for you: Dick. Zip, zero, bupkis. You get the burden of the intrusion and proof and get dick in return.
You don't pay any less, they just make more. It works the same way in government. The bottom line is they're using data technology to spy on millions of innocent people going after a few tax cheats they could catch with more traditional investigations. There's always a good reason for prying into people's lives.
I'd call it simple theft. Try to pretty it up with names like "shaving" or whatever, but it still boils down to good 'ol garden variety stealing. I'm not sure why this is being handled in civil court instead of criminal court. They had motif, intent and opportunity and should be facing the same sanctions as employees caught boosting goods out of the warehouse.
You're totally right about responsibility. As long as some groups can have their criminal behavior regulated to civil court, nothing will change. Because most of the time they can get away with stealing for years and litigate a fine when, and if, they caught. There's no incentive to change.
Unlikely. RH has a very compelling enterprise product and a good name. But if Novell/SUSE/Ximian/IBM come up with an integrated server/desktop/mobile device management system, they'll kick everyone, RH included. IBM has the juice to put business apps many companies already use on an integrated platform. Hell, yeah, I'd be afraid of that. RH on it's way out, I don't think so. But the potential for a downside, oh yeah.
Until it probably gets over-turned on appeal MS police have the right to enter your property without a warrant for a "safety inspection." That just makes it easier to track down people breaking the law, right? So what's the big deal. It's not like they're knocking down your door.
Freedom doesn't get stripped away in one big blast, it gets peeled away like layers in an onion. And at every layer there's someone like you saying, "We're just protecting ourselves."
It's not the size of the intrusion, it's the mentality it represents.
I really don't blame anyone for not wanting to come here. When visiting other countries the worst part of the trip was coming home through US Customs. It was bad before 9-11 and that was for US citizens.
It does feel more right wing and intrusive lately. I love my country, but I'm really concerned by the spread of quasi-religious angry dogmatism of the right. We're losing the image of the US being the greatest place in the world to live. More people are now thinking, "Whew, glad I don't live there." And for many here the American dream has gone from a house in the country to a house in another country.
We were seriously thinking about moving to NZ before 9-11. The other day I saw a bumper sticker that said, "If you don't like it, get out." It reminded me to get my application of interest ready.
It's beginning to look more and more like MSFT against the rest of the computing world. Though I'm sure they'll come out in a couple years saying they always had a Linux strategy. But it'll be different this time.
Yeah, there are a lot like you out here.
That's what we've doing wrong! lol. Hey, I wonder if you ran it through a Dolby 5.1 decoder you could FEEL the infringement? Surround code. HAHAHAHAHA!
If you want to present a professional image to prospective users, a dating service ad probably isn't a great introduction.
I've never seen any system that tries to rank employees contribute to anything except turnover. Either the person is right for the job or they're not. Either they have some skills worth keeping or you can live without them. That's simple enough even the HR department can follow it.