What I would like to see is an easing of the GPL so that proprietary code can interface with GPL code. i.e. call or link to GPL libraries, shared objects etc. That way people would be actually free to do what they want. Proprietary programs could run on Linux and there would be more high quality apps available to run on it. Then more people would be apt to use Linux. Then the folks who write open source programs would have a bigger potential audience (a win win situation). I'm not sure, but this could go both ways too. Proprietary programs might open up API's that open source programs could link to. For example, to allow an printer driver to be able to have an open source plug-in created for an unsupported printer that someone may have. That would be a long shot I admit, but some drivers already support open source. If more people were to use Linux, then of course the other would be bound to follow.
People use proprietary programs to do their work, quite frankly because there are more and better quality programs that are proprietary. A well known behaviour of computer users is that they won't use programs that are a pain in the ass to use, even if they can do what the user needs. The user will find an easier way to do the same thing, or find a better program that makes it easier. Given that Linux is free as in beer and people are still not using it, it follows that the programs that run on Linux by and large do not allow people to do their jobs easily (yes there are some that pretty good, but not enough). Given that people don't generally like to spend money, it follows that if they are willing to buy programs that they need, those programs must be far better than the free ones. Unfortunately the proprietary programs that those people buy can't run on Linux because all programs need the support of the O/S and proprietary programs cannot interface to GPL'd programs. If people could get their programs to run on a free O/S that supports what they need and is more secure by design, I think they would use that O/S; especially as Distros like SUSE and Redhat have made it very easy to use Linux.
I do like SUSE, but I do tend to use my Windows machine more because I can do pretty much everything on it that I can do on Linux, and more. The kicker are some of the design tools I use, that don't have analogues on Linux. It doesn't make sense to go back and forth. So I keep a Linux machine around to the actual coding on for learning and personal development. I work with enterprise java systems, which usually run on Linux or Unix. As an aside, it blows my mind how many Java programmers out there don't know very much (or squat) about Unix or Linux; even though their code ultimately will be running on a Unix or Linux system. ls, grep, and more are about all that most know. I figure if your code runs on it, it is a tool you use, and you should know your tools. I know my tool. But that's another story. Say good night Dick.
It is good to see the fanatics mod me down. GPL fanboy fanatics while spouting freedom and all things around it that they espouse, seem to be anathemas to free thought. You must think like us or you are cursed and evil. They try to silence and shout down all those who do not think like them. But this is evidenced in the GPL. It is not 'free'. It imposes as many serious restrictions than other piece of software. And its restrictions limit a persons ability to earn a living writing open source code. Without that, there is no way to create a long term 'buy in' from the developer so that the software he or she creates is maintained and improved over the long run. Look at database app tora. It was OK, but once the developer joined Quest (TOAD) it just sat there. It was OK, not great to begin with. Then it sat and didn't work with new versions of the databases. Now the only people who work on it are the occasional student who will work on it for a semester for a project or sometimes a little longer. When real life comes in (like a job or girlfriend, etc.) then they stop working on it. If the ability to put food on the table depended on developing the app, he would keep developing it and make it the best he could. But it doesn't happen. That is the history of Linux apps. All except those where corporate interests are involved. Where they make more money by using free server software. Or even where they contribute coders to make the server software better because it is still cheaper than paying tens of millions for a commercial version. And even there, it is long term profit... keeping the corporate equivalent of food on the table that drives the development. But only of server side software. The only desktop improvements come from the distros who earn a living selling to customers and who survive on that income. It is in their interest to improve things. So the bottom line is that being able to pay the rent is the only thing that drives even Linux development. Do you think even Torvalds would be working on the kernel so much if he couldn't get paid for it? Maybe a little on the side, but no. And I'll call anyone bullshit if they think otherwise. So the ability for people to fork your code and make money on your hard work is what will keep anything other than server side code in a Micky Mouse state until a fundamental change in he license happens.
I deprive the store of the income resulting from a sale
So you are still taking food off of someone's plate. And that is the part where people have a problem with stealing. Bernard Madhoff didn't take anything physical. He transferred funds, usually electronically. The victims were still hurt. You deprive people of their money or their ability to make money, even without walking off the premises with a bag of loot, you are still stealing.
