I have had similar experiences with linux, but as a good computer geek I actually enjoy trying to figure out what is wrong and fix it. It is as fun to me as any game. I have a dual boot system, and only use windows when I need to use my wireless card (I haven't been able to get the 3rd party drivers to compile correctly) or if I totally hose my linux install from tweaking somthing I don't know much about and dont feel like fixing it at the moment. With Windows, if somthing is broken or not optimized, there usually isn't much you can do about it, but in Linux there is almost always a way, although sometimes it takes a couple of hours.
As it applies to a corporation, balance sheet equity is assets minus liabilities. So negative equity means they have more liabilities than assets. While this is not a good thing, it doesn't necessarily mean that the company is going to go out of buisness. I know amazon.com had negative equity for a while, and I believe still does.
I can't imaging what kind of criticism Gore would have faced during 9-11 from the right. Most likely, something like "See you elected that spineless eco-hippy and he let THIS happen."
Another question is would 911 have happened if Gore had been elected? Bush had already managed to mildly piss off most of the rest of the world in his first year of presidency with things like rejecting the Kyoto protocol. His policies highlighted American greed.
That won't work, you'l just get thrown in jail and no one who cares will hear your story. You can't fight a catch-22 situation. the only solution is to get on your lifeboatboat and row to sweeden. Didn't you read the book?
Aren't they basically saying that software purchases in government should be a "new deal" type tax and spend program aimed at boosting software companies' profits and employment? I don't think Microsoft would appriciate it much if the government looked for the most expensive alternative for everything it bought, as it would be coming out of microsoft's pockets in the form of taxes.
Required? I don't like the idea being required to do anything, and anyway, who is going to require them to provide the service packs to pirates? I am in no way some righteous anti-piracy evangelist, but MS is a for profit company and has the right to do anything it can to prevent piracy. Every pirated copy is money out of their pocket, and piracy has probably cost them billions. Remember it takes money to develop these service packs, money that in theory comes from what you paid for XP. Sure, it would be great if they gave it to everyone, pirate or not, but it doesn't make business sense, and it really isn't unethical to deny SP2 to people who unethically obtained their software. There has to be some sort of incentive to actually pay for the software. For the record, yes I have pirated software, and no, I don't think I should recieve support for it if the company doesn't want me to. That's thier right.
Here in Ohio, I know you can incorporate a company with you as the sole shareholder. Interestingly enough, the law requires you to have an annual meeting with yourself, and to have minutes recorded. People actually do this to get the limited liability incorporation gives.
Kia's "#1 in service satisfaction!" should be starting any time now thanks to this guilt trip. They probably don't even really fire the guy if you insist on giving a 9...
Would you hire a physicist to design a bridge? It would be insane.
Would you hire an engineer with no knowledge of physics to build a bridge? That would be even more insane. Its really a bad analogy though, as a bridge is a one shot thing, it either stands, or crumbles. If the program i'm developing coredumps, I can fix it, no harm done. Even if you are never going to write your own hash table, its helpful to know how it works when you are using one.
It is VERY easy to cut a fiber line... I work at an ISP and we have to badger the telcos to fix it every time there is a fiber cut. The cuts are usually the result of a careless backhoe operator, and once it was determined the cable was actually cut by a lawnmower. Most are accidents, but it wouldent be hard to intentionally dig up some cable and cut it.
An LCD reverse peephole could be pretty helpful if someone is waiting inside with a sock full of quarters...
Re:Why is this news on Slashdot?
on
Kernel 2.4.26 Out
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They did: 2.6.5 2.6.4 Since slashdot is a major place to discuss and learn about linux, I think it's newsworthy because the kernel is the heart of linux. This is always the first place I hear about new kernels, plus the discussions usually tell what is new in it so I dont have to sift through the changelogs.
They are increasingly becoming even less of a devlopment company. The two flagship products, Windows and Office, are more or less stagnant. The OS they promised next year has been pushed to the next decade. Office has had no significant improvements in years. So they don't invest in new software products, and the xbox can only eat so much. So where to invest the money?
Kinda reminds me of the game Railroad Tycoon (one of my favorates). You start out and grow your railroad, trying to box the other companies in as you grow, but once you reach a certain point the actual trains don't matter at all any more because thier profits are such a tiny % of your cash on hand, and all your profit comes from financial wheelings and dealings where you buy/screw the competition. Microsoft seems to have reached that point. They have to do radical things to keep thier software profits growing, and have a massive war chest to fund it all.
