Well, your company could change it's official IM client. It's not like they are really stuck, here.
Perhaps you could suggest they set up their own Jabber server. This will increase employee's security, as it is HTTPS driven, and the server would belong to your company, so you wouldn't have to worry about people being slackers and talking to friends and family on it while they should be getting work done.
It's quite amusing that you think this is illegal. It's not illegal to offer a service for free to build a user base, then restrict it's use in a certain way that allows you to bring in some revenue. They could even, legally, shut MSN down, without notice if they wanted.
This little transcript comes to mind when I picture you taking your case up with the government:
You "Mr. Government, MSN won't let me use GAIM to access their network. I really don't like paying for my service by viewing ads. I want it for free. Please take them to jail!"
I really don't understand why this parent got modded up while speaking on assumptions about the new OS. They, very well, could be fully focused on these action items you mention. It's border-line flamebait with it's pre-emptive strike on Windows users and the assumption that someone who plays a few games on their windows box would reply in the stated manner. This just reaks of immature thinking.
The way you talk about it, it sounds like you think the same people who design interfaces are also in charge of application security. They don't. It's likely the person who came up with the interface design doesn't know a single line of C code.
It would be one of the biggest bad ideas M$ ever made if they came out with a new OS and didn't have a fancy new interface. Especially since OSX came out, it's been the worst thing about XP to most users.
I chuckle at the notion of making a prettier desktop would not result in more sales in the desktop market. All they will have to do is pump up the airwaves with a lot of commercials hyping up the new look and functionality, and people will flock to the stores to get it. Not to mention when they eventually expire updates and support for XP in a few years.
I'm no M$ Windows supporter by any stretch of the imagination. I'm just an adult who depends on technology to put food on my table, I'm also a realist. As a result, working in a modern office, I have to stay sharp with linux, freebsd, solaris, windows 2000, and a lot of the applications that run on these systems, such as active directory.
My current Active Directory box has normally had 100+ day uptimes, only being rebooted after applying security patches. It serves about 1800 users. I've had FreeBSD boxes that exceeded 700 day uptimes and only got rebooted due to the need to standardize distro versions for a cvs project I was working on. I've also had a few Linux systems that were completely unstable, daily rebooters due to bad code in a vendor application.
It's all in how you run your servers, really. Just as in Linux, you are going to have an unstable box if you try to run too many services on it, don't pay attention to your resources, or install 1 more application on the system than is vital to use it for it's specified tasks.
I don't like M$ because of the anti-trust issues and how they used to be slow to issue patches to known exploits, I could really care less about their software being closed source (like commercial unix, mac, etc).. Nowadays, they usually have a patch that your XP box can automatically download and install, usually the same day the exploit steps into the wild.
On a final thought, you are responding to what appears to be a 13 year old gamer who hasn't posted his comment yet. My game system usually only has a few hours uptime. I turn it on, it defrags it's swap drive, then the rest of the system, loads XP, I open gamespy, play my game, close game, shut the computer off, and go back to work on my xfree workstation. XP does this particular task flawlessly for me. I'm assuming the majority of computer users (non-geeks) have similar practices. I can see and understand why stability is not their number one goal. It's not relevant if your machine runs flawlessly doing day to day tasks. If you run XP 24/7, have lots of software on it, don't maintain it properly, yeah, you are going to have some problems that require a lot of reboots.
Anyway, do you really want Windows so stable that no enterprise of any financial capability will even look at a Linux solution? I'd prefer Windows stay just like it is in the server realm..
Isn't it amazing how something so unimportant as a few studios that produce screen plays and music can drastically change the laws in a huge country full of freedom loving (wanting) people?
The RIAA and MPAA members wealthy off our dollar. Please don't spend more money with these people unless you don't mind kissing more freedoms goodbye.
Ok, pardon my french.. What the hell are systems in charge of nuclear power plant safety controls doing running Windows? Not to mention having enough connectivity to the outside world to allow something like this.
I don't understand how the safety of an entire city can be maintained by such networks and computer systems. I'd much prefer to see a commercial unix system or some BSD flavored system with NO external connectivity, STRICT firewall rules to not allow it to talk to anything it doesn't have to, only on specific ports, etc. It's not so hard, I've set up pretty good sized networks this way before and I'm borderline redneck.
It's just amazing... Right when I think mankind isn't totally doomed, I read this.
Typically a system admin with a non-technical manager will escalate and whine until they get one.
