The shocking thing is, many people build their business and reputation on Oracle software. And act like they are making a wise business decision.
If their business is dependent on and tied together by software that 'lives' on the whim of one man (Ellision) it's hard to call it a wisely structured business. Maybe he'll live forever. He's certainly 'married' to his company. It seems like a deal with the devil though.
Bob Young isn't 'any moron.' He's one of the clueful. He got in when Linux was young, and he's cashed out now. How can you call that the behavior of 'any moron'?
The prices that products fetch in the US market, plus the non-trivial fact that the goods are bought with US Dollars (important in the Asian economies) makes WalMart a very important customer to those Asian vendors. You think they're keen to sell cheap CD players in China for $2 and would rather do that than sell them in the US where they fetch $15-40?
Sure it will. You just have to "upgrade" the Operating System.
The 'Lindows' they sell in those computers is like the cheap offset printed halftone color 'photograph' that is in the picture frame when you buy it. Nobody would in their right mind use it. Anybody with a clue throws a begged/bought/borrowed copy of a Windows or Linux CD in the machine quickly.
It remains to be seen, however, what will truly happen when walmart is the world's only megacorp...
There is a natural cycle that develops. Mega-corps inevitably 'fall down' because they become huge, monolithic and inflexible as they grow. Often they 'clear the land' so to speak, and make it possible for small new upstart businesses to take root.
Wal-Mart, to take an example, 'cleared the field' by undercutting and wiping out big dinosaur retailers like Montgomery Ward and K-Mart.
There's a Wal-Mart on the outskirts of the small town that I near. It's done a lot of damage to that small-town's storefronts, but I have noticed that in the last six months a new independently-managed Music store has opened up. It sells both recorded music and actual musical instruments. At the same time the local Sam Goody is liquidating their stock and will be closed as of Dec. 27th.
Market economies are dynamic, and unless WalMart can get laws passed preventing small businesses from opening, they can't and won't control the entire market. We, locally, refuse to shop there, and we're not alone.
For literally millions of Asians, Wal-Mart is the market that sells the goods they manufacture. It is the buyer and retail seller of the cheap manufactured goods they have jobs making.
Obviously, things are different in a country with 200+ million "citizens..." so the ancient model needs to be modernized, in some way.
Modernize 'schmodernize.' Come on now. The good old fashioned way established in the Constitution when this country was founded would work fine, it's just that we've allowed a large federal government to eat away at our political freedoms over time.
Political power should be vested in as small a unit of people as is possible. State governments should have singificantly more power than the Federal government. Local governments should have more power than state governments. Wherever possible. That's the way the United States (hello? did you notice the words United and States there??) was founded.
Washington DC should fade slowly back into the being obscure unpleasant swamplike place it originally was.
How does any redistricting program nullify your vote?
You get to vote. Your vote is not nullified.
Now, if you want to start playing group games and set up divide and conquer games where people are sorted out according to ancestry or economic status, maybe you can make the case that your voting bloc is nullified. But that's you and your arbitrary categories you're sorting people into. Some of us feel people should stand on their merits as individuals. Sorry for not being clannish and in favor of your apartheid games.
civil servants in European monarchies were traditionally loyal to the king,
Yes, and civil servants today, everywhere in the world, unless they're 'biased' in favor of one political party or the other, are beholden to the strong 'mother state' concept. They're DEFINITELY not going to support any anti-establishment political movement that seeks to roll back the power of the state (the avowed claim that many small-c conservatives espouse in the US).
In most places where I've seen 'pieces of mail' validating someone for some geographically based 'right' (i.e. library card) it has to be a substancial piece of mail like a utility bill. I hope the particular voting hoax you elude to doesn't allow it to be postcards. It would be easy to rig a postcard-sending system where people pair up and send postcards to each other and double their vote that way.
They could easily find that they have lost everything they now have in 12 months time.
Not hardly. The Democratic losses over the last half decade aren't a 'fluke' that can be overturned by a little election trickery. It's a historical trend, and it's not changing anytime soon. Perhaps what the 'two party system' needs is to loosen the belt a little and let the loony left and the loony right more free to run third party candidates more easily, because the loony-left is right on the verge of throwing the presidential election again. I don't see a Perot out there to fuddle up the Republican base, but I've heard the recent rumors about Nader running again...