The OP is looking for something that works for his family and friends who are average computer users/laypeople. Not something that meets people's ideological values; people who are usually technical experts compared to the vast majority of computer users. I tried to like Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Debian, but I found myself having to build and configure too many things in order to get functionality that I believe should have 'just worked'. I also am not a fan of the GPL. I believe in the spirit of it, but it is too fanatical and viral. There should be ways to allow interfaces between GPL and proprietary code. That way, those who want to maintain closed source could, and those who want to provide open source could. And they could work together. That is what I call open. But it is what it is, and I can only hope that Stallman and his Stallmanites disappear so that reasonable people can prevail.
I am all for HTML 5 and it replacing the hodgepodge of crap out there to mitigate the usecase gaps in HTML 4. However I wouldn't blame MS for this quite yet. The W3C was supposed to come out with something conclusive by now. Sure we have a good idea of what will be in HTML 5, but a good idea and a couple of dollars might get you a cup coffee at Starbucks. i.e. good ideas disappear out of final specs and products all the time. Why should MS redesign things to accommodate features that may not even make it into the final spec or even recommendation? It costs money to write and then rewrite code. Meanwhile they have something that is meeting its needs right now. So I say the W3C should shit or get off the pot before people start playing the blame game. If MS still screws around once something better than a 'draft' version is released, then fine. Until then...
I agree. SUSE is the way to go. Some points I like: first distro I tried where wifi worked without a big hassle. For those who want to use motherboard raid, it recognizes it and you don't have to endure people telling you it is fakeraid and all the other bullshit. That is, you can set up your drives as YOU want from the installer. No separate 'alternate' installer where raid installation doesn't work anyway, even if using kernel based software raid. The wifi and raid bullshit turned me off of Ubuntu. They keep trying to add bells and whistles and keep ignoring fundamental issues like this. I liked Ubuntu in general (Kubuntu actually). But these issues turned me off of it. I avoided Suse before because of Novels dealings with MS. However someone recently convinced me to try Suse again, and it was good. It is not perfect, but for the average user it is a very good Linux distro. Instructions to install proprietary media drivers are about as difficult to find as with Ubuntu. i.e. a quick Google for Suse 11.2 mp3 drivers or similar and you find a link to the opensuse group that has the driver links. If you pay for the distro (which everyone should now and then... so they stay in business), I believe the drivers are included.
There are times when outages happen; and the first time a major internet outage happens in an area, they will hear a lot about it. When it comes back up their email servers will get flooded. And if they don't respond, they will likely lose a lot of business from that area. Eventually all areas will experience this. It won't last. However, the game I was waiting for to come out, Silent Hunter V.... I won't be buying now. See, it has already started. So either emails or dollars will talk. But I admit, I think the dollars will talk louder. i.e. don't buy their shite.
They still pay money for the drinks, whether liquor or soda or juice. They are still paying for entertainment. So they can't afford 100 dollars in one night. So they don't normally have cash on hand to buy a game. It means they have to save up for their game. If someone said they couldn't afford to buy a beer, does that mean it's alright to steal it from the store. I couldn't find another way to entertain myself so I stole it officer. Oh, well mikael says it's alright if you don't make a lot of money to steal stuff to entertain yourself with, so it's alright go home and drink it.
That is an interesting sentiment from a citizen of a country that owes China hundreds of billions of dollars. The national debt thingy is awfully inconvenient, is it not?
Actually my country doesn't owe them hundreds of billions to China. Up to about a year ago, Canada was actually paying down its national debt. But yes, we owe about 580 billion dollars (CDN) but most of it is owed to Canadians in the form of bonds. Something less than 20% of that is owed to foreign interests. But in any case, we have something like a 60 billion dollar trade deficit to China. And the Chinese don't seem to want to even think about parity. Hence my comment. What don't you get? FWIW, if people would get their heads out of their asses and stop buying from Walmart and similar institutions and insist on buying either American, or from those with similar values (freedom, clean environment, etc.) then we wouldn't need to give a shit about what China does. But like oil and the middle east, America is addicted. Yes I know Canada is the United State's biggest supplier of oil and natural gas. However the amount coming from the middle east is huge. If America would stop listening to the bullshit from the oil companies and stop electing officials who are backed by big oil, they could have found a substitute for oil to power things by now. Heck, the fuel cell was actually invented around the turn of the last century. If they had worked on making that efficient for the last 110 years, we would all be driving electric vehicles.
