The way to improve labor wages is to create so many jobs that unemployment disappears and employers have to compete to hold jobs. Until you get to a certain economic plateau, workers will jump for the smallest gain in wages. Create a company, pay 10% above scale, and demand (and keep) only the best workers. If done right, you'll have fantastically loyal workers, a higher productivity rate, and better profits.
So why is India struggling to reduce their tariffs and free their economy from government intrusion specifically because they say such measures have held them back in the past? Makes ya kinda think, no?
The third world debt problem couldn't be because kleptomaniac leaders stole a good portion of the money and wasted a large portion of the rest could it? No, that would imply that it's at least partially their own fault. Cancelling debts makes it harder to borrow in future and encourages the 3rd world government thieves to keep right on stealing because if they mismanage things badly enough, fraternal, compassionate first worlders will just cancel their debts again in order to help those suffering 3rd world people.
They deserve to be able to develop and they *are* able to develop, they are just cursed with leaderships that choose *not* to develop, having a preference for luxurious living over the welfare of their people. I don't know how we are supposed to fix that besides reinstituting colonialism and I doubt anybody wants to pick of "the white man's burden" (thank God).
Unfortunately, nobody has ever figured out how to fix prices in a socialist system, they all either ape capitalist pricing elsewhere or they end up with irrational, distorted markets where things just don't make sense. Let's not forget that setting a price on a good or a service, and thus setting its value is a necessary precondition for *any* economic system to work right. The dismal failure of *all* forms of socialism to successfully set prices is just another reason to toss the idea.
When they sell a few hundred thousand of these things and Steve Jobs pulls one of his patented 'oh and one more things' and announces a firmware update that upgrades the iPod to a full-feature PDA, will it be breakthrough and innovative enough for you?
As a business move it'd be brilliant because you'd have instant marketshare from announcement day. As an engineering move it'd be the first time it's ever been done. As for coolness/nerd factor, sure, lots of people have hacked other people's hardware to do different things but when did the manufacturer ever do something like this?
The question really is, if you have Win XP and all you needed was to manually drag your collection to load it to the iPod, would you buy it even without iTunes?
Do you want revolutionary? Ask yourself, what chip is this running? Ask yourself, what is the OS on this thing? This is v0.8 of Apple's PDA folks. They're just waiting for the hardware and the economy to get a little better.
The interface is IEEE-1394 (aka firewire & iLink). If you've got the port you've got connectivity and it shouldn't matter what processor you're running. No doubt Windows will be supported somehow since MS has come out in favor of IEEE-1394 and are integrating driver support into Windows.
Since there aren't any iTunes available on other platforms, you're probably going to have to connect it up as a removable hard drive and drag copy your mp3 collection manually.
Not only did you read the story, you spent the time to reply? Get some priorities yourself. Some people need to know this stuff professionally and earning money to feed our children is pretty high up on our priority list.
Please don't confuse not having a vision and having a vision you don't like. Linux' vision is the creation of an operating system where the consumer is in charge. There isn't any manipulation, there isn't any politics in getting a functionality working in the OS. Nobody can tell you, you aren't important enough to have your changes in or that your patch is going to be delayed for months because not enough other people are having their business destroyed by the system failure. You can hire your own programmers and fix any mistakes. Have an itch? Scratch it! is a vision, just one you seem uncomfortable with.
Well said, but wait, it's worse. The whole idea of linux is that the developers are in charge. The writer just engaged in one big rant that he wished that the developers would develop the way *he* wanted them to. They certainly will, as soon as he starts paying them.
That's the real difference between Open Source/Free Software and Communism, the people are truly in charge and no self-appointed dictator for the proletariat can override their judgement.
OK, you don't like the word shadowy and think it shows bias. How about the press release from the House of Representatives?
"
The Commission's recommendations regarding cyber security include:
...
Establishment of a special "Cyber Court" patterned after the court established in the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."
