MSFT is a sinking ship, but it's a vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big ship that will take an equally long time to sink -- long enough that it might end up being repaired before it's too late.:P
I love Linux just as much as the next guy (and has been my only home desktop for 5 years), but unlike DEC & Sun, MSFT's revenue keeps on increasing at an incredible pace.
When they have flat (not declining, but flat) revenues for 3 straight years, then I'll believe that it's sinking.
Huh? My SUSE fonts are far better than any Windows box I've used lately. People keep talking about patents relating to hinting, but MS doesn't seem to be using them since fonts in Windows usually look like crap to me, and don't even look anti-aliased.
Really? In Debian X.org 6.8.2 and MS TT "core fonts", things look good at larger font sizes, but cramped at 10 & 12 pt, whereas in Windows things are easy to read.
Being, literally, a grey-beard who remembers working on intelligent (3270-series) terminals and water-cooled mainframes and Unix and DOS punks crowing about how "the mainframe is dead"... things like Citrix, LTSP, liquid-cooled racks, and IBM setting new records in "number of mainframe MIPS sold every year" really amuses me.
Your blanket statements sound good, but you have no clue as to my situation. Most of what you said is standard boilerplate rhetoric spewed by outsiders that don't take an individual into consideration.
Yes, you're right. I still stand by my (amended) statement that parents (even divorced ones) need to sacrifice for their children.
We've put our money where our mouths are: my wife could be making a lot more money, but we agreed that being around for our children when they come home from school is more important. (And no, I don't make anywhere near a 6 digit salary.)
It's not as bad as it sounds, since it's a school/day care. The facility is top-notch, and I and my ex-wife feel rather comfortable having her there.
Bah. What's more important to her, her career or her child?
She also lives out of town, so I or my family am not able to pick her up.
What's more important to you, your career or your child?
That said, divorce is rough on kids, and this is just one of the side effects.
And one of the many sacrifices that parents have to make for their children is to be there for them, even when you don't get along with your spouse.
Yes, I am a father, and yes, I have been divorced.
My ex-wife worked in one of those fancy day-schools, and as an afternoon nanny for a rich 1980s high-powered dual-income couple, and let me tell you, those kids were screwed up. They needed more mother and less nanny.
Because in the last couple of decades, "intellectual" has come to mean someone so out of touch with the vast majority that the label is distrusted. Intellectual = some snotty guy at Harvard telling you middle America peons that you're, well, peons, and that everything would be better if you just listened to volvo-driving people like himself.
As for your comments about snotty guys from Harvard, I'd stretch it a bit.
When you have activists and fame-seeking doctors coming out with the thinnest of evidence saying with great fanfare, "Agar will kill you", "coffee causes cancer", "Vitamin E prevents cancer", etc, etc, and then 3 years later, peer-reviewed studies come out saying, "well, no, that's not true", people tend to get suspicious, and eventually stop believing what scientists say.
It's not about going to Mars because its a pretty fun place to visit like Disneyland. It's about going to Mars because of a desire to learn about new environments and new science and new technology.
We are like 15th century Europe about to start exploring the Americas, it's a huge wild dangerous place filled with great unknowns and fantastically huge potential. Should we stay home in our safe little castles or step out into the next frontier and learn how to live there and what its pitfalls and rewards are?
It seems as though you are forgetting how incerdibly hostile that Space is:
hard vacuum
weightlessness (calcium leeches out of bones)
gamma (and other?) radiation
cold
heat
energy (our own)
That's just the big stuff that we know about. Then there's the stuff we don't know about and so can't plan for, and there the "other things" like:
water/comestibles - there are no South Seas islands to occasionally stop at to barter for fresh water & supplies, or oceans to catch fish in.
those Martian sand storms - will they sandblast the spacecraft?
lunar dust, having never been eroded by water, is very abrasive - how will it affect mechanical instruments?
To follow with your European exploration analogy, I say that we are not yet at the Nina, Pinta & Santa Maria stage yet. Rather, we are ancient Greeks who have reed boats that can travel from island to island. We'll get to the point of 15th century Europeans when we develop an adequate power source.
Who wants to go explore and live on a planet where there are regular "continent-sized" dust storms?
Not I.
