I was talking with a CEO of a large entertainment company in an Asian nation. (I won't mention where). When I expressed disbelief that he wanted to stream full HD resolution movies over the internet to his customers, he explained that internet usage is much different in his country. Everyone uses their ubiquitous cellphones for email, and hardly anyone has a computer. Real time connections are not in demand, so it's okay if video hogs all the bandwidth because no one will care. Their infrastructure is geared towards high volume streaming rather than low volume connections.
It all comes down to the economics. Supply is a response to demand, and follows the market. In the US we have a different demand profile. Sure we want more bandwidth and higher speeds. But we're satisfied with what we got. We get our movies from cable, so we don't have a huge demand for instant 4gig downloads. Hell, we have subsidized HD converters and a lot of people still aren't switching! (Remember, the Slashdot readership does NOT represent the general public).
p.s. Of course, part of the problem is because local governments want to direct things. Thanks to them we have entrenched phone and cable monopolies, municipal networks crowding out competition, etc. To top it off we have Net Neutrality advocates lobbying to get the federal government involved.
The difference between the US and France, is that restrictions on legal immigrants are far less in the US. Most immigrants have to have a job to get to the US, and getting a green card is a straightforward (though lengthy) task. But in France it is very hard for an immigrant to get a job. In terms of welfare it is the opposite. It is very hard for a immigrant to get welfare in the US, but almost automatic in France.
This leads to ghettoizing of immigrants in France and other nations that have similar immigration policies. Their problem isn't that they have too many browned skinned people, but that they have segregated brown skinned people into separate neighborhoods, refuse to let them work, and made them dependent on the state for subsistance. Anywhere you have a large population of unemployable disaffected youth, you will have problems. The only places in the US where you see similar problems, is in similar circumstances where immigrants have been segregated into separate communities and put on welfare.
Having a job should not be crime. Period.
I'm not arguing for no borders. Immigrants do need to be checked for disease, criminal background, etc. But any peaceful person with a job should be allowed to immigrate. We need a guest worker program to take the pressure off the border and eliminate the culture of illegality. Instead of soldiers at the borders, we need labor contractors.
...and controlling illegal immigration to allow only the best from all nations to become Americans
I agree with all you said, except for that. As a Californian, I should no more fear a Mexican worker than an Oregonian worker. In my never humble opinion, our immigration policy should be to let anyone in who has a job. It doesn't matter if it's high tech in Silicon Valley or a three months picking lettuce in Imperial Valley.
Removing the tariffs and engaging in true free trade will make the poorer nations richer, but despite Lou Dobbs spittle-flecked rantings to the contrary, it does not make rich nations poorer.
It drives me nuts when people assert that the US economy needs dead-end jobs making plastic doodads on assembly lines. "Oh noes, they is stealing our jobs!" If other countries can make doodads cheaper, let them! That frees us up to create different jobs more to our liking. This is been accepted economic knowledge since David Ricardo a century and a half ago. Yes, there will be dislocation, but they are temporary. There are better solutions to laid off doodad workers than trade restrictions.
Free trade isn't a leveler, it benefits all parties, mostly the poor but also the rich. We have nothing to fear from free trade.
I have two friends who pirate games and other software. Why? I'm not sure, but it's not money, ease, ideology, or anything like that. I think they just like being pirate.
Norm is a software pusher. He pirates stuff because he can. He's always trying to push software on me. "It's Vista man, you use Vista, here have some Vista. What? You don't use Vista? What do you use then, I can get it for you! FreeBSD? What's that? Never mind I'll get it for you. Free man, all free!" He also downloads movies. "Spiderman III man! Spidey3! Don't go to the theater they just want to take your money. Here look, I've got it on my iPhone. Look! [tiny 2" screen showing the back of people's heads in some Hong Kong theater]"
My other friend is more into movies. He subscribes to NetFlix 8 at a time. Yes, 8 at a time. Every one he gets he immediately rips and mails back. He has a rack of harddrives with ripped movies, and a case of DVDs with ripped movies. HE DOESN'T WATCH THEM! He just rips them in case he might want to watch them in the future. He doesn't have a lot of money, but for the number of movies he does watch, he can drop down to a $11.99 subscription instead of the $47.99 he has now. So it ain't the money.
