First thing after singing up on lastfm it told me to download 2 applications. A player and a application that sends songs that I play via itunes back to them.
No thanks. I'll stick with pandora.
I used Pandora for a while, but then I realized that it was using about 20% CPU. Maybe that's Adobe/Macromedia's fault, or maybe it's Pandora's, but whatever the case I don't think my media player needs a fifth of my computer's processing power. I'm now happily using the Last.fm player with about 2% CPU. So, my experience is that Pandora is very clunky, not Last.fm. Fortunately for me, I use amaroK, so support was built in and I only had to download one program, not two; nevertheless, I still think that if you're going to spend enough time to sign up with either service, it's not much more work to download two small programs.
I'm sure Coke could be a lot cheaper if they dropped their marketing efforts but there's probably problems with that as well.
Well, there the fault lies with consumers. If they think that just because polar bears appear with a drink in a commercial that it's worth more, that's their business. The demand for a product is determined by how much consumers want it, not necessarily by how good it is. Since consumers aren't always rational, prices will not always be rational, but there's not really much we can or should do about that. Besides, consumers are usually rational enough that prices aren't completely disconnected from reality, and your experience with your company shows that.
If you already know that, and you haven't arrested him by the time he shows up to get on the plane, what's the point?
Um, because you can arrest him when he shows up. That's my whole point. Obviously just checking your ID won't do anything *by itself*. The logical extension of checking the ID is arresting them if you know that the person is probably up to no good.
Linux doesn't really count in this manner because it gets ignored as a "geek OS" and not really something anybody can run.
And I suppose you think that non-geeks are going to have a conversation like this:
Non-geek MS fan: Look at that! Finder takes 1.5 times as long as Explorer to display the contents of this directory. Non-geek Apple fan: Pfff! Everyone knows that Trident (Explorer's renderer) sucks. It's not even close to Acid2 compliance! Non-geek MS fan: It hardly matters. Acid2 isn't really of any practical value and it doesn't truly represent a test for compliance with HTML/CSS since it only accounts for a small subset of the standards. Non-geek Apple fan: So what? Everyone knows that if you tie a browser so deeply into an OS you're going to have trouble. Geek Linux fan: Well, KDE, though not a complete OS, relies pretty heavily on Konqueror, and it's Acid2 compliant.
Both non-geeks: Ugh! Begone you nerd!
Riiight... Only geeks will really care about "OS competition," so your statement is a moot point. And really, the only geeky knowledge you need to at this point to run Linux is how to boot from a CD. My non-geek sister installed Ubuntu without my help and has run it with no more help than I had to give my other sister who runs Windows.
Apple will always have an "unfair" advantage on the hardware side because it tightly controls what hardware it uses. Windows has to run on a wide variety of hardware whose reliability will vary widely. Linux has to run on the same variety (actually more variety since it can run on both x86, PPC and many other platforms) without the clout that Microsoft has, so usually Linux developers have to write 3rd party drivers with documentation, if they're lucky, or reverse-engineering. The only way you'll have "real OS competition" is if (A) Apple lets OS X run on non-Apple PCs and (B) hardware manufacturers start writing Linux drivers. The former will probably never happen and the latter will only happen if Linux gains a lot of marketshare.
Mohammed Atta had a passport and credit cards, and there's no indication that he was reluctant to show them as he got on a plane at Logan airport on 9/11. Same with the shoe bomber.
Maybe checking ID doesn't really help.
Your statement assumes that the government has no idea of who Atta was. Of course, without *any* other measures ID checking "doesn't really help." But if you know who Mohammed Atta is, and you know what he wants to (potentially culled from intelligence), it might prevent an attack.
When you connect to a server, it logs your IP address. If the admin of the server realizes that you've been trying to attack the server from your IP address, he might simply ban connections from you. Everyone here agrees that IP logging is a way to help ensure security on computers; we should also agree that "person-logging" at airports benefits security in some way.
Whether or not giving up anonymous travel is worth this added layer of security is debatable. But saying that ID-checking is useless for security is like saying that IP-logging is useless as well.
What you're basically saying is that it's possible to progress with nothing going wrong, which any engineer will tell you is a load of bollocks.