Face it: humans evolved in the specific circumstances of the surface of the Earth, and until we can create a practical high-energy source that allows for heavily-shielded spaceships/habitats, it will be extremely expensive to keep humans alive & healthy anywhere else.
America is more than anti-science. American culture in the broadest terms has become very anti-intellectual, which is really a super-set of being anti-science.
He said science and especially mathematics were poorly taught in most U.S. schools, leading both to a shortage of good scientists and general scientific ignorance.
Too true.
I'm a pretty well-educated, science-minded kinda guy, atheist and all that. And I have a hard time grokking how life evolved into the mega-myriad of amazing forms it is in today. Thus, can guarantee you that poorly-educated superstitious people would have an even harder time believing it, especially when it contradicts their holy book.
Just to make it clear where I'm coming from: I'm a parent too, and although my child is healthy and will hopefully remain so her whole life, I can tell you that if she ever does need some kind of treatment that someone objects to on religious grounds, that someone had better stay the hell out of my way.
Since you are so (quite reasonably) hot to trot to protect your daughter, if she was thus afflicted, would you think of ways to convince pregant women to have abortions, so that the dying fetus' stem cells could be harvested for your own child?
To my bemusement, it consisted of a series of RPMs. I do not use an RPM based distro, nor have any experience with RPMs, so I decided it wasn't worth the trouble and didn't install it. Now the release is just RPMs. Wtf do I do?
If you use a Debian-based distro, you can install OOo2 from
Slashdot Mirror
Now that you mention it I am in the process of moving.
Be a man and give up your citizenship while you're at it. After all, if the country is soooo bad, why would you want to be a citizen of it?
Or will yoube a chickensit and keep it, so you can go running to the US Embassy as soon as you get in a bit of trouble?
Bring back water cooling, I say!
The data center (in NY State) where I work used to have a fresh air vent, that they opened up during the winter.
MSFT is a sinking ship, but it's a vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big ship that will take an equally long time to sink -- long enough that it might end up being repaired before it's too late. :P
I love Linux just as much as the next guy (and has been my only home desktop for 5 years), but unlike DEC & Sun, MSFT's revenue keeps on increasing at an incredible pace.
When they have flat (not declining, but flat) revenues for 3 straight years, then I'll believe that it's sinking.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=MSFT&annual
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=MSFT&annual
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cf?s=MSFT&annual
Huh? My SUSE fonts are far better than any Windows box I've used lately. People keep talking about patents relating to hinting, but MS doesn't seem to be using them since fonts in Windows usually look like crap to me, and don't even look anti-aliased.
Really? In Debian X.org 6.8.2 and MS TT "core fonts", things look good at larger font sizes, but cramped at 10 & 12 pt, whereas in Windows things are easy to read.
liquid cooling
Being, literally, a grey-beard who remembers working on intelligent (3270-series) terminals and water-cooled mainframes and Unix and DOS punks crowing about how "the mainframe is dead"... things like Citrix, LTSP, liquid-cooled racks, and IBM setting new records in "number of mainframe MIPS sold every year" really amuses me.
Your blanket statements sound good, but you have no clue as to my situation. Most of what you said is standard boilerplate rhetoric spewed by outsiders that don't take an individual into consideration.
Yes, you're right. I still stand by my (amended) statement that parents (even divorced ones) need to sacrifice for their children.
We've put our money where our mouths are: my wife could be making a lot more money, but we agreed that being around for our children when they come home from school is more important. (And no, I don't make anywhere near a 6 digit salary.)
Try xine!
It still needs to crack CSS. Definitely a grey legal area.
Cisco VPN client for Linux!
Point taken.
If you can't find an alternative application in Linux you could always run Windows through VMWare
For 95% of people, that's not an acceptable work-around.
just install ndiswrapper and use the windows drivers!
Except on everything except 32 bit x86.
If font's are so important to you, why not just use the Windows true type fonts in linux??
You think I haven't been using those fonts for years?
The point is that MS & Apple have patent-encumbered techniques for hinting fonts that make TT fonts look much better than they do under X.
"be there for them, even when you don't get along with your spouse."
Ok, that came out ambiguous.
In "be there for them", I was thinking "be near, so that you can see them more often".