If there is a vulnerability in a closed source OS, chances are there is going to be a virus or exploit written before there is a fix, but in an open source OS, vulnerabilities are discovered much easier by anyone looking for them, but the people finding them, possibly even would be virus writers, write a fix for the problem, and the software maintainers will actually add your fix into the code. It seems virus writers (with the exception of spammers) just want to show off thier technical prowess, and if its open source, they have an alternative to writing a virus. Surely though, if average Joe User starts using linux, he will run as root and download everything mailed to him, which will cause problems for him. Experienced users will have no problems most likely, just because they dont do stupid stuff like that. I haven't gotten a windows virus in about 7 years.. its not that hard to avoid if you know what you're doing.
Has anyone else ever wished for a combo gui-command line interface? I would love to be able to click to get to a directory (which often have long annoying to type names) and use a command line to actually execute somthing in that directory, such as "vi README" This would be especially useful if there's a huge number of files in the directory and you don't feel like actually looking for it. So they both definately have thier strengths and weaknesses.
Who is being outsourced, who is getting the jobs, who is making the decisions.
What is the result of outsourcing: product quality, economic effects...?
When:How long has this been going on? history of jobs going overseas, and how the current situation is different.
Where:What areas of the country are being hardest hit (i'd have to assume silicon valley, but I could be wrong).
Why are the companies doing it? How much is saved? What is being done with that extra cash?
People actually expect the government to finish ANYTHING within the budget and on time? This will probably be modded funny, but I don't think I'v ever heard of any major government project from road construction to wars being finished in the amount of time and for the cost they say it will. This is the government we're talking about, it would be bigger news if they had actually been successful.
This seems like a smart buisness move by IBM that will end up benefiting everyone. IBM probably believes that they will controll most of the manufacturing, because the only company with the fab capacity to make many is Intel, and i doubt they'd want to jeopardize thier probably higher profit margin pentium market share by making a power chip. At the same time, small fabs will be able to make the chips and keep the price reasonable. Also, i'd have to assume that IBM expects to provide most of the service and support for the chips. So the result will be a better designed chip because more people are working on it, oppritunities for small fabs to make this excelent chip, and profits for IBM because if the chip design is improved, market share will rise, with IBM reaping a good part of the profits. Bottom line in this optomistic scenario is a cheap, high preformance chip, and added profits for everyone but Intel. Everyone wins.
I have this one for the intellivision. You controll two kids in a house that have these really weird ghosts floating around, and you have to use them to collect sugar, a water pitcher and suger, then bring it to the sink to make koolade. If one of the kids gets hit by a ghost it is frozen, and you have to continue with the other. I think if you wanted you could switch which one was frozen. When you finished and made the koolade, there was a bonus level where you made the koolade man move up and down the screen and collect fruit that flies by. Kinda stupid, but still a fun game. I also have to point out how weird Donkey Kong is, although most people have just accepted that one without thinking about it too much.
I had that for the apple IIgs. Its just breakout, but with a rediculous story about a grid monster told in comic book style on the inside cover of the book type thing it came in. In the last level instead of bricks theres this mummy-head type things that spits things at you that you have to avoid while hitting him with your ball.
The big problem I see with this is that employees will have to become ass-kissers and make sure they tell management everything good that they do. The guy who quietly does his work unnoticed will probably get screwed in the ranking system. At the same time, it really is true that 50% of the workers are below average. How does the company handle the people who get 1's? Are they fired pretty quickly, or are they given some mercy, especially of the company or department as a whole is doing very well? I'm a big softie, and if I was a manager who had to evaluate employees, i'd most likely give most of them good raitings, but some other manager might want to look tough and give his employees poor raitings, especially if his department is doing poorly and he wants to transfer the blame off of himself. Forced rankings like that would give some consistancy in the rankings between different departments or shifts, which is probaly a good thing, especially if a company is planning layoffs. Without it, you could be in a lot more likely to be laid off if you have the tough boss.