And I forgot to add that I disagree with the OP's sig that patriotism is bigotry. While I am not a big fan of deGaulle (let's just say I would have preferred we left him in Dunkirk when the Germans arrived), proving the "exception to the rule" rule, he said one smart thing:
"Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first." -deGaulle
Nationalism is bigotry. Nationalism leads to ethnic cleansing, even in the form of languagelaws. The statement is true even though it is completely at odds with his bullshit behaviour in Quebec in 1967 where he supported nationalism (and stuck his nose in Canada's affairs... and pissed off enough people that he had to fly home early leaving the ship he came in to sail home without him... and earning him the status of "rectum non grata" in Canada).
I tend to agree that the U.S. government... the Bush government, and now the Obama government; which doesn't seem to mind what Bush put in place in this regard... has pretty much shot themselves in the foot when it comes to whether we should trust them or not with our privacy. Even going so far as ignoring the constitution.
On the other hand, the Chinese government is still an autocratic entity that frequently jails people for expressing their opinions. As bad as what the FBI has done, I am not convinced that they have abused the spirit of the constitution enough to equal what China frequently does to its own people. My first inclination is that I would say to not trust Chinese CA's. And for those who think they only apply to the Chinese themselves, you have your head in the sand at the Walmart Beach Resort. So much of our stuff comes out of China; and many companies' web sites for support and such are hosted there now. What happens if you log in with https? I think we give China too much already. Granted with all the offshoring scumbag companies out there, my bank account info is probably on servers over there already, but why help more?
What makes me wonder about this is the fact that many museums stop visitors from taking photographs of exhibits because they state they maintain a copyright of everything in the museum. For example I visited Paul Allen's 'Experience the Music Project' in Seattle and wanted to photograph a 100+ year old guitar (without using a flash). The security guard came over and told me I couldn't because that would be copyright infringement, and he would have to throw me out. I thought WTF? How do you copyright the reflection of light off of an object into my eyes, or onto my CCD? That is the ultimate of fact... what is there before your eyes. Of course not being as rich as a Microsoft co-founder, I have no resources to challenge the validity of this kind of copyright, so decided to leave and not give those pricks any more of my money than I already did.
For anyone who prefers their email format in text as opposed to html or rich text, it still isn't bad.:) But I think I'll stick with a GUI.
What I don't understand is how the article poster could possibly make the statement that Google Mail is good for large corporations. If I were a large (or even small) corporation, I wouldn't want any of my email messages, many of which likely containing proprietary information, being stored on another corporations mail servers. That's not only giving you a fair chance to shoot yourself in the foot, it is like asking for a marksman to shoot you in the foot for you.
RIM's Blackberry is so popular because RIM can't tell what you are emailing. It doesn't store your email. Your company still uses its own mail servers, and anything that goes through RIM's servers is not staged, and is encrypted so only your company knows what your business is. Fat chance data mining Google will encrypt mail so that they can't tell what it says.
You must have missed this part of my post: "The fact that people select Wikipedia to go to so often is likely why a Wikipedia search result is almost always near the top of a Google search.":)
When you search on almost anything on Google, all you get is a listing of people who sell some item with your search term in the product name. Sometimes it isn't even that. Sometimes it a page that is another advertising search page.
At least when you search for something in Wikipedia you get to a topic, not an advert. The fact that people select Wikipedia to go to so often is likely why a Wikipedia search result is almost always near the top of a Google search. Most of the time, it is the only type of information a person is looking for. 'Tell me about subject xyz', I don't want to fucking buy it, just learn about it. A lot of the time now, except when looking for product (one I have already bought) or programming forums I just search Wikipedia immediately. The articles also usually have enough external links to get me surfing for more info without needing to use Google too much.
I worked in heavy industry before. Occassoinally when working on equipment like conveyers and things that can cut you in half or suffocate you or poison you confined space entries, people get killed or maimed. Not very often. Probably only a fraction of a percent of the time. It happens when either someone accidently turns on a piece of equipment someone is working on, opens a valve to a disassembled pipe, goes into a space without checking for poison gas, or not locking out electrical hazards, etc. etc. etc. These things can happen, but people actually do try to be careful, so in actual fact there are not a lot of issues like this happening. However the impact of all of these activities and actions is very high. Death or serious life changing injury.