Maybe we should support Skylarov by purchasing and using the software products his company produces. As mentioned here, they make a product called "Advanced Email Extractor (AEE)" that "is designed to extract e-mail addresses from web-pages on the Internet"
Yes, an email address harvesting product for spammers to use.
And he moved on from Minix, which is really a pedagogical OS, to produce Amoeba, which is and was pretty cool. And is greatly overlooked by many people.
Lots and lots of people bought SX chips (I didn't) There wasn't a lot of code for Windows that used floating point instructions back in the days of the 486. For 'general use' as a word processor, etc. the DX chip was overkill and contained a lot of silicon that was never used.
A few years later, the same sort of 'cost saving' measure was practiced by people who bought the far cheaper non-intel 'Pentium clone' chips, i.e. the Cyrix and AMD K5 and K6 chips, which had degraded floating point performance but sigificantly lower cost.
Windows before version 3.0 wasn't claimed to be a multitasking environment, except for the special case of 'Windows 386 2.1' which had some rudimentary protected mode support.
Many of us ran Windows on 8088 and '286 machines for quite awhile before we could afford a machine with the '386 'virtual 8086' functionality, so we didn't have 'Pre-emptive mutlitasking' either.
And I know that Microsoft made no unfounded claims about 'multitasking' on their early versions of Windows.
I have tons of Simpsons episodes recorded as VCDs in my collection. Burned onto nice stable CD-R disks.
We'll see in ten years or so wether you still have that big honking hard drive and equipment to read it and play it back to a display. I could stick my collection of CDs in a cardboard box and store it for ten years with confidence that at least most of them will still play.
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The shocking thing is, many people build their business and reputation on Oracle software. And act like they are making a wise business decision.
If their business is dependent on and tied together by software that 'lives' on the whim of one man (Ellision) it's hard to call it a wisely structured business. Maybe he'll live forever. He's certainly 'married' to his company. It seems like a deal with the devil though.
Contract employees are generally treated that way at any company. You want a good job, you get hired. You want a quick-and-dirty job, you contract.
Bob Young isn't 'any moron.' He's one of the clueful. He got in when Linux was young, and he's cashed out now. How can you call that the behavior of 'any moron'?
they lock me into their clunky interface to play my music.
How can you say that? You don't like acres of brushed-aluminum-widgetry?
The prices that products fetch in the US market, plus the non-trivial fact that the goods are bought with US Dollars (important in the Asian economies) makes WalMart a very important customer to those Asian vendors. You think they're keen to sell cheap CD players in China for $2 and would rather do that than sell them in the US where they fetch $15-40?
WalMart can succeed dramatically without ever selling a single song to a customer who has ever owned a Macintosh.
I doubt if they consider the ITMS as a competitor. Apple's venture is widely seen as a 'test market' by many.
Sure it will. You just have to "upgrade" the Operating System.
The 'Lindows' they sell in those computers is like the cheap offset printed halftone color 'photograph' that is in the picture frame when you buy it. Nobody would in their right mind use it. Anybody with a clue throws a begged/bought/borrowed copy of a Windows or Linux CD in the machine quickly.
It remains to be seen, however, what will truly happen when walmart is the world's only megacorp...
There is a natural cycle that develops. Mega-corps inevitably 'fall down' because they become huge, monolithic and inflexible as they grow. Often they 'clear the land' so to speak, and make it possible for small new upstart businesses to take root.
Wal-Mart, to take an example, 'cleared the field' by undercutting and wiping out big dinosaur retailers like Montgomery Ward and K-Mart.
There's a Wal-Mart on the outskirts of the small town that I near. It's done a lot of damage to that small-town's storefronts, but I have noticed that in the last six months a new independently-managed Music store has opened up. It sells both recorded music and actual musical instruments. At the same time the local Sam Goody is liquidating their stock and will be closed as of Dec. 27th.
Market economies are dynamic, and unless WalMart can get laws passed preventing small businesses from opening, they can't and won't control the entire market. We, locally, refuse to shop there, and we're not alone.
For literally millions of Asians, Wal-Mart is the market that sells the goods they manufacture. It is the buyer and retail seller of the cheap manufactured goods they have jobs making.
He probably means 'compelled' as in 'compulsive.'
Don't nobody??
That's doublespeak for 'everybody' isn't it?
Or is it simply a double negative for the same effect?
Obviously, things are different in a country with 200+ million "citizens..." so the ancient model needs to be modernized, in some way.