Isn't the U.S. officially opposed to religious fundamentalists curtailing freedoms in other countries? Yet in this country gambiling is immoral so we cant do it in most places. Stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
I have had similar experiences with linux, but as a good computer geek I actually enjoy trying to figure out what is wrong and fix it. It is as fun to me as any game. I have a dual boot system, and only use windows when I need to use my wireless card (I haven't been able to get the 3rd party drivers to compile correctly) or if I totally hose my linux install from tweaking somthing I don't know much about and dont feel like fixing it at the moment. With Windows, if somthing is broken or not optimized, there usually isn't much you can do about it, but in Linux there is almost always a way, although sometimes it takes a couple of hours.
As it applies to a corporation, balance sheet equity is assets minus liabilities. So negative equity means they have more liabilities than assets. While this is not a good thing, it doesn't necessarily mean that the company is going to go out of buisness. I know amazon.com had negative equity for a while, and I believe still does.
I can't imaging what kind of criticism Gore would have faced during 9-11 from the right. Most likely, something like "See you elected that spineless eco-hippy and he let THIS happen."
Another question is would 911 have happened if Gore had been elected? Bush had already managed to mildly piss off most of the rest of the world in his first year of presidency with things like rejecting the Kyoto protocol. His policies highlighted American greed.
That won't work, you'l just get thrown in jail and no one who cares will hear your story. You can't fight a catch-22 situation. the only solution is to get on your lifeboatboat and row to sweeden. Didn't you read the book?
Aren't they basically saying that software purchases in government should be a "new deal" type tax and spend program aimed at boosting software companies' profits and employment? I don't think Microsoft would appriciate it much if the government looked for the most expensive alternative for everything it bought, as it would be coming out of microsoft's pockets in the form of taxes.
Required? I don't like the idea being required to do anything, and anyway, who is going to require them to provide the service packs to pirates? I am in no way some righteous anti-piracy evangelist, but MS is a for profit company and has the right to do anything it can to prevent piracy. Every pirated copy is money out of their pocket, and piracy has probably cost them billions. Remember it takes money to develop these service packs, money that in theory comes from what you paid for XP. Sure, it would be great if they gave it to everyone, pirate or not, but it doesn't make business sense, and it really isn't unethical to deny SP2 to people who unethically obtained their software. There has to be some sort of incentive to actually pay for the software. For the record, yes I have pirated software, and no, I don't think I should recieve support for it if the company doesn't want me to. That's thier right.
Here in Ohio, I know you can incorporate a company with you as the sole shareholder. Interestingly enough, the law requires you to have an annual meeting with yourself, and to have minutes recorded. People actually do this to get the limited liability incorporation gives.
Kia's "#1 in service satisfaction!" should be starting any time now thanks to this guilt trip. They probably don't even really fire the guy if you insist on giving a 9...
"Do you really want to do this? The person who helped you will be fired if you don't give the 10."
Man, I wish I could do that to that bastard at midas that replaced my whole exaust system for $500 without asking me first...
Would you hire a physicist to design a bridge? It would be insane.
Would you hire an engineer with no knowledge of physics to build a bridge? That would be even more insane. Its really a bad analogy though, as a bridge is a one shot thing, it either stands, or crumbles. If the program i'm developing coredumps, I can fix it, no harm done. Even if you are never going to write your own hash table, its helpful to know how it works when you are using one.
It is VERY easy to cut a fiber line... I work at an ISP and we have to badger the telcos to fix it every time there is a fiber cut. The cuts are usually the result of a careless backhoe operator, and once it was determined the cable was actually cut by a lawnmower. Most are accidents, but it wouldent be hard to intentionally dig up some cable and cut it.
An LCD reverse peephole could be pretty helpful if someone is waiting inside with a sock full of quarters...
They did:
2.6.5
2.6.4
Since slashdot is a major place to discuss and learn about linux, I think it's newsworthy because the kernel is the heart of linux. This is always the first place I hear about new kernels, plus the discussions usually tell what is new in it so I dont have to sift through the changelogs.
Isn't this why we have airplanes/helicopters? I'm sure its not easy to fly to the south pole, but it can't be any easier to drive there...
They are increasingly becoming even less of a devlopment company. The two flagship products, Windows and Office, are more or less stagnant. The OS they promised next year has been pushed to the next decade. Office has had no significant improvements in years. So they don't invest in new software products, and the xbox can only eat so much. So where to invest the money?
Kinda reminds me of the game Railroad Tycoon (one of my favorates). You start out and grow your railroad, trying to box the other companies in as you grow, but once you reach a certain point the actual trains don't matter at all any more because thier profits are such a tiny % of your cash on hand, and all your profit comes from financial wheelings and dealings where you buy/screw the competition. Microsoft seems to have reached that point. They have to do radical things to keep thier software profits growing, and have a massive war chest to fund it all.