I've had users lie through their teeth about custom fwding ports not working or being unreliable, just so they can get higher powers invovled over their 'inability to be productive with the provided solution'.. This is so they can get out in the wild and do whatever on the network, without watchful corporate eyes on them. Meanwhile, the company suffers in bandwidth costs and liability.
At my last job, I did corporate information security for several years for a large ISP.
We had specific policy regarding everything to do with software and just about everyone infringed at some point.
For example, Playing games at work == termination. At any given time, I could dump an interface on a firewall at any of our offices and see Quake3 or Counter-strike games being played. The people who 'could not be behind the proxy or nat due to their job function' would often try and set up game servers.
This sort of thing seems to be rampant in technical businesses. A large percentage of technical types feel that they are smart, the exception, or somehow immune to company policy. Combine this with a slacker attitude and you have some problems. What they don't understand, there is a whole world of people playing catchup to the American technical market. Soon enough, they'll have all our jobs. My last position was eliminated when they announced 3000 of our call center employees and three offices were shutting down due to their spiffy new contract with a support company in India.
Anyway, back to the software licence issues. For organizations like the BSA, any sizable office is an easy target, as unless the IT group comes across as 'network nazis', software policy will be ignored by most.
I once worked at a smaller firm who would make employees pay out of pocket for any licence infractions they caused. One guy got stuck with the option of finding a new job or pay for the company's costs surrounding an unlicenced suite of Adobe products. I think it cost him around $3k. He paid it, then got canned a few months later for going on a week-long coke binge. He forgot to schedule some vacation time for it.
I really didn't like the last Matrix movie, save the special effects and fight scenes. Maybe I'm getting old and angry, but the acting wasn't all that great.
The movie did look awesome when I saw it on IMAX. You could see that the cars doing flips on the highway, during that one scene, didn't have motors in them. Not that it matters, I just didn't notice on the smaller big screen.
Oh, and the Oracle's skin looks really nasty when they do close ups on the IMAX. They really should have photoshop'd her or get out the airbrush.
"Ever get the feeling your Usenet newsgroup list is being watched? By Microsoft? If so, consider yourself right. An interesting but troubling CNET interview with Microsoft's in-house sociologist goes into how the software giant is keeping a close eye on newsgroups and other public e-mail lists, tracking and rating contributors' social habits and determining "people who the system has shown to have value."
I don't see what is disturbing about this. Notice the word "public" here. What's wrong with a corporation trying to figure out a little more about how humans interract with the services and software it's customers use? Especially when they never tried to hide it.
I'm sure if the Linux Project hired a sociologist to examine the uses and interractions between Linux developers and users, in public forum, you would think "Wow, what an innovative idea!".
As for privacy on Usenet, every action you perform gets logged on a big RAID array at your ISP. Most ISPs back that data up on tape and store it offsite for a couple of months. Paranoid now? Oh, this includes your downloads too.
I'm no supporter of M$ by a long shot, but I think it's silly when everything they do gets treated like some nasty conspiracy when it just boils down to building data for marketing and development purposes. Notice how he's been there for ~4 years, that's about the time most big companies started taking extra measures to get inside their customer's heads.
This is about as disturbing as "A sociologist from Microsoft may have visited your public website, and read it too!"
XViD is on the path to surpass DiVX, being rapidly developed open source.
Nothing is different for the end-user's experience. Encoding is a teenie bit more flakey than DiVX, but I'd expect it to have surpassed DiVX within a year in the quality/compression department.
Now only if we can drum up enough support to put Real and QT out of business. >:-)
Homeless people and those on wellfare or in section 8 housing are a PROBLEM in america.
The gallery of privacy rights activists are foaming at the mouth, but really, the government knows the general location of every home owner and person that has a license to drive by their addresses. They can come and get you in your sleep, but they don't.
I'd personally like to see this homeless thing dealt with somehow. Most of you have not lived in an area where bums gather. It's pretty bad as they will break into cars and harass the crap out of people until they get into a shelter, go to jail, or end up dead. In Atlanta, during the winter, cops find or get calls about dead homeless people daily. It doesn't make the news, but it's very common.
Homelessness is typically the last step for most people with mental or addiction problems. Once they get out on the street, it's not very common they grow old and retire like normal folk.