So most places now implement work permits and confined space entry permits. They mandate that supervisors have to inspect the work site, identify dangers, make sure they are locked out or otherwise neutralized (electrical lockouts with actual locks on the switches), test for correct atmosphere (e.g. 21% O2, no poisonous gases), ensure lookouts and rescue crews are in position where required, and get another supervisor and the actual crew working to sign off on it too. Notifications are made throughout the facility are made and then work can begin. Anywhere I worked where that has been done experiences a significant decrease of lost time injury. In fact one place. And in fact at major pilot project I worked at for four to five years, an experiemental 6 megawatt direct current closed top arc furnace (the largest direct current arc furnace smelter ever built... as opposed to standard 3 phase AC open top) which by the nature of being the first ever built like this was potentially a very dangerous place, there were no lost time injuries. We followed policies as described above. There were a great deal of potential dangers, all as listed above; poison gases as a major bi-product, carcinogenic materials (crystaline silica with a great deal of dust (not sand)), molten metal, confined spaces, gantry cranes, etc. By following the kind of risk management assessment I described originally, in four to five years we had no lost time injuries to anyone there. A broken thumb once and a few burns. In contrast, the contractors building the place over the course of one year they had a number of serious accidents including one fellow who fell four stories and broke his back. They did not follow this practice. Or at least not very well.
Precautions help. Saying they don't is fallacy. If you don't believe it, stop looking both ways before you cross busy streets, and make sure you are texting and listening to your mp3 player.
100% sure he wasn't messing with me. I thought it was a joke at first and laughed. He was stone faced. I kept thinking he has to be joking but he didn't change. He and his friends around him were too consistent for it to be a joke. Sad but true.
After I talked to the genetic engineer (for Monsanto) in Saint Louis that told me he didn't believe in evolution, I've kind of thought religious fundamentalists of any kind are brain damaged. After that I would usually ask most people I met if they believed in evolution. It was a good way to filter out the retards. Don't believe in evolution eh? Later.
Risk management in NOT just about the odds of some event or action happening like almost everyone seems to think. It also has to take into account the impact of the event or action. Low risk low impact, don't worry so much. High risk low impact, still don't have to worry that much unless the frequency is an issue. Low risk high impact (like death), take actions to prevent it. High risk high impact, just don't even bother.
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What I would like to see is an easing of the GPL so that proprietary code can interface with GPL code. i.e. call or link to GPL libraries, shared objects etc. That way people would be actually free to do what they want. Proprietary programs could run on Linux and there would be more high quality apps available to run on it. Then more people would be apt to use Linux. Then the folks who write open source programs would have a bigger potential audience (a win win situation). I'm not sure, but this could go both ways too. Proprietary programs might open up API's that open source programs could link to. For example, to allow an printer driver to be able to have an open source plug-in created for an unsupported printer that someone may have. That would be a long shot I admit, but some drivers already support open source. If more people were to use Linux, then of course the other would be bound to follow.
People use proprietary programs to do their work, quite frankly because there are more and better quality programs that are proprietary. A well known behaviour of computer users is that they won't use programs that are a pain in the ass to use, even if they can do what the user needs. The user will find an easier way to do the same thing, or find a better program that makes it easier. Given that Linux is free as in beer and people are still not using it, it follows that the programs that run on Linux by and large do not allow people to do their jobs easily (yes there are some that pretty good, but not enough). Given that people don't generally like to spend money, it follows that if they are willing to buy programs that they need, those programs must be far better than the free ones. Unfortunately the proprietary programs that those people buy can't run on Linux because all programs need the support of the O/S and proprietary programs cannot interface to GPL'd programs. If people could get their programs to run on a free O/S that supports what they need and is more secure by design, I think they would use that O/S; especially as Distros like SUSE and Redhat have made it very easy to use Linux.
I do like SUSE, but I do tend to use my Windows machine more because I can do pretty much everything on it that I can do on Linux, and more. The kicker are some of the design tools I use, that don't have analogues on Linux. It doesn't make sense to go back and forth. So I keep a Linux machine around to the actual coding on for learning and personal development. I work with enterprise java systems, which usually run on Linux or Unix. As an aside, it blows my mind how many Java programmers out there don't know very much (or squat) about Unix or Linux; even though their code ultimately will be running on a Unix or Linux system. ls, grep, and more are about all that most know. I figure if your code runs on it, it is a tool you use, and you should know your tools. I know my tool. But that's another story. Say good night Dick.