There is no ticket to a free job. If you can't sell yourself, it doesn't matter how great your experience is. But even if you're the greatest self-promoter in the world, you still have to bust your ass for that job. That's life.
Some of you younglings may think experience is overrated, that your degree from a party university should give you a free entry into an immediately high paying job. But this is the real world. Degrees are a dime a dozen and most resumes are padded. You need to prove to us old fogeys not just that you can code, but that you can code well, know how to design, now how to work in teams, won't go on a three month drinking binge the first time you get a bug logged against your software.
We want experience!
That's what internships are for. But getting an internship is almost as difficult as getting a regular position. Open Source Software lets you create your own internship. It lets you put down real experience on your resume. Even if you have real world experience, a lot of your code won't be public. But your Open Source Software will be, and interviewers can see your actual code.
Another example of the continuing deliteracy in the United States. This times it's the undefining of the word "slave". Apple employees are not owned in any sense of the word. They are not forced to work for Apple. They are not coerced to work overtime without pay. There are no guns or whips involved. No unsanitary slave quarters out back. No policy that employee offspring are also property. The claims in the lawsuit are a cruel mockery to all real slaves past and present.
If you don't want to work overtime without pay, then tell your boss "no". It's the ultimate safe word. If you say "no" and he fires you, then you sue. But you don't sue for what you have voluntarily chosen to do.
Please don't give my any crap about "not having a choice". You always have a choice. So what if you end up unemployed? Real slaves in history who ran away were often castrated and sometimes killed. You're a technical worker in the heart of Silicon Valley. Comparing your lot with theirs is the pathetic whining of a loser.
No, it's the difference between science and human nature. Like or or not, we evolved [or were designed, whatever] to be dogmatic. It's a very important survival mechanism. Human beings hate change, hate it with a passion. One of the big ideas in science is the idea that knowledge can change. But even in science, the general attitude is that there is a static unchanging set of truths that the scientific method is slowly approaching.
I should have said "victimless crimes" instead. Enron's crimes WERE violent, in one sense of the word. "Violence" is related to "violate", and refers to the violation of one's unalienable rights. Not just the right to life, but of liberty and property. As such, theft is a violent crime even if a gun was not used. So is fraud. And that's what Enron was guilty of.
In the legal sense, "violent crime" requires the infliction or threat of physical harm. "Victimless crime" is a better term, and I should have used it.
The biggest problem is that the government is in charge of our children. Remember, this is the same government that can't define "is", can't find WMDs, can't balance the budget, and can't even bother to follow the same laws it created. Why do we give them our children? We say it's because it guarantees that the poor will get educated, but considering the state of many inner city schools, I think fewer poor get educated with state run schools than without. Sure there's not a lot of cheap private schools out there, but the biggest reason for that is the government schools that crowd them out. Some say it's just because we don't have the "right people" in charge. That's nonsense. I'm not the biggest fan of school vouchers, but they're a better solution than one-size-fits-all brand we have now.
Of course, abolishing government schools isn't going to happen. When you add Federal and state expenditures together, education is the single biggest teat on government, and parents aren't going to stop sucking at it. So what do you do instead? Figure out what makes today's state schools so much crappier than those of last century.
The biggest change I see between the state schools of yesterday and today, is the centralization of the bureacracy. Back when our schools were considered the best in the world, they were controlled at the local county level. Now they're controlled by the Federal government through state government proxies. Getting control back to the local level can happen, and it can improve things. That's the direction we should be heading. It may mean a few counties get lousy schools because of their demographics, but it's better than all the schools being dragged down to their level just to make things "fair".
Snitching on non-violent "crimes" is a sign of a warped sense of justice. Growing pot is no more violent any more than growing petunias. The violence that does exist around pot is there because the government has made it a black market. The crime exists for the same reason prohibition gave us gangsters. If you lived back then, I suspect you would "snitch" on your neighbors drinking beer too.