I'd be comfortable with the idea of sending them to work camps until they learn to sober up and take care of themselves. As payment for the labor, they would get minimum wage, room and board. They would be required to remain on the campus or worksite for the duration of their term, say 6 months, and when their term is up appoint them to a low-income housing project and release their wages to them. Run it like a military, as to teach them discipline. Once they graduate from the program, have them appointed to a permanent job as construction workers or whatever has openings in the basic-labor field and give the companies who hire them a tax break.
I know bleeding heart liberals would have a breakdown trying to swallow such a program, but at least it gives them a chance at being an average joe someday. Once on the streets, if they aren't addicted to booze or drugs it's only a matter of time as that's the only thing to comfort yourself with when you don't have anything. That's why it takes a broad sweeping and new approach to dealing with the matter.
First off, why should I work to support someone's grandmother, bastard children, unemployed mother, mexican immigrant, etc? I'm sorry, but that's not MY responsibility. I disagree with taxation to support anyone. Taxes should be to pay the expenses of running a government, not supporting a nation.
How exatcly would limiting section8 and handouts help america.
Very easy.. It would put money back in the pockets of the people that worked for it. These are the people who will invest it or spend it on traded goods. Did you know between 15-20% of your tax dollars go to entitlement programs?
Give that money back to the people it belongs to, they'll spend it on something besides alchohol, drugs, crap foods, and such. This would result in more production, jobs, and economic growth.
People wouldn't starve. They'd actually be motivated to be a family and help one another out.
Anyway, are you aware how section 8 works? Basically, you pay a discounted (or no) rent, and the government picks up what you didn't pay. This is often $400-800/mo per household. Guess what? Most of these are single, minority mothers. They started off single, had babies knowing they would get a free ride until the child turns 18.
Think I am exaggerating? I have a relative who's manager over a local apartment complex that began filing section 8's about 4 years ago. She has to deal with these people all the time. These single mothers keep having babies, even after they were already filed under the program. What sense does that make? They needed money from ME to pay for their first kid and now they keep having more! BTW, this is a middle income complex and there's about 315 section 8's. All female, all with no job, no education, and a bunch of kids. Most have boyfriends living with them, for free, on our dollar too.
Sure, we can keep those programs, but I'd suggest that we begin sterilizing anyone that applies.
I know there's sweet little old ladies out there that need our help. I just don't think the government should play a role and force others to help. A more localized, community or church organization would be a much better answer. If taxes were lower, people would contribute to these sort of things a bit more. Especially when there's nothing else to fall back on.
If adults acted more like adults, we wouldn't be in this situation. Invest in your future now, don't leech on society later.
There's ample, untapped, opportunities for our government to legalize and tax commodities that have no real harm on society, but are illegal for moral concerns.
A 2000 year old book tells you gambling is a sin, so we've got to make sure it's illegal in 2003. It's amazing how far we've come as a society in some aspects, and how badly we've done in others.
I say we ditch all the 'moral' laws and stick to the ones that actual cause harm to others. End entitlement programs (hand outs, section 8, etc). Separate church and state for real. Ditch de-regulation of utilities. Make punishments for government employees who let contributions change a vote extreme. Then sit back and watch America become a better place to live.
Sorry for the bad grammar, it's the thought that counts.:)
I know my karma will get a beating, but....
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Blackout Week Continues
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What is going on with Slashdot this week? How many links to Wired articles are you going to post that you disagree with?
Most of the more technical people in the Slashdot crowd are aware that Wired is like the Sun, but about tech. It's not a real news source, and it's articles are written 90% for entertainment, 10% information. It's done that way to attract the largest crowd it can while still being a 'technical' source. Wired also has very fishy reviews. The bottom line appears to be, if you have ad space with them, your product will get mentioned anytime they can stick it in an article and it will always get a good review.
Back when I first started reading Wired, I would send corrections in for articles almost daily. These included links and details of why information they had posted was inaccurate and was worded very nicely, as not to offend anyone. Guess what? They never corrected anything. That's when it occured to me that they are more concerned with 'eyeballs' (old marketing term) than being an accurate information source.
Anyway, I beg of the Slashdot lords to please stop with the Wired links. If you don't agree with them or have a problem with an article, then don't post it on the site. It's pretty easy.:)
Now I'm going to sit here and watch my otherwise good karma go negative. Had to get it off my chest.
I agree. This hit me as Fark.com material. Not something you'd expect to be posted on Slashdot.
Between this link, the global power grid story (utter crap w/ assumptions about how the grid works), and the iDesk (ikea garbage), I'm starting to wonder what to expect from Slashdot.