It is good to see the fanatics mod me down. GPL fanboy fanatics while spouting freedom and all things around it that they espouse, seem to be anathemas to free thought. You must think like us or you are cursed and evil. They try to silence and shout down all those who do not think like them. But this is evidenced in the GPL. It is not 'free'. It imposes as many serious restrictions than other piece of software. And its restrictions limit a persons ability to earn a living writing open source code. Without that, there is no way to create a long term 'buy in' from the developer so that the software he or she creates is maintained and improved over the long run. Look at database app tora. It was OK, but once the developer joined Quest (TOAD) it just sat there. It was OK, not great to begin with. Then it sat and didn't work with new versions of the databases. Now the only people who work on it are the occasional student who will work on it for a semester for a project or sometimes a little longer. When real life comes in (like a job or girlfriend, etc.) then they stop working on it. If the ability to put food on the table depended on developing the app, he would keep developing it and make it the best he could. But it doesn't happen. That is the history of Linux apps. All except those where corporate interests are involved. Where they make more money by using free server software. Or even where they contribute coders to make the server software better because it is still cheaper than paying tens of millions for a commercial version. And even there, it is long term profit... keeping the corporate equivalent of food on the table that drives the development. But only of server side software. The only desktop improvements come from the distros who earn a living selling to customers and who survive on that income. It is in their interest to improve things. So the bottom line is that being able to pay the rent is the only thing that drives even Linux development. Do you think even Torvalds would be working on the kernel so much if he couldn't get paid for it? Maybe a little on the side, but no. And I'll call anyone bullshit if they think otherwise. So the ability for people to fork your code and make money on your hard work is what will keep anything other than server side code in a Micky Mouse state until a fundamental change in he license happens.
You cannot understand freedom if you think that people must think like you.
So you are still taking food off of someone's plate. And that is the part where people have a problem with stealing. Bernard Madhoff didn't take anything physical. He transferred funds, usually electronically. The victims were still hurt. You deprive people of their money or their ability to make money, even without walking off the premises with a bag of loot, you are still stealing.
The OP is looking for something that works for his family and friends who are average computer users/laypeople. Not something that meets people's ideological values; people who are usually technical experts compared to the vast majority of computer users. I tried to like Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Debian, but I found myself having to build and configure too many things in order to get functionality that I believe should have 'just worked'. I also am not a fan of the GPL. I believe in the spirit of it, but it is too fanatical and viral. There should be ways to allow interfaces between GPL and proprietary code. That way, those who want to maintain closed source could, and those who want to provide open source could. And they could work together. That is what I call open. But it is what it is, and I can only hope that Stallman and his Stallmanites disappear so that reasonable people can prevail.
I am all for HTML 5 and it replacing the hodgepodge of crap out there to mitigate the usecase gaps in HTML 4. However I wouldn't blame MS for this quite yet. The W3C was supposed to come out with something conclusive by now. Sure we have a good idea of what will be in HTML 5, but a good idea and a couple of dollars might get you a cup coffee at Starbucks. i.e. good ideas disappear out of final specs and products all the time. Why should MS redesign things to accommodate features that may not even make it into the final spec or even recommendation? It costs money to write and then rewrite code. Meanwhile they have something that is meeting its needs right now. So I say the W3C should shit or get off the pot before people start playing the blame game. If MS still screws around once something better than a 'draft' version is released, then fine. Until then...
I agree. SUSE is the way to go. Some points I like: first distro I tried where wifi worked without a big hassle. For those who want to use motherboard raid, it recognizes it and you don't have to endure people telling you it is fakeraid and all the other bullshit. That is, you can set up your drives as YOU want from the installer. No separate 'alternate' installer where raid installation doesn't work anyway, even if using kernel based software raid. The wifi and raid bullshit turned me off of Ubuntu. They keep trying to add bells and whistles and keep ignoring fundamental issues like this. I liked Ubuntu in general (Kubuntu actually). But these issues turned me off of it. I avoided Suse before because of Novels dealings with MS. However someone recently convinced me to try Suse again, and it was good. It is not perfect, but for the average user it is a very good Linux distro. Instructions to install proprietary media drivers are about as difficult to find as with Ubuntu. i.e. a quick Google for Suse 11.2 mp3 drivers or similar and you find a link to the opensuse group that has the driver links. If you pay for the distro (which everyone should now and then... so they stay in business), I believe the drivers are included.