Of course thinking that nothing will go wrong is ridiculous, and that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the original poster trivialized the Challenger accident as something we can live with every now and then; I guess it would be analagous to saying that the accident was within an acceptable error margin since the astronauts were aware of the dangers and spaceflight is inherently dangerous. Just because we had an accident doesn't mean that we should stop exploring space, but it doesn't mean that the accident wasn't a big deal.
These astronauts were accepting a risk and the whole thing was a bummer, but more people die getting hit by cars a day than being strapped on dangerous rockets.
Far more people ride on cars each day than ride into space.
The reason it was such a big deal was the media and politicians using it to full propaganda value. Nothing like a little shared greaf to bring the nation together. I should remind you, that America in the 1980's had lots of social conflict lying just below the surface.
You need to read myths 6 and 7. Politics had nothing to do with when the launch happened, and the accident did not have to happen. Dismissing this as just "something that goes with progress" suggests that we need not learn from our mistakes, since it's okay if we mess up every now and then. It's always important to learn from mistakes in engineering, especially when they end up tragically like in this case, so that they don't repeat themselves.
If you're friends or family died in a car crash, I don't think you'd find this idea very consoling: "hey, running around at 60 mph in a ton of metal with explosions going off in front of you is dangerous, so what? My friends knew about the risk and they accepted it."
hasn't he tried the competition enough ot know that the command in question is called "su" and that most people just use "sudo" to do superuser commands one at a time?
Not just that, but look at the "SUPERUSR ON" in context:
if they consent, just that task is elevated (this is more secure that SUPERUSR ON in Unix that elevates the entire session).
If you do "sudo task", task alone is run as the superuser. So, in that sense, the only difference here is that Unix asks you for a password before executing it. In this sense, Unix is more secure because once you've cracked someone's "protected admin" account, it doesn't take much effort to give superuser approval to tasks (assuming you don't yet know the user's password). What Mr. Nash was talking about was "su" which will elevate everything in your session, but so long as you're in X, it will only do that for the commands you enter into the terminal window, not your entire session.
Do you really want to be informed of every social wrong on the planet and given the responsibility to fix all of them with every motion of your body?
No, but you are misinterpreting what I said. All I'm saying is that worker's compensation should be decided between the company and the employees, with the caveat being that the labor market is fluid enough that workers have a choice in where they work. I'm also saying that the price of products should be decided between the company and the consumer. Since the company is responsible for two variables here, they will have to strike a balance to succeed. Any company that sets prices too low will have to pay too little, which means employees won't go there, which means it will go out of business. If it pays employees too much, its prices will go too high, and it will go out of business. Consumers will always want cheaper prices, and employees will always want higher salaries, but since it's impossible to please everyone, companies are there to set the most reasonable balance.
My statement doesn't extend beyond that. Let me quickly debunk each of your statements:
"Don't drive on that street, it was made with that cheap migrant labor from Mexico."
If the Mexican laborers are willing to work for less, so be it. Give the jobs to the most competitive workers. Don't like it? Go work somewhere else.
"Don't eat that, the boats they use for catching that seafood uses lead based paints on the hull."
That's an environmental issue that isn't relevant to my point. Companies usually lack the long-term vision to see the impact of such a decision, so government should stop that.
"You can't use Shell gasoline, they aren't nice people."
Riiight...
"Why aren't you buying American you commie?"
In a global market, I don't care about preserving American jobs at the expense of foreign jobs and at the expense of the American economy unless Americans are doing the best job. I care about rewarding the best workers, whichever country they live in.
"Don't work there, they use Microsoft products on their workstations and they've been convicted and they use those evil H1-B visa people who steal our jobs."
1) Even if I don't like Microsoft, that doesn't mean I dislike its customers. 2) If they've served their sentence and got out, it's not my job to punish them further. 3) I don't know about the "H1-B visa" but if they're "stealing out jobs" because they're more competitive than American workers, good for them! Let's thank them for strengthening our economy.
The government should be policing things that we cannot police ourselves. I don't have the power to find out what paint is on the bottom of the ships that got the fish I eat; that's the sort of thing government is for. But we can definitely police our own wages; in fact, we can do that far better than the government can (this is why Germany, which has a lot of such intervention, has over 10% unemployment). Government is there to mind the business of the people as a whole; our brains are here to mind our own business.
K... but how does what you quoted relate to my comment?
The Enron debacle happened because executives dumped their stocks when they had insider information on the company. This system prevents Google from turning into Enron.
Shocking news: The SWF format IS open: Here you have a link. The license is quite similar to PDF.
Shocking news: The SWF format is NOT open. Read here. Here is the important part:
"Although a full specification of SWF is available, it is not an open format, as implementing software that plays the format is disallowed by the specification's license. Reverse engineering is therefore the only legal way to compete with the official SWF player, and no adequate competition yet exists."
In other words, the reason why libswf can exist and why gstreamer can make Flash animations is that you can make stuff that *writes* SWF files, but not programs that *read* them. This is completely unlike PDF, where we can write programs to both create PDFs and to display them.
The idealist (RMS) and the engineer (Linus) are definitely at a point of contention on this issue...it'll be interesting to see what happens.
I agree the general point of your post, but I just wanted to add that this "idealist/engineer" contrast is slightly inaccurate. In fact, I think Linus once said something like "RMS is the great philosopher, I am the engineer" (correct me if I'm wrong). RMS sure talks a lot about philosophy and Linus does not, but that doesn't mean that RMS isn't as much of an engineer. He's responsible for some of the most important and popular programs out there, such as GCC, GDB and Emacs. So, IMHO, it should be something more like "RMS is the idealist engineer, while Linus is the pragmatic engineer." In other words, RMS does work adhering to a strict philosophy, while Linus is more concerned with just getting the work done.
How is it that Nike has been accused for many years of running third world sweat shops (as has the rest of the garment industry) and yet the first thing we are concerned with when buying clothes is the cost. There is nothing which will stop this from happening unless it is artificially implimented (government regulations).
If the people buying clothes (the general public) care more about the cost of their shoes than the conditions of the workers who make the shoes, why will they vote for laws that will increase the price of the shoes? The reasons for why this situation can occur are:
1. The public doesn't care about the workers (and if the public controls the government as in a democracy, it won't act to protect the workers either).
2. Nike has no competition for labor.
If Nike has a monopoly on labor, then government intervention may be warranted. I favor the government intervening to protect the right of workers to exercise their economic freedoms (i.e. striking, negotiating terms, or going to other places of work), and because everyone in the country works for someone, the people will support such a measure. But setting artificial requirements for wages or benefits are either redundant or harmful in the economy.
I'm not praising communism, but I am saying that there are some merits to limiting the amount of power CEO's and CoB's have. Perhaps even making them "the people"... it wouldn't hurt to make those dirty bastards have to EARN a living. They bleed the same as we do, perhaps they should put something back into society before they see another dime.
Here's a way to limit their power: stop paying them. There are two groups of people who CEOs need to attract: employees and customers. If company A (which makes computers because we're on/.) chooses to pay its employees $10/hour, and company B (also making computers) chooses to pay $20/hour, who is going to get the workers? On the other hand, company B will have to raise its prices to $2000 for a computer, while company A will only have to charge $1000. Who's going to get the customers? It depends. If company B makes really great computers and A makes really crappy computers, people will buy from company A. So, company A will end up having to raise wages so that it ends its losing streak.
Companies have a vested interest in pleasing customers, which indirectly means they have a vested interest in pleasing employees, not breaking their backs. Obviously there are exceptions that can arise, such as corruption by the CEOs, and all of this depends on fluidity in the market, i.e. if consumers don't like company A, there needs to be a competitor they can go to, and the same holds for workers. But my point here is that how high wages are and what kind of working conditions workers have is set really by the consumer public; the CEO is just the messenger. Of course, CEOs are supposed to manage this relationship and set it in a general direction, and this is a job of its own which deserves pay, even though the pay is often extremely exaggerated. Still, it's easy to blame CEOs and "megacorporations" and "big business," but these people don't draw their influence from thin air. The reason CEOs get rich is because people voluntarily give them money. If the general public really cared about not paying CEOs lots of money, this wouldn't be an issue. I often think that various CEOs who are getting rich don't deserve it; that's why I'm not giving them money. Don't like wealthy movie actors? Stop