I don't know.. The higher the 2001SE score, the higher the FPS in a game, typically. That is, unless someone's drivers are cheating.
He didn't even mention 3DMark2003, which does a more comprehensive job testing modern GPU features and is included on any benchmarks of 'modern' (aka DX9 supported) cards.
Think about it, in 2000 when they were working on the 3dmark 2001, directx8.1 wasn't even done; to my knowledge, most of DX8 wasn't even used in 3dmark 2001se.. Since then, cards came out with tons of new feature sets (directx9, AGP 8X, etc) and there was simply a lag time between good benchmarking software.
Now, I do agree with charting performance over time. This would be much more handy when doing comparisons of AMD and Inel processors. I get the same over-all frame rate with my AMD 2400 as an Intel @ ~2.6gig. But, the Intel w/ a faster bus will likely not be getting those split second ticks where the AMD is 100% occupied or the FSB is flooded.
I'm not knocking AMD at all. I can just tell a difference in the overall smoothness of a CPU intensive game. When I bought mine, I spent about 3/4 of what I would have spent on an Inel rig and got around 3/4 of the performance.
It all works out once you stop paying attention to a marketing department. People always say you can't trust advertising, but act so suprised when a company is exposed for making a false claim of some minor sort.
you get what you pay for.
Also, instead of complaining about poor benchmarks in real-world situations, you should write the various game developers and request they add, or consider adding, a benchmark to their game engines. Having to 'devise' a way to test game performance probably isn't going to result in wide-spread adoption of that particular benchmark. ID Software's engines have always come with built-in benchmarks (timedemo), thus making them very easy to test. That's why you always see the games that use ID's engines in benchmarks.
That brings me to my final point, he mentions that StarWars game should be tested instead of Q3, yet it uses the same engine. Sorry, more copies of Q3 exist, and since any game using that engine doesn't bring anything new to the table, might as well stick with it. eh?
Right, but I doubt many of us actually think end-users are going to adopt Linux in it's present form. As easy installs and package management gets simpler/more stable, more will hop onboard.
I'm guessing that once a distro comes along that's 100% end user friendly and has one-click security updates (P2P based, eliminating subscriptions), etc we'll see a big move. Not huge, just big enough to make an impact. Then we have to beg and pray that game developers will more actively port or develope games for Linux..
We just have to get X fixed up, Gnome prettier, and zealots less zealotty. All in due time. There will be a day when Linux is on top, I have no doubt, but it'll be a long while.:)
I guess the point I am avoiding saying is nothing stays the same for very long. Over the longest haul, you can't compete with free. Eventually, something will happen, markets will shift, etc. Just because there's a monopoly now, it might not be that way 10 years off. At the same time, we have to not be short-sighted and expect things to happen right away or assume they'll never happen at all. It's not all about the right here, right now.
Hopefully, today we can do better, but again, today we become frustrated (I know I do) because we can't get hours-long DVD-quality video from Mars rover.
That's what I want.. The Mars DVD set. Hours of a rover wandering over alien terrain.
It would definitely make a good backdrop video at a house party. Well, if you are like me and the only girls who frequent your parties are from IRC and AIM.
Yes, not quite as significant, but it paves the way for more home users. If an employee has a linux workstation at the office, and gets used to their particular interface, then they'll be much more likely to ask for Linux when they purchase their next new home computer.
I doubt the 20% figure is accurate. I might be wrong, but my gut tells me otherwise.:(
Something about wookies, ewoks, and jedi masters doesn't get my rod up.
Re:A custom desk form my PCs
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iWorkstations?
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· Score: 1
I miss using one of those things. When I upgraded to dual 21" trinitrons, mine warped and got rather unstable.
Perhaps when flat panels get bigger and cheaper, I will revisit the folding table 'custom'..:)
Re:No coffee cup holders? Well...
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iWorkstations?
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Yeah no kidding.
This desk probably fits in best around those who drive new beetles. Too bad there's not a little flower vase holder so they can transport their favorite flower from the dashboard to their desk, too.
Apparently innovation is being unable to do traditional tasks like writing on a sheet of paper with a pencil.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, your company could change it's official IM client. It's not like they are really stuck, here.
Perhaps you could suggest they set up their own Jabber server. This will increase employee's security, as it is HTTPS driven, and the server would belong to your company, so you wouldn't have to worry about people being slackers and talking to friends and family on it while they should be getting work done.