Remember? What the heck do you mean by "remember? The tree view in a file system is ubiquitous for GUIs viewing the file system. I'm not talking about Windoze either. Both GTK+ and Qt have it in their file dialogs. It's in Konqueror, Dolphin, Nautilus and Thunar. Even the Mac Finder has it. The reason it is there is that the tree view is appropriate for viewing tree structures.
Then let your Linux peers know that it's not okay to accept this bribe from Adobe. Tell them to keep pressuring for an Open Source Flash. They can keep their content creation software closed, but as long as people are acting like SWF is some sort of standard, it needs to be fully Open Source.
People who know what Open Source Software means are not pushing WINE. Don't blame the movement on the actions of some nitwits who don't know what "Open Source" means. Otherwise I'll have to retaliate by blaming the Free Software movement for everything a a "Free Software" nitwit says!
Yes, but neither will work with real world Flash content. Not yet at least, but I'm hoping that someday soon they will be.
p.s. I have lots of philosophical disagreements with the FSF, but one area where I do not fault them is their willingness to write replacements for proprietary software.
What distribution ships with KDE4 as the desktop by default? I'm not aware of any.
Translation: Eat the pottage your distro gives you and don't complain. If you actually go and and build some software that has been explicitly labled as stable and release, then it's your own damned fault.
Well duh! When KDE marketing says "4.0" and "release", users and distros expect software of release quality! They didn't say "technology preview", they didn't say "beta", they didn't even say "release candidate". Instead they said "release".
No it's not. Qt3 is officially and unambiguously not supported. KDE3 depends on Qt3. KDE3 is not being developed anymore. Add it up. The most you will ever see will be the ocasional bug fix for serious holes.
Not all of these are myths. Some are quite subjective. For example, "KDE should just have ported KDE 3.5 to Qt 4...". The FAQ answer states quite clearly that it was discussed as a serious option. It's a very subjective opinion, and NEITHER side is wrong. It's not a myth, it's a valid opinion on the history of the project.
A few others are equally subjective. The article isn't debunking myths, it's promoting orthodox opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
I was talking with a CEO of a large entertainment company in an Asian nation. (I won't mention where). When I expressed disbelief that he wanted to stream full HD resolution movies over the internet to his customers, he explained that internet usage is much different in his country. Everyone uses their ubiquitous cellphones for email, and hardly anyone has a computer. Real time connections are not in demand, so it's okay if video hogs all the bandwidth because no one will care. Their infrastructure is geared towards high volume streaming rather than low volume connections.
It all comes down to the economics. Supply is a response to demand, and follows the market. In the US we have a different demand profile. Sure we want more bandwidth and higher speeds. But we're satisfied with what we got. We get our movies from cable, so we don't have a huge demand for instant 4gig downloads. Hell, we have subsidized HD converters and a lot of people still aren't switching! (Remember, the Slashdot readership does NOT represent the general public).
p.s. Of course, part of the problem is because local governments want to direct things. Thanks to them we have entrenched phone and cable monopolies, municipal networks crowding out competition, etc. To top it off we have Net Neutrality advocates lobbying to get the federal government involved.
So those raw food guys really are idiots like I've suspected all along?
The difference between the US and France, is that restrictions on legal immigrants are far less in the US. Most immigrants have to have a job to get to the US, and getting a green card is a straightforward (though lengthy) task. But in France it is very hard for an immigrant to get a job. In terms of welfare it is the opposite. It is very hard for a immigrant to get welfare in the US, but almost automatic in France.
This leads to ghettoizing of immigrants in France and other nations that have similar immigration policies. Their problem isn't that they have too many browned skinned people, but that they have segregated brown skinned people into separate neighborhoods, refuse to let them work, and made them dependent on the state for subsistance. Anywhere you have a large population of unemployable disaffected youth, you will have problems. The only places in the US where you see similar problems, is in similar circumstances where immigrants have been segregated into separate communities and put on welfare.
Having a job should not be crime. Period.
I'm not arguing for no borders. Immigrants do need to be checked for disease, criminal background, etc. But any peaceful person with a job should be allowed to immigrate. We need a guest worker program to take the pressure off the border and eliminate the culture of illegality. Instead of soldiers at the borders, we need labor contractors.