"
Now the FISA court is notorious for having virtually no oversight and its specifically used only in cases of grave national security (I'm taking the government's word on this because I can't check it, which is the whole problem, isn't it?) where the fate of the nation can hang in the balance. Hacking cases, for the most part are not a case of national security, nor is the fate of the nation visibly changed whether police are required to have probable cause before they take down slashdot because somebody posted a deCSS haiku.
What, pray tell, is the possible justification in your mind to treat hack case evidence with the same paranoia as properly classified government secrets?
So how are you going to prevent an unethical company from alleging fake bugs and providing tools to detect the fake bug and providing patches that don't do a thing for security but destabilize the software a bit. Bottom line, the exploit code needs to be out there somewhere or we're just setting ourselves up for a different type of exploitation
Would this be the UN agency that was sacked and occupied by the Taliban some weeks back? The UN pulled out of Afghanistan long before the bombing started because the Taliban was too nuts for the UN to risk its personnel with them.
Shortening production runs and reducing retooling time and expense are a goal in *all* manufacturing plants because to create the ability to capture smaller orders enables larger profits. I don't imagine that chip fabs are different than any other production line.
In the realistic near future, I could see something on the order of a large university system (University of California perhaps?) sponsoring a chip line and having all its schools with computer engineering programs participate in the development then making a run and giving it to the EE departments to play with. That way you might cobble enough educational value out of the exercise to justify the cost and you would turn out graduates that can justifiably say that they were part of a chip design team.
Last I checked there were lots of people who owned semiconductor fabrication plants who were willing to rent out their production capacity. Fabless chip design shops are nothing new. The economics of it would be no different than any other fabless shop, only that the design would be open.
I don't think you quite understand, fuels such as ethanol, methane, natural gas, even gasoline are converted inside the vehicle/generator before they get to the actual fuel cell. The major energy transportation systems don't have to change on day 1 to allow for proper hydrogen distribution. New construction will eventually take care of the problem of piping pure hydrogen but you won't need to bottle the stuff and transport it, just use current fuels or home grown ones like methane or ethanol that may be locally available but currently unusable for transportation needs.
In most areas of the US, the filling stations already exist, they're called home. Ballard Power Systems is the company GM and all of the rest of the auto makers are buying their fuel cells from and their products page makes it clear "The fundamental component of these end-user products is the Ballard® fuel cell that combines hydrogen (which can be obtained from methanol, natural gas, petroleum or renewable sources) and oxygen (from air) without combustion to generate electricity.". If you have a natural gas line running to your home, you should be able to tank up at home for the cost of a bit of piping, maybe a storage tank and a pump to convert to a higher pressure.
The oil companies already know this and have started calling themselves energy companies for a few years now. Hydrogen, whether you get it from biomass as methane (for those environmentalists out there) or out of the ground via natural gas or whatever, it's still a profit opportunity for these firms and they are busy gearing up to take advantage of the opportunity. Eventually, we will get the direct hydrogen infrastructure because it's simpler and cleaner but the vicious circle is broken, the multi-fuel aspects of fuel cells mean that we can shift from one fuel to another as infrastructure matures and we will never again have to pay homage to the sheikhs or anybody else because the fuels are so varied that nobody is going to be able to get monopoly power over all of them.
Since the oil companies are very aware and actually seem to like the idea of varying their markets and profit opportunities, I'd guess that the two Texas oil men in the White House are going to grease the wheels and make the hydrogen transition as easy as possible because it's going to make their campaign contributors lots of money, is going to clean up the environment, and is going to erase the US' national security vulnerability due to dependence on foreign energy sources. That's a very rare political three-fer.
I don't think that you quite understood. I called the software company that makes Qt (trolltech) and *they* say you can't run it on Mac OS X since they need to port it. If you can get it up on Mac OS X, please give instructions...
Omniweb's taking care of the browser, the email app is written already (and called Mail), and they are likely to have MS-Office itself for the forseeable future.
Now I predict that within a year or two, you are going to see Mac OS X develop a Linux compatibility layer (just like every other BSD variant) so it is quite likely that anybody programming for Linux is going to have at least some of their userbase being run on a Mac.