It's quite amusing that you think this is illegal. It's not illegal to offer a service for free to build a user base, then restrict it's use in a certain way that allows you to bring in some revenue. They could even, legally, shut MSN down, without notice if they wanted.
This little transcript comes to mind when I picture you taking your case up with the government:
You "Mr. Government, MSN won't let me use GAIM to access their network. I really don't like paying for my service by viewing ads. I want it for free. Please take them to jail!"
Mr. Government "Get a life, dweeb."
Another way of saying the same thing:
/got nothin
You invest a lot of money into making a nice private party, but it's only for people with invitations.
Then people start showing up with forged invitations and begin drinking all the beer you paid for.
Then they have the nerve to pitch a fit when you ask them to leave.
Who's the vendor? Until that is shown, this is not news, but just 'someone said this...' speak.
I really don't understand why this parent got modded up while speaking on assumptions about the new OS. They, very well, could be fully focused on these action items you mention. It's border-line flamebait with it's pre-emptive strike on Windows users and the assumption that someone who plays a few games on their windows box would reply in the stated manner. This just reaks of immature thinking.
The way you talk about it, it sounds like you think the same people who design interfaces are also in charge of application security. They don't. It's likely the person who came up with the interface design doesn't know a single line of C code.
It would be one of the biggest bad ideas M$ ever made if they came out with a new OS and didn't have a fancy new interface. Especially since OSX came out, it's been the worst thing about XP to most users.
I chuckle at the notion of making a prettier desktop would not result in more sales in the desktop market. All they will have to do is pump up the airwaves with a lot of commercials hyping up the new look and functionality, and people will flock to the stores to get it. Not to mention when they eventually expire updates and support for XP in a few years.
I'm no M$ Windows supporter by any stretch of the imagination. I'm just an adult who depends on technology to put food on my table, I'm also a realist. As a result, working in a modern office, I have to stay sharp with linux, freebsd, solaris, windows 2000, and a lot of the applications that run on these systems, such as active directory.
My current Active Directory box has normally had 100+ day uptimes, only being rebooted after applying security patches. It serves about 1800 users. I've had FreeBSD boxes that exceeded 700 day uptimes and only got rebooted due to the need to standardize distro versions for a cvs project I was working on. I've also had a few Linux systems that were completely unstable, daily rebooters due to bad code in a vendor application.
It's all in how you run your servers, really. Just as in Linux, you are going to have an unstable box if you try to run too many services on it, don't pay attention to your resources, or install 1 more application on the system than is vital to use it for it's specified tasks.
I don't like M$ because of the anti-trust issues and how they used to be slow to issue patches to known exploits, I could really care less about their software being closed source (like commercial unix, mac, etc).. Nowadays, they usually have a patch that your XP box can automatically download and install, usually the same day the exploit steps into the wild.
On a final thought, you are responding to what appears to be a 13 year old gamer who hasn't posted his comment yet. My game system usually only has a few hours uptime. I turn it on, it defrags it's swap drive, then the rest of the system, loads XP, I open gamespy, play my game, close game, shut the computer off, and go back to work on my xfree workstation. XP does this particular task flawlessly for me. I'm assuming the majority of computer users (non-geeks) have similar practices. I can see and understand why stability is not their number one goal. It's not relevant if your machine runs flawlessly doing day to day tasks. If you run XP 24/7, have lots of software on it, don't maintain it properly, yeah, you are going to have some problems that require a lot of reboots.
Anyway, do you really want Windows so stable that no enterprise of any financial capability will even look at a Linux solution? I'd prefer Windows stay just like it is in the server realm..
Isn't it amazing how something so unimportant as a few studios that produce screen plays and music can drastically change the laws in a huge country full of freedom loving (wanting) people?
The RIAA and MPAA members wealthy off our dollar. Please don't spend more money with these people unless you don't mind kissing more freedoms goodbye.
Ok, pardon my french.. What the hell are systems in charge of nuclear power plant safety controls doing running Windows? Not to mention having enough connectivity to the outside world to allow something like this.
I don't understand how the safety of an entire city can be maintained by such networks and computer systems. I'd much prefer to see a commercial unix system or some BSD flavored system with NO external connectivity, STRICT firewall rules to not allow it to talk to anything it doesn't have to, only on specific ports, etc. It's not so hard, I've set up pretty good sized networks this way before and I'm borderline redneck.
It's just amazing... Right when I think mankind isn't totally doomed, I read this.