If there is a vulnerability in a closed source OS, chances are there is going to be a virus or exploit written before there is a fix, but in an open source OS, vulnerabilities are discovered much easier by anyone looking for them, but the people finding them, possibly even would be virus writers, write a fix for the problem, and the software maintainers will actually add your fix into the code. It seems virus writers (with the exception of spammers) just want to show off thier technical prowess, and if its open source, they have an alternative to writing a virus. Surely though, if average Joe User starts using linux, he will run as root and download everything mailed to him, which will cause problems for him. Experienced users will have no problems most likely, just because they dont do stupid stuff like that. I haven't gotten a windows virus in about 7 years.. its not that hard to avoid if you know what you're doing.
Has anyone else ever wished for a combo gui-command line interface? I would love to be able to click to get to a directory (which often have long annoying to type names) and use a command line to actually execute somthing in that directory, such as "vi README" This would be especially useful if there's a huge number of files in the directory and you don't feel like actually looking for it. So they both definately have thier strengths and weaknesses.
Who is being outsourced, who is getting the jobs, who is making the decisions.
What is the result of outsourcing: product quality, economic effects...?
When:How long has this been going on? history of jobs going overseas, and how the current situation is different.
Where:What areas of the country are being hardest hit (i'd have to assume silicon valley, but I could be wrong).
Why are the companies doing it? How much is saved? What is being done with that extra cash?
People actually expect the government to finish ANYTHING within the budget and on time? This will probably be modded funny, but I don't think I'v ever heard of any major government project from road construction to wars being finished in the amount of time and for the cost they say it will. This is the government we're talking about, it would be bigger news if they had actually been successful.
This seems like a smart buisness move by IBM that will end up benefiting everyone. IBM probably believes that they will controll most of the manufacturing, because the only company with the fab capacity to make many is Intel, and i doubt they'd want to jeopardize thier probably higher profit margin pentium market share by making a power chip. At the same time, small fabs will be able to make the chips and keep the price reasonable. Also, i'd have to assume that IBM expects to provide most of the service and support for the chips. So the result will be a better designed chip because more people are working on it, oppritunities for small fabs to make this excelent chip, and profits for IBM because if the chip design is improved, market share will rise, with IBM reaping a good part of the profits. Bottom line in this optomistic scenario is a cheap, high preformance chip, and added profits for everyone but Intel. Everyone wins.
$3,500au=$2,658.50us or 2,171.13 euros. Pretty pricy
I have this one for the intellivision. You controll two kids in a house that have these really weird ghosts floating around, and you have to use them to collect sugar, a water pitcher and suger, then bring it to the sink to make koolade. If one of the kids gets hit by a ghost it is frozen, and you have to continue with the other. I think if you wanted you could switch which one was frozen. When you finished and made the koolade, there was a bonus level where you made the koolade man move up and down the screen and collect fruit that flies by. Kinda stupid, but still a fun game. I also have to point out how weird Donkey Kong is, although most people have just accepted that one without thinking about it too much.
I had that for the apple IIgs. Its just breakout, but with a rediculous story about a grid monster told in comic book style on the inside cover of the book type thing it came in. In the last level instead of bricks theres this mummy-head type things that spits things at you that you have to avoid while hitting him with your ball.
The big problem I see with this is that employees will have to become ass-kissers and make sure they tell management everything good that they do. The guy who quietly does his work unnoticed will probably get screwed in the ranking system. At the same time, it really is true that 50% of the workers are below average. How does the company handle the people who get 1's? Are they fired pretty quickly, or are they given some mercy, especially of the company or department as a whole is doing very well? I'm a big softie, and if I was a manager who had to evaluate employees, i'd most likely give most of them good raitings, but some other manager might want to look tough and give his employees poor raitings, especially if his department is doing poorly and he wants to transfer the blame off of himself. Forced rankings like that would give some consistancy in the rankings between different departments or shifts, which is probaly a good thing, especially if a company is planning layoffs. Without it, you could be in a lot more likely to be laid off if you have the tough boss.
Isn't the U.S. officially opposed to religious fundamentalists curtailing freedoms in other countries? Yet in this country gambiling is immoral so we cant do it in most places. Stupid.