AFAIK, KOffice requires KDE to run at all. KDE requires QT which is made by a nice friendly company called Trolltech. Trolltech technical support kindly informed me that they aren't going to make QT compatible with Mac OS X until they are ready to release a point upgrade past 3.0 (which isn't out yet).
As an MCSE who happily goes home to his Linux and Mac Boxen at night, I'd suggest tacking a look at OmniWeb for your browser, OS X's very good mail application Mail and keep your eye on the office suite market because Office 98 is getting long in the tooth and its replacement seems to be having some problems (especially Entourage).
I think you might seriously reconsider your blanket condemnation of the Open Source movement (and business model) since Apple has certainly decided that there's money in open source and have based Mac OS X on an open source core (a freeBSD derivative called Darwin).
I would much rather be factually correct than non-partisan but CATO is, according to its website, "a nonpartisan public policy research foundation headquartered in Washington, D.C. The Institute is named for Cato's Letters, libertarian pamphlets that helped lay the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution". The IRS agrees insofar as it allows CATO to have tax advantages it wouldn't have as a partisan group. I have also seen articles critical of GWB and other (R) administrations coming from CATO with some regularity. Now to your equally mistaken factual points. Even accepting your numbers, giving 40%+ of your corporate donations to the anti-business party isn't sound thinking. The source I pointed to wasn't dealing with just formal partisan politics but mostly with left and right leaning NGOs where funding is more unbalanced towards the left. Logging companies give surprising amounts of money to fund anti-logging groups. Sometimes this is a sleazy corporate tactic where a logging company will fund a group that only operates in the territory of its competitors but other times it is done as an exercise in extortion (Jackson's Rainbow-PUSH rackets for example).
Re:Microsoft donations: you are wrong
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
Your URL didn't work and from what I can tell opensecrets.org only seems to go back to 1999 which postdates the period I was referring to. As I originally said, Microsoft was a (D) leaning corp before they got jumped by the anti-trust police. Today it does lean towards the (R) side of the donation fence but does maintain significant donation levels to Democratic party organs despite them gunning for the company.
Slashdot Mirror
The way to improve labor wages is to create so many jobs that unemployment disappears and employers have to compete to hold jobs. Until you get to a certain economic plateau, workers will jump for the smallest gain in wages. Create a company, pay 10% above scale, and demand (and keep) only the best workers. If done right, you'll have fantastically loyal workers, a higher productivity rate, and better profits.
DB
So why is India struggling to reduce their tariffs and free their economy from government intrusion specifically because they say such measures have held them back in the past? Makes ya kinda think, no?
DB
The third world debt problem couldn't be because kleptomaniac leaders stole a good portion of the money and wasted a large portion of the rest could it? No, that would imply that it's at least partially their own fault. Cancelling debts makes it harder to borrow in future and encourages the 3rd world government thieves to keep right on stealing because if they mismanage things badly enough, fraternal, compassionate first worlders will just cancel their debts again in order to help those suffering 3rd world people.
They deserve to be able to develop and they *are* able to develop, they are just cursed with leaderships that choose *not* to develop, having a preference for luxurious living over the welfare of their people. I don't know how we are supposed to fix that besides reinstituting colonialism and I doubt anybody wants to pick of "the white man's burden" (thank God).
DB
Unfortunately, nobody has ever figured out how to fix prices in a socialist system, they all either ape capitalist pricing elsewhere or they end up with irrational, distorted markets where things just don't make sense. Let's not forget that setting a price on a good or a service, and thus setting its value is a necessary precondition for *any* economic system to work right. The dismal failure of *all* forms of socialism to successfully set prices is just another reason to toss the idea.
When they sell a few hundred thousand of these things and Steve Jobs pulls one of his patented 'oh and one more things' and announces a firmware update that upgrades the iPod to a full-feature PDA, will it be breakthrough and innovative enough for you?