Typically a system admin with a non-technical manager will escalate and whine until they get one.
I've had users lie through their teeth about custom fwding ports not working or being unreliable, just so they can get higher powers invovled over their 'inability to be productive with the provided solution'.. This is so they can get out in the wild and do whatever on the network, without watchful corporate eyes on them. Meanwhile, the company suffers in bandwidth costs and liability.
Yeah, no kidding.
At my last job, I did corporate information security for several years for a large ISP.
We had specific policy regarding everything to do with software and just about everyone infringed at some point.
For example, Playing games at work == termination. At any given time, I could dump an interface on a firewall at any of our offices and see Quake3 or Counter-strike games being played. The people who 'could not be behind the proxy or nat due to their job function' would often try and set up game servers.
This sort of thing seems to be rampant in technical businesses. A large percentage of technical types feel that they are smart, the exception, or somehow immune to company policy. Combine this with a slacker attitude and you have some problems. What they don't understand, there is a whole world of people playing catchup to the American technical market. Soon enough, they'll have all our jobs. My last position was eliminated when they announced 3000 of our call center employees and three offices were shutting down due to their spiffy new contract with a support company in India.
Anyway, back to the software licence issues. For organizations like the BSA, any sizable office is an easy target, as unless the IT group comes across as 'network nazis', software policy will be ignored by most.
I once worked at a smaller firm who would make employees pay out of pocket for any licence infractions they caused. One guy got stuck with the option of finding a new job or pay for the company's costs surrounding an unlicenced suite of Adobe products. I think it cost him around $3k. He paid it, then got canned a few months later for going on a week-long coke binge. He forgot to schedule some vacation time for it.
I really didn't like the last Matrix movie, save the special effects and fight scenes. Maybe I'm getting old and angry, but the acting wasn't all that great.
The movie did look awesome when I saw it on IMAX. You could see that the cars doing flips on the highway, during that one scene, didn't have motors in them. Not that it matters, I just didn't notice on the smaller big screen.
Oh, and the Oracle's skin looks really nasty when they do close ups on the IMAX. They really should have photoshop'd her or get out the airbrush.
"Ever get the feeling your Usenet newsgroup list is being watched? By Microsoft? If so, consider yourself right. An interesting but troubling CNET interview with Microsoft's in-house sociologist goes into how the software giant is keeping a close eye on newsgroups and other public e-mail lists, tracking and rating contributors' social habits and determining "people who the system has shown to have value."
I don't see what is disturbing about this. Notice the word "public" here. What's wrong with a corporation trying to figure out a little more about how humans interract with the services and software it's customers use? Especially when they never tried to hide it.
I'm sure if the Linux Project hired a sociologist to examine the uses and interractions between Linux developers and users, in public forum, you would think "Wow, what an innovative idea!".
As for privacy on Usenet, every action you perform gets logged on a big RAID array at your ISP. Most ISPs back that data up on tape and store it offsite for a couple of months. Paranoid now? Oh, this includes your downloads too.
I'm no supporter of M$ by a long shot, but I think it's silly when everything they do gets treated like some nasty conspiracy when it just boils down to building data for marketing and development purposes. Notice how he's been there for ~4 years, that's about the time most big companies started taking extra measures to get inside their customer's heads.
This is about as disturbing as "A sociologist from Microsoft may have visited your public website, and read it too!"
XViD is on the path to surpass DiVX, being rapidly developed open source.
Nothing is different for the end-user's experience. Encoding is a teenie bit more flakey than DiVX, but I'd expect it to have surpassed DiVX within a year in the quality/compression department.
Now only if we can drum up enough support to put Real and QT out of business. >:-)
http://www.xvid.org/
Yes, but you reduce yourself to a Anonymous Coward name-calling, little flamebaiter on Slashdot.
Come forth and tell the world your ideas on how to deal with homeless people? Just feeding them and giving temporary shelter doesn't fix anything.
Homeless people and those on wellfare or in section 8 housing are a PROBLEM in america.
The gallery of privacy rights activists are foaming at the mouth, but really, the government knows the general location of every home owner and person that has a license to drive by their addresses. They can come and get you in your sleep, but they don't.
I'd personally like to see this homeless thing dealt with somehow. Most of you have not lived in an area where bums gather. It's pretty bad as they will break into cars and harass the crap out of people until they get into a shelter, go to jail, or end up dead. In Atlanta, during the winter, cops find or get calls about dead homeless people daily. It doesn't make the news, but it's very common.