There are times when outages happen; and the first time a major internet outage happens in an area, they will hear a lot about it. When it comes back up their email servers will get flooded. And if they don't respond, they will likely lose a lot of business from that area. Eventually all areas will experience this. It won't last. However, the game I was waiting for to come out, Silent Hunter V.... I won't be buying now. See, it has already started. So either emails or dollars will talk. But I admit, I think the dollars will talk louder. i.e. don't buy their shite.
They still pay money for the drinks, whether liquor or soda or juice. They are still paying for entertainment. So they can't afford 100 dollars in one night. So they don't normally have cash on hand to buy a game. It means they have to save up for their game. If someone said they couldn't afford to buy a beer, does that mean it's alright to steal it from the store. I couldn't find another way to entertain myself so I stole it officer. Oh, well mikael says it's alright if you don't make a lot of money to steal stuff to entertain yourself with, so it's alright go home and drink it.
Actually my country doesn't owe them hundreds of billions to China. Up to about a year ago, Canada was actually paying down its national debt. But yes, we owe about 580 billion dollars (CDN) but most of it is owed to Canadians in the form of bonds. Something less than 20% of that is owed to foreign interests. But in any case, we have something like a 60 billion dollar trade deficit to China. And the Chinese don't seem to want to even think about parity. Hence my comment. What don't you get? FWIW, if people would get their heads out of their asses and stop buying from Walmart and similar institutions and insist on buying either American, or from those with similar values (freedom, clean environment, etc.) then we wouldn't need to give a shit about what China does. But like oil and the middle east, America is addicted. Yes I know Canada is the United State's biggest supplier of oil and natural gas. However the amount coming from the middle east is huge. If America would stop listening to the bullshit from the oil companies and stop electing officials who are backed by big oil, they could have found a substitute for oil to power things by now. Heck, the fuel cell was actually invented around the turn of the last century. If they had worked on making that efficient for the last 110 years, we would all be driving electric vehicles.
And I forgot to add that I disagree with the OP's sig that patriotism is bigotry. While I am not a big fan of deGaulle (let's just say I would have preferred we left him in Dunkirk when the Germans arrived), proving the "exception to the rule" rule, he said one smart thing:
"Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first." -deGaulle
Nationalism is bigotry. Nationalism leads to ethnic cleansing, even in the form of language laws. The statement is true even though it is completely at odds with his bullshit behaviour in Quebec in 1967 where he supported nationalism (and stuck his nose in Canada's affairs... and pissed off enough people that he had to fly home early leaving the ship he came in to sail home without him... and earning him the status of "rectum non grata" in Canada).
I tend to agree that the U.S. government... the Bush government, and now the Obama government; which doesn't seem to mind what Bush put in place in this regard... has pretty much shot themselves in the foot when it comes to whether we should trust them or not with our privacy. Even going so far as ignoring the constitution.
On the other hand, the Chinese government is still an autocratic entity that frequently jails people for expressing their opinions. As bad as what the FBI has done, I am not convinced that they have abused the spirit of the constitution enough to equal what China frequently does to its own people. My first inclination is that I would say to not trust Chinese CA's. And for those who think they only apply to the Chinese themselves, you have your head in the sand at the Walmart Beach Resort. So much of our stuff comes out of China; and many companies' web sites for support and such are hosted there now. What happens if you log in with https? I think we give China too much already. Granted with all the offshoring scumbag companies out there, my bank account info is probably on servers over there already, but why help more?
What makes me wonder about this is the fact that many museums stop visitors from taking photographs of exhibits because they state they maintain a copyright of everything in the museum. For example I visited Paul Allen's 'Experience the Music Project' in Seattle and wanted to photograph a 100+ year old guitar (without using a flash). The security guard came over and told me I couldn't because that would be copyright infringement, and he would have to throw me out. I thought WTF? How do you copyright the reflection of light off of an object into my eyes, or onto my CCD? That is the ultimate of fact... what is there before your eyes. Of course not being as rich as a Microsoft co-founder, I have no resources to challenge the validity of this kind of copyright, so decided to leave and not give those pricks any more of my money than I already did.
I would have liked it to model the process of a black hole eating the earth if the large hadron collider actually did create a black hole.
It said the colour values were in sigma.bin NOT sigmoid.bin
For anyone who prefers their email format in text as opposed to html or rich text, it still isn't bad. :) But I think I'll stick with a GUI.