As a business move it'd be brilliant because you'd have instant marketshare from announcement day. As an engineering move it'd be the first time it's ever been done. As for coolness/nerd factor, sure, lots of people have hacked other people's hardware to do different things but when did the manufacturer ever do something like this?
DB
The question really is, if you have Win XP and all you needed was to manually drag your collection to load it to the iPod, would you buy it even without iTunes?
DB
Do you want revolutionary? Ask yourself, what chip is this running? Ask yourself, what is the OS on this thing? This is v0.8 of Apple's PDA folks. They're just waiting for the hardware and the economy to get a little better.
DB
The interface is IEEE-1394 (aka firewire & iLink). If you've got the port you've got connectivity and it shouldn't matter what processor you're running. No doubt Windows will be supported somehow since MS has come out in favor of IEEE-1394 and are integrating driver support into Windows.
Since there aren't any iTunes available on other platforms, you're probably going to have to connect it up as a removable hard drive and drag copy your mp3 collection manually.
DB
Not only did you read the story, you spent the time to reply? Get some priorities yourself. Some people need to know this stuff professionally and earning money to feed our children is pretty high up on our priority list.
DB
Please don't confuse not having a vision and having a vision you don't like. Linux' vision is the creation of an operating system where the consumer is in charge. There isn't any manipulation, there isn't any politics in getting a functionality working in the OS. Nobody can tell you, you aren't important enough to have your changes in or that your patch is going to be delayed for months because not enough other people are having their business destroyed by the system failure. You can hire your own programmers and fix any mistakes. Have an itch? Scratch it! is a vision, just one you seem uncomfortable with.
Have fun with your EULA!
Well said, but wait, it's worse. The whole idea of linux is that the developers are in charge. The writer just engaged in one big rant that he wished that the developers would develop the way *he* wanted them to. They certainly will, as soon as he starts paying them.
That's the real difference between Open Source/Free Software and Communism, the people are truly in charge and no self-appointed dictator for the proletariat can override their judgement.
OK, you don't like the word shadowy and think it shows bias. How about the press release from the House of Representatives?
"
The Commission's recommendations regarding cyber security include:
...
Establishment of a special "Cyber Court" patterned after the court established in the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act."
"
Now the FISA court is notorious for having virtually no oversight and its specifically used only in cases of grave national security (I'm taking the government's word on this because I can't check it, which is the whole problem, isn't it?) where the fate of the nation can hang in the balance. Hacking cases, for the most part are not a case of national security, nor is the fate of the nation visibly changed whether police are required to have probable cause before they take down slashdot because somebody posted a deCSS haiku.
What, pray tell, is the possible justification in your mind to treat hack case evidence with the same paranoia as properly classified government secrets?
DB
So how are you going to prevent an unethical company from alleging fake bugs and providing tools to detect the fake bug and providing patches that don't do a thing for security but destabilize the software a bit. Bottom line, the exploit code needs to be out there somewhere or we're just setting ourselves up for a different type of exploitation
DB
One would argue that a decent admin would not pick such a flimsy door.
Administrators need to pick the best tool for the job whatever the vendor.
Would this be the UN agency that was sacked and occupied by the Taliban some weeks back? The UN pulled out of Afghanistan long before the bombing started because the Taliban was too nuts for the UN to risk its personnel with them.
DB
Shortening production runs and reducing retooling time and expense are a goal in *all* manufacturing plants because to create the ability to capture smaller orders enables larger profits. I don't imagine that chip fabs are different than any other production line.
In the realistic near future, I could see something on the order of a large university system (University of California perhaps?) sponsoring a chip line and having all its schools with computer engineering programs participate in the development then making a run and giving it to the EE departments to play with. That way you might cobble enough educational value out of the exercise to justify the cost and you would turn out graduates that can justifiably say that they were part of a chip design team.
Last I checked there were lots of people who owned semiconductor fabrication plants who were willing to rent out their production capacity. Fabless chip design shops are nothing new. The economics of it would be no different than any other fabless shop, only that the design would be open.