Homelessness is typically the last step for most people with mental or addiction problems. Once they get out on the street, it's not very common they grow old and retire like normal folk.
I'd be comfortable with the idea of sending them to work camps until they learn to sober up and take care of themselves. As payment for the labor, they would get minimum wage, room and board. They would be required to remain on the campus or worksite for the duration of their term, say 6 months, and when their term is up appoint them to a low-income housing project and release their wages to them. Run it like a military, as to teach them discipline. Once they graduate from the program, have them appointed to a permanent job as construction workers or whatever has openings in the basic-labor field and give the companies who hire them a tax break.
I know bleeding heart liberals would have a breakdown trying to swallow such a program, but at least it gives them a chance at being an average joe someday. Once on the streets, if they aren't addicted to booze or drugs it's only a matter of time as that's the only thing to comfort yourself with when you don't have anything. That's why it takes a broad sweeping and new approach to dealing with the matter.
I hate political labels, but yeah, that fits.
I guess I'll have to come right out and say it...
First off, why should I work to support someone's grandmother, bastard children, unemployed mother, mexican immigrant, etc? I'm sorry, but that's not MY responsibility. I disagree with taxation to support anyone. Taxes should be to pay the expenses of running a government, not supporting a nation.
How exatcly would limiting section8 and handouts help america.
Very easy.. It would put money back in the pockets of the people that worked for it. These are the people who will invest it or spend it on traded goods. Did you know between 15-20% of your tax dollars go to entitlement programs?
Give that money back to the people it belongs to, they'll spend it on something besides alchohol, drugs, crap foods, and such. This would result in more production, jobs, and economic growth.
People wouldn't starve. They'd actually be motivated to be a family and help one another out.
Anyway, are you aware how section 8 works? Basically, you pay a discounted (or no) rent, and the government picks up what you didn't pay. This is often $400-800/mo per household. Guess what? Most of these are single, minority mothers. They started off single, had babies knowing they would get a free ride until the child turns 18.
Think I am exaggerating? I have a relative who's manager over a local apartment complex that began filing section 8's about 4 years ago. She has to deal with these people all the time. These single mothers keep having babies, even after they were already filed under the program. What sense does that make? They needed money from ME to pay for their first kid and now they keep having more! BTW, this is a middle income complex and there's about 315 section 8's. All female, all with no job, no education, and a bunch of kids. Most have boyfriends living with them, for free, on our dollar too.
Sure, we can keep those programs, but I'd suggest that we begin sterilizing anyone that applies.
I know there's sweet little old ladies out there that need our help. I just don't think the government should play a role and force others to help. A more localized, community or church organization would be a much better answer. If taxes were lower, people would contribute to these sort of things a bit more. Especially when there's nothing else to fall back on.
If adults acted more like adults, we wouldn't be in this situation. Invest in your future now, don't leech on society later.
The same thing goes with drug prohibition.
:)
There's ample, untapped, opportunities for our government to legalize and tax commodities that have no real harm on society, but are illegal for moral concerns.
A 2000 year old book tells you gambling is a sin, so we've got to make sure it's illegal in 2003. It's amazing how far we've come as a society in some aspects, and how badly we've done in others.
I say we ditch all the 'moral' laws and stick to the ones that actual cause harm to others. End entitlement programs (hand outs, section 8, etc). Separate church and state for real. Ditch de-regulation of utilities. Make punishments for government employees who let contributions change a vote extreme. Then sit back and watch America become a better place to live.
Sorry for the bad grammar, it's the thought that counts.
What is going on with Slashdot this week? How many links to Wired articles are you going to post that you disagree with?
:)
Most of the more technical people in the Slashdot crowd are aware that Wired is like the Sun, but about tech. It's not a real news source, and it's articles are written 90% for entertainment, 10% information. It's done that way to attract the largest crowd it can while still being a 'technical' source. Wired also has very fishy reviews. The bottom line appears to be, if you have ad space with them, your product will get mentioned anytime they can stick it in an article and it will always get a good review.
Back when I first started reading Wired, I would send corrections in for articles almost daily. These included links and details of why information they had posted was inaccurate and was worded very nicely, as not to offend anyone. Guess what? They never corrected anything. That's when it occured to me that they are more concerned with 'eyeballs' (old marketing term) than being an accurate information source.
Anyway, I beg of the Slashdot lords to please stop with the Wired links. If you don't agree with them or have a problem with an article, then don't post it on the site. It's pretty easy.