What I don't understand is how the article poster could possibly make the statement that Google Mail is good for large corporations. If I were a large (or even small) corporation, I wouldn't want any of my email messages, many of which likely containing proprietary information, being stored on another corporations mail servers. That's not only giving you a fair chance to shoot yourself in the foot, it is like asking for a marksman to shoot you in the foot for you.
RIM's Blackberry is so popular because RIM can't tell what you are emailing. It doesn't store your email. Your company still uses its own mail servers, and anything that goes through RIM's servers is not staged, and is encrypted so only your company knows what your business is. Fat chance data mining Google will encrypt mail so that they can't tell what it says.
And Oh Auntie M, there's no place like home. No place like home. BTW, the rest of us live in the real world.
You must have missed this part of my post: "The fact that people select Wikipedia to go to so often is likely why a Wikipedia search result is almost always near the top of a Google search." :)
When you search on almost anything on Google, all you get is a listing of people who sell some item with your search term in the product name. Sometimes it isn't even that. Sometimes it a page that is another advertising search page.
At least when you search for something in Wikipedia you get to a topic, not an advert. The fact that people select Wikipedia to go to so often is likely why a Wikipedia search result is almost always near the top of a Google search. Most of the time, it is the only type of information a person is looking for. 'Tell me about subject xyz', I don't want to fucking buy it, just learn about it. A lot of the time now, except when looking for product (one I have already bought) or programming forums I just search Wikipedia immediately. The articles also usually have enough external links to get me surfing for more info without needing to use Google too much.
I worked in heavy industry before. Occassoinally when working on equipment like conveyers and things that can cut you in half or suffocate you or poison you confined space entries, people get killed or maimed. Not very often. Probably only a fraction of a percent of the time. It happens when either someone accidently turns on a piece of equipment someone is working on, opens a valve to a disassembled pipe, goes into a space without checking for poison gas, or not locking out electrical hazards, etc. etc. etc. These things can happen, but people actually do try to be careful, so in actual fact there are not a lot of issues like this happening. However the impact of all of these activities and actions is very high. Death or serious life changing injury.
So most places now implement work permits and confined space entry permits. They mandate that supervisors have to inspect the work site, identify dangers, make sure they are locked out or otherwise neutralized (electrical lockouts with actual locks on the switches), test for correct atmosphere (e.g. 21% O2, no poisonous gases), ensure lookouts and rescue crews are in position where required, and get another supervisor and the actual crew working to sign off on it too. Notifications are made throughout the facility are made and then work can begin. Anywhere I worked where that has been done experiences a significant decrease of lost time injury. In fact one place. And in fact at major pilot project I worked at for four to five years, an experiemental 6 megawatt direct current closed top arc furnace (the largest direct current arc furnace smelter ever built... as opposed to standard 3 phase AC open top) which by the nature of being the first ever built like this was potentially a very dangerous place, there were no lost time injuries. We followed policies as described above. There were a great deal of potential dangers, all as listed above; poison gases as a major bi-product, carcinogenic materials (crystaline silica with a great deal of dust (not sand)), molten metal, confined spaces, gantry cranes, etc. By following the kind of risk management assessment I described originally, in four to five years we had no lost time injuries to anyone there. A broken thumb once and a few burns. In contrast, the contractors building the place over the course of one year they had a number of serious accidents including one fellow who fell four stories and broke his back. They did not follow this practice. Or at least not very well.
Precautions help. Saying they don't is fallacy. If you don't believe it, stop looking both ways before you cross busy streets, and make sure you are texting and listening to your mp3 player.
100% sure he wasn't messing with me. I thought it was a joke at first and laughed. He was stone faced. I kept thinking he has to be joking but he didn't change. He and his friends around him were too consistent for it to be a joke. Sad but true.
The religious right modders have spoken. Join Bush on his crusade already.
Way funny.
After I talked to the genetic engineer (for Monsanto) in Saint Louis that told me he didn't believe in evolution, I've kind of thought religious fundamentalists of any kind are brain damaged. After that I would usually ask most people I met if they believed in evolution. It was a good way to filter out the retards. Don't believe in evolution eh? Later.
Risk management in NOT just about the odds of some event or action happening like almost everyone seems to think. It also has to take into account the impact of the event or action. Low risk low impact, don't worry so much. High risk low impact, still don't have to worry that much unless the frequency is an issue. Low risk high impact (like death), take actions to prevent it. High risk high impact, just don't even bother.