I agree with all you said, except for that. As a Californian, I should no more fear a Mexican worker than an Oregonian worker. In my never humble opinion, our immigration policy should be to let anyone in who has a job. It doesn't matter if it's high tech in Silicon Valley or a three months picking lettuce in Imperial Valley.
Removing the tariffs and engaging in true free trade will make the poorer nations richer, but despite Lou Dobbs spittle-flecked rantings to the contrary, it does not make rich nations poorer.
It drives me nuts when people assert that the US economy needs dead-end jobs making plastic doodads on assembly lines. "Oh noes, they is stealing our jobs!" If other countries can make doodads cheaper, let them! That frees us up to create different jobs more to our liking. This is been accepted economic knowledge since David Ricardo a century and a half ago. Yes, there will be dislocation, but they are temporary. There are better solutions to laid off doodad workers than trade restrictions.
Free trade isn't a leveler, it benefits all parties, mostly the poor but also the rich. We have nothing to fear from free trade.
In the meantime 1969 K&R C is still fully supported.
I have two friends who pirate games and other software. Why? I'm not sure, but it's not money, ease, ideology, or anything like that. I think they just like being pirate.
Norm is a software pusher. He pirates stuff because he can. He's always trying to push software on me. "It's Vista man, you use Vista, here have some Vista. What? You don't use Vista? What do you use then, I can get it for you! FreeBSD? What's that? Never mind I'll get it for you. Free man, all free!" He also downloads movies. "Spiderman III man! Spidey3! Don't go to the theater they just want to take your money. Here look, I've got it on my iPhone. Look! [tiny 2" screen showing the back of people's heads in some Hong Kong theater]"
My other friend is more into movies. He subscribes to NetFlix 8 at a time. Yes, 8 at a time. Every one he gets he immediately rips and mails back. He has a rack of harddrives with ripped movies, and a case of DVDs with ripped movies. HE DOESN'T WATCH THEM! He just rips them in case he might want to watch them in the future. He doesn't have a lot of money, but for the number of movies he does watch, he can drop down to a $11.99 subscription instead of the $47.99 he has now. So it ain't the money.
It eez flat like your head!
Pffft! That's nothing. There are still 9/11 Truthers left! And they believe that fire can't melt steel!
There is no ticket to a free job. If you can't sell yourself, it doesn't matter how great your experience is. But even if you're the greatest self-promoter in the world, you still have to bust your ass for that job. That's life.
It may not be "legal", but it still seems to be a thriving business within the city limits. Go figure.
p.s. Pahrump is northwest of Las Vegas...
Some of you younglings may think experience is overrated, that your degree from a party university should give you a free entry into an immediately high paying job. But this is the real world. Degrees are a dime a dozen and most resumes are padded. You need to prove to us old fogeys not just that you can code, but that you can code well, know how to design, now how to work in teams, won't go on a three month drinking binge the first time you get a bug logged against your software.
We want experience!
That's what internships are for. But getting an internship is almost as difficult as getting a regular position. Open Source Software lets you create your own internship. It lets you put down real experience on your resume. Even if you have real world experience, a lot of your code won't be public. But your Open Source Software will be, and interviewers can see your actual code.
Another example of the continuing deliteracy in the United States. This times it's the undefining of the word "slave". Apple employees are not owned in any sense of the word. They are not forced to work for Apple. They are not coerced to work overtime without pay. There are no guns or whips involved. No unsanitary slave quarters out back. No policy that employee offspring are also property. The claims in the lawsuit are a cruel mockery to all real slaves past and present.
If you don't want to work overtime without pay, then tell your boss "no". It's the ultimate safe word. If you say "no" and he fires you, then you sue. But you don't sue for what you have voluntarily chosen to do.
Please don't give my any crap about "not having a choice". You always have a choice. So what if you end up unemployed? Real slaves in history who ran away were often castrated and sometimes killed. You're a technical worker in the heart of Silicon Valley. Comparing your lot with theirs is the pathetic whining of a loser.
No, it's the difference between science and human nature. Like or or not, we evolved [or were designed, whatever] to be dogmatic. It's a very important survival mechanism. Human beings hate change, hate it with a passion. One of the big ideas in science is the idea that knowledge can change. But even in science, the general attitude is that there is a static unchanging set of truths that the scientific method is slowly approaching.