Modernize 'schmodernize.' Come on now. The good old fashioned way established in the Constitution when this country was founded would work fine, it's just that we've allowed a large federal government to eat away at our political freedoms over time.
Political power should be vested in as small a unit of people as is possible. State governments should have singificantly more power than the Federal government. Local governments should have more power than state governments. Wherever possible. That's the way the United States (hello? did you notice the words United and States there??) was founded.
Washington DC should fade slowly back into the being obscure unpleasant swamplike place it originally was.
How does any redistricting program nullify your vote?
You get to vote. Your vote is not nullified.
Now, if you want to start playing group games and set up divide and conquer games where people are sorted out according to ancestry or economic status, maybe you can make the case that your voting bloc is nullified. But that's you and your arbitrary categories you're sorting people into. Some of us feel people should stand on their merits as individuals. Sorry for not being clannish and in favor of your apartheid games.
civil servants in European monarchies were traditionally loyal to the king,
Yes, and civil servants today, everywhere in the world, unless they're 'biased' in favor of one political party or the other, are beholden to the strong 'mother state' concept. They're DEFINITELY not going to support any anti-establishment political movement that seeks to roll back the power of the state (the avowed claim that many small-c conservatives espouse in the US).
the people actually drawing the boundries are career civil servants
Whew! That's reassuring. I wouldn't want anybody involved in the districting to have a bias against large government!
So basically this 'commission' is made up of deep, deep insiders heavily vested in government and bureacracy.
The fact that no boundary disputes have been referred to a court for resolution makes it sound even more like it's a closed up deal.
In most places where I've seen 'pieces of mail' validating someone for some geographically based 'right' (i.e. library card) it has to be a substancial piece of mail like a utility bill. I hope the particular voting hoax you elude to doesn't allow it to be postcards. It would be easy to rig a postcard-sending system where people pair up and send postcards to each other and double their vote that way.
They could easily find that they have lost everything they now have in 12 months time.
Not hardly. The Democratic losses over the last half decade aren't a 'fluke' that can be overturned by a little election trickery. It's a historical trend, and it's not changing anytime soon. Perhaps what the 'two party system' needs is to loosen the belt a little and let the loony left and the loony right more free to run third party candidates more easily, because the loony-left is right on the verge of throwing the presidential election again. I don't see a Perot out there to fuddle up the Republican base, but I've heard the recent rumors about Nader running again...
Why would it be different than it was when Clinton and Janet Rhino were in office? Remember the 'storm trooper' tactics that happened back then?
Ol' Shakey may have appeared 'nice' on camera, but she knew how to pull a trigger when needed.
Maybe we should support Skylarov by purchasing and using the software products his company produces. As mentioned here, they make a product called "Advanced Email Extractor (AEE)" that "is designed to extract e-mail addresses from web-pages on the Internet"
Yes, an email address harvesting product for spammers to use.
Nice guy. Let's throw all our support behind him.
And he moved on from Minix, which is really a pedagogical OS, to produce Amoeba, which is and was pretty cool. And is greatly overlooked by many people.
It wasn't that far off a prediction.
A Windows PC running AOL's host software is a pretty good approximation of a 'dumb terminal.' It's at least a good emulation.
Lots and lots of people bought SX chips (I didn't) There wasn't a lot of code for Windows that used floating point instructions back in the days of the 486. For 'general use' as a word processor, etc. the DX chip was overkill and contained a lot of silicon that was never used.
A few years later, the same sort of 'cost saving' measure was practiced by people who bought the far cheaper non-intel 'Pentium clone' chips, i.e. the Cyrix and AMD K5 and K6 chips, which had degraded floating point performance but sigificantly lower cost.
Windows before version 3.0 wasn't claimed to be a multitasking environment, except for the special case of 'Windows 386 2.1' which had some rudimentary protected mode support.
Many of us ran Windows on 8088 and '286 machines for quite awhile before we could afford a machine with the '386 'virtual 8086' functionality, so we didn't have 'Pre-emptive mutlitasking' either.
And I know that Microsoft made no unfounded claims about 'multitasking' on their early versions of Windows.
What's your basis for your claims?
I have tons of Simpsons episodes recorded as VCDs in my collection. Burned onto nice stable CD-R disks.
We'll see in ten years or so wether you still have that big honking hard drive and equipment to read it and play it back to a display. I could stick my collection of CDs in a cardboard box and store it for ten years with confidence that at least most of them will still play.