It's not as bad as it sounds, since it's a school/day care. The facility is top-notch, and I and my ex-wife feel rather comfortable having her there.
Bah. What's more important to her, her career or her child?
She also lives out of town, so I or my family am not able to pick her up.
What's more important to you, your career or your child?
That said, divorce is rough on kids, and this is just one of the side effects.
And one of the many sacrifices that parents have to make for their children is to be there for them, even when you don't get along with your spouse.
Yes, I am a father, and yes, I have been divorced.
My ex-wife worked in one of those fancy day-schools, and as an afternoon nanny for a rich 1980s high-powered dual-income couple, and let me tell you, those kids were screwed up. They needed more mother and less nanny.
My daughter (3.5) is at school almost 8 hours a day.
Eight hours????????????
She's only 3!!!!!!!!!!!
Ripping off Apple and Google is hardly distinct or innovation.
It depends on your definition of "innovation", I guess.
Sry, a typo. I meant to write ID (intelligent design).
That's the 1st thing I thought, but A is so far away from I, it didn't appear to be a typo.
People who believe in AD.
anno Domini?
Active Directory?
Attention Deficit?
Because in the last couple of decades, "intellectual" has come to mean someone so out of touch with the vast majority that the label is distrusted. Intellectual = some snotty guy at Harvard telling you middle America peons that you're, well, peons, and that everything would be better if you just listened to volvo-driving people like himself.
. htm
Anti-intellectualism in the US has a longer history than 20 years. Note this speech from 1954: http://www.historians.org/info/AHA_History/mcurti
As for your comments about snotty guys from Harvard, I'd stretch it a bit.
When you have activists and fame-seeking doctors coming out with the thinnest of evidence saying with great fanfare, "Agar will kill you", "coffee causes cancer", "Vitamin E prevents cancer", etc, etc, and then 3 years later, peer-reviewed studies come out saying, "well, no, that's not true", people tend to get suspicious, and eventually stop believing what scientists say.
We are like 15th century Europe about to start exploring the Americas, it's a huge wild dangerous place filled with great unknowns and fantastically huge potential. Should we stay home in our safe little castles or step out into the next frontier and learn how to live there and what its pitfalls and rewards are?
It seems as though you are forgetting how incerdibly hostile that Space is:
That's just the big stuff that we know about. Then there's the stuff we don't know about and so can't plan for, and there the "other things" like:
To follow with your European exploration analogy, I say that we are not yet at the Nina, Pinta & Santa Maria stage yet. Rather, we are ancient Greeks who have reed boats that can travel from island to island. We'll get to the point of 15th century Europeans when we develop an adequate power source.
Who wants to go explore and live on a planet where there are regular "continent-sized" dust storms?
Not I.
Face it: humans evolved in the specific circumstances of the surface of the Earth, and until we can create a practical high-energy source that allows for heavily-shielded spaceships/habitats, it will be extremely expensive to keep humans alive & healthy anywhere else.
Too true.
I'm a pretty well-educated, science-minded kinda guy, atheist and all that. And I have a hard time grokking how life evolved into the mega-myriad of amazing forms it is in today. Thus, can guarantee you that poorly-educated superstitious people would have an even harder time believing it, especially when it contradicts their holy book.
You should have posted a link to pedantry
What does sex with children have to do with the discussion?
Pederasty != Pedantry.
Just to make it clear where I'm coming from: I'm a parent too, and although my child is healthy and will hopefully remain so her whole life, I can tell you that if she ever does need some kind of treatment that someone objects to on religious grounds, that someone had better stay the hell out of my way.
Since you are so (quite reasonably) hot to trot to protect your daughter, if she was thus afflicted, would you think of ways to convince pregant women to have abortions, so that the dying fetus' stem cells could be harvested for your own child?
If you use a Debian-based distro, you can install OOo2 from
Coordinated Universal Time?
In French, of course... Why do they think that their language is still the lingua franca?
My bet is it would take little more then a recompile.
You're presuming that they did a good job of writing portable code. Like OpenOffice.org.
Oh, wait. Never mind...
BSD vs. GPL is like the difference between libertine & liberty.
Sure, the libetrine can do anything he wants, but liberty implies responsibility.
Successful is not even on the list.
Why not? It succeeded in it's task of building atomic bombs.