I should have said "victimless crimes" instead. Enron's crimes WERE violent, in one sense of the word. "Violence" is related to "violate", and refers to the violation of one's unalienable rights. Not just the right to life, but of liberty and property. As such, theft is a violent crime even if a gun was not used. So is fraud. And that's what Enron was guilty of.
In the legal sense, "violent crime" requires the infliction or threat of physical harm. "Victimless crime" is a better term, and I should have used it.
The biggest problem is that the government is in charge of our children. Remember, this is the same government that can't define "is", can't find WMDs, can't balance the budget, and can't even bother to follow the same laws it created. Why do we give them our children? We say it's because it guarantees that the poor will get educated, but considering the state of many inner city schools, I think fewer poor get educated with state run schools than without. Sure there's not a lot of cheap private schools out there, but the biggest reason for that is the government schools that crowd them out. Some say it's just because we don't have the "right people" in charge. That's nonsense. I'm not the biggest fan of school vouchers, but they're a better solution than one-size-fits-all brand we have now.
Of course, abolishing government schools isn't going to happen. When you add Federal and state expenditures together, education is the single biggest teat on government, and parents aren't going to stop sucking at it. So what do you do instead? Figure out what makes today's state schools so much crappier than those of last century.
The biggest change I see between the state schools of yesterday and today, is the centralization of the bureacracy. Back when our schools were considered the best in the world, they were controlled at the local county level. Now they're controlled by the Federal government through state government proxies. Getting control back to the local level can happen, and it can improve things. That's the direction we should be heading. It may mean a few counties get lousy schools because of their demographics, but it's better than all the schools being dragged down to their level just to make things "fair".
Snitching on non-violent "crimes" is a sign of a warped sense of justice. Growing pot is no more violent any more than growing petunias. The violence that does exist around pot is there because the government has made it a black market. The crime exists for the same reason prohibition gave us gangsters. If you lived back then, I suspect you would "snitch" on your neighbors drinking beer too.
Remember? What the heck do you mean by "remember? The tree view in a file system is ubiquitous for GUIs viewing the file system. I'm not talking about Windoze either. Both GTK+ and Qt have it in their file dialogs. It's in Konqueror, Dolphin, Nautilus and Thunar. Even the Mac Finder has it. The reason it is there is that the tree view is appropriate for viewing tree structures.
Then let your Linux peers know that it's not okay to accept this bribe from Adobe. Tell them to keep pressuring for an Open Source Flash. They can keep their content creation software closed, but as long as people are acting like SWF is some sort of standard, it needs to be fully Open Source.
People who know what Open Source Software means are not pushing WINE. Don't blame the movement on the actions of some nitwits who don't know what "Open Source" means. Otherwise I'll have to retaliate by blaming the Free Software movement for everything a a "Free Software" nitwit says!
Yes, but neither will work with real world Flash content. Not yet at least, but I'm hoping that someday soon they will be.
p.s. I have lots of philosophical disagreements with the FSF, but one area where I do not fault them is their willingness to write replacements for proprietary software.
Translation: Eat the pottage your distro gives you and don't complain. If you actually go and and build some software that has been explicitly labled as stable and release, then it's your own damned fault.
Well duh! When KDE marketing says "4.0" and "release", users and distros expect software of release quality! They didn't say "technology preview", they didn't say "beta", they didn't even say "release candidate". Instead they said "release".
KDE 3.5 is still being updated.
No it's not. Qt3 is officially and unambiguously not supported. KDE3 depends on Qt3. KDE3 is not being developed anymore. Add it up. The most you will ever see will be the ocasional bug fix for serious holes.
Not all of these are myths. Some are quite subjective. For example, "KDE should just have ported KDE 3.5 to Qt 4...". The FAQ answer states quite clearly that it was discussed as a serious option. It's a very subjective opinion, and NEITHER side is wrong. It's not a myth, it's a valid opinion on the history of the project.
A few others are equally subjective. The article isn't debunking myths, it's promoting orthodox opinion.