Now I'm going to sit here and watch my otherwise good karma go negative. Had to get it off my chest.
I agree. This hit me as Fark.com material. Not something you'd expect to be posted on Slashdot.
Between this link, the global power grid story (utter crap w/ assumptions about how the grid works), and the iDesk (ikea garbage), I'm starting to wonder what to expect from Slashdot.
I don't know.. The higher the 2001SE score, the higher the FPS in a game, typically. That is, unless someone's drivers are cheating.
He didn't even mention 3DMark2003, which does a more comprehensive job testing modern GPU features and is included on any benchmarks of 'modern' (aka DX9 supported) cards.
Think about it, in 2000 when they were working on the 3dmark 2001, directx8.1 wasn't even done; to my knowledge, most of DX8 wasn't even used in 3dmark 2001se.. Since then, cards came out with tons of new feature sets (directx9, AGP 8X, etc) and there was simply a lag time between good benchmarking software.
Now, I do agree with charting performance over time. This would be much more handy when doing comparisons of AMD and Inel processors. I get the same over-all frame rate with my AMD 2400 as an Intel @ ~2.6gig. But, the Intel w/ a faster bus will likely not be getting those split second ticks where the AMD is 100% occupied or the FSB is flooded.
I'm not knocking AMD at all. I can just tell a difference in the overall smoothness of a CPU intensive game. When I bought mine, I spent about 3/4 of what I would have spent on an Inel rig and got around 3/4 of the performance.
It all works out once you stop paying attention to a marketing department. People always say you can't trust advertising, but act so suprised when a company is exposed for making a false claim of some minor sort.
you get what you pay for.
Also, instead of complaining about poor benchmarks in real-world situations, you should write the various game developers and request they add, or consider adding, a benchmark to their game engines. Having to 'devise' a way to test game performance probably isn't going to result in wide-spread adoption of that particular benchmark. ID Software's engines have always come with built-in benchmarks (timedemo), thus making them very easy to test. That's why you always see the games that use ID's engines in benchmarks.
That brings me to my final point, he mentions that StarWars game should be tested instead of Q3, yet it uses the same engine. Sorry, more copies of Q3 exist, and since any game using that engine doesn't bring anything new to the table, might as well stick with it. eh?
Right, but I doubt many of us actually think end-users are going to adopt Linux in it's present form. As easy installs and package management gets simpler/more stable, more will hop onboard.
:)
I'm guessing that once a distro comes along that's 100% end user friendly and has one-click security updates (P2P based, eliminating subscriptions), etc we'll see a big move. Not huge, just big enough to make an impact. Then we have to beg and pray that game developers will more actively port or develope games for Linux..
We just have to get X fixed up, Gnome prettier, and zealots less zealotty. All in due time. There will be a day when Linux is on top, I have no doubt, but it'll be a long while.
I guess the point I am avoiding saying is nothing stays the same for very long. Over the longest haul, you can't compete with free. Eventually, something will happen, markets will shift, etc. Just because there's a monopoly now, it might not be that way 10 years off. At the same time, we have to not be short-sighted and expect things to happen right away or assume they'll never happen at all. It's not all about the right here, right now.
Hopefully, today we can do better, but again, today we become frustrated (I know I do) because we can't get hours-long DVD-quality video from Mars rover.
That's what I want.. The Mars DVD set. Hours of a rover wandering over alien terrain.
It would definitely make a good backdrop video at a house party. Well, if you are like me and the only girls who frequent your parties are from IRC and AIM.
Yes, not quite as significant, but it paves the way for more home users. If an employee has a linux workstation at the office, and gets used to their particular interface, then they'll be much more likely to ask for Linux when they purchase their next new home computer.
:(
I doubt the 20% figure is accurate. I might be wrong, but my gut tells me otherwise.
That's what I was thinking..
Starwars and sex? How about a female and sex.
Something about wookies, ewoks, and jedi masters doesn't get my rod up.
I miss using one of those things. When I upgraded to dual 21" trinitrons, mine warped and got rather unstable.
Perhaps when flat panels get bigger and cheaper, I will revisit the folding table 'custom'..
Yeah no kidding.
This desk probably fits in best around those who drive new beetles. Too bad there's not a little flower vase holder so they can transport their favorite flower from the dashboard to their desk, too.
Apparently innovation is being unable to do traditional tasks like writing on a sheet of paper with a pencil.