DB
I don't think you quite understand, fuels such as ethanol, methane, natural gas, even gasoline are converted inside the vehicle/generator before they get to the actual fuel cell. The major energy transportation systems don't have to change on day 1 to allow for proper hydrogen distribution. New construction will eventually take care of the problem of piping pure hydrogen but you won't need to bottle the stuff and transport it, just use current fuels or home grown ones like methane or ethanol that may be locally available but currently unusable for transportation needs.
The oil companies already know this and have started calling themselves energy companies for a few years now. Hydrogen, whether you get it from biomass as methane (for those environmentalists out there) or out of the ground via natural gas or whatever, it's still a profit opportunity for these firms and they are busy gearing up to take advantage of the opportunity. Eventually, we will get the direct hydrogen infrastructure because it's simpler and cleaner but the vicious circle is broken, the multi-fuel aspects of fuel cells mean that we can shift from one fuel to another as infrastructure matures and we will never again have to pay homage to the sheikhs or anybody else because the fuels are so varied that nobody is going to be able to get monopoly power over all of them.
Since the oil companies are very aware and actually seem to like the idea of varying their markets and profit opportunities, I'd guess that the two Texas oil men in the White House are going to grease the wheels and make the hydrogen transition as easy as possible because it's going to make their campaign contributors lots of money, is going to clean up the environment, and is going to erase the US' national security vulnerability due to dependence on foreign energy sources. That's a very rare political three-fer.
DB
I don't think that you quite understood. I called the software company that makes Qt (trolltech) and *they* say you can't run it on Mac OS X since they need to port it. If you can get it up on Mac OS X, please give instructions...
Omniweb's taking care of the browser, the email app is written already (and called Mail), and they are likely to have MS-Office itself for the forseeable future.
Now I predict that within a year or two, you are going to see Mac OS X develop a Linux compatibility layer (just like every other BSD variant) so it is quite likely that anybody programming for Linux is going to have at least some of their userbase being run on a Mac.
"KOffice already runs on OS X"
AFAIK, KOffice requires KDE to run at all. KDE requires QT which is made by a nice friendly company called Trolltech. Trolltech technical support kindly informed me that they aren't going to make QT compatible with Mac OS X until they are ready to release a point upgrade past 3.0 (which isn't out yet).
DB
As an MCSE who happily goes home to his Linux and Mac Boxen at night, I'd suggest tacking a look at OmniWeb for your browser, OS X's very good mail application Mail and keep your eye on the office suite market because Office 98 is getting long in the tooth and its replacement seems to be having some problems (especially Entourage).
I think you might seriously reconsider your blanket condemnation of the Open Source movement (and business model) since Apple has certainly decided that there's money in open source and have based Mac OS X on an open source core (a freeBSD derivative called Darwin).
DB
I would much rather be factually correct than non-partisan but CATO is, according to its website, "a nonpartisan public policy research foundation headquartered in Washington, D.C. The Institute is named for Cato's Letters, libertarian pamphlets that helped lay the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution". The IRS agrees insofar as it allows CATO to have tax advantages it wouldn't have as a partisan group. I have also seen articles critical of GWB and other (R) administrations coming from CATO with some regularity. Now to your equally mistaken factual points. Even accepting your numbers, giving 40%+ of your corporate donations to the anti-business party isn't sound thinking. The source I pointed to wasn't dealing with just formal partisan politics but mostly with left and right leaning NGOs where funding is more unbalanced towards the left. Logging companies give surprising amounts of money to fund anti-logging groups. Sometimes this is a sleazy corporate tactic where a logging company will fund a group that only operates in the territory of its competitors but other times it is done as an exercise in extortion (Jackson's Rainbow-PUSH rackets for example).
Your URL didn't work and from what I can tell opensecrets.org only seems to go back to 1999 which postdates the period I was referring to. As I originally said, Microsoft was a (D) leaning corp before they got jumped by the anti-trust police. Today it does lean towards the (R) side of the donation fence but does maintain significant donation levels to Democratic party organs despite them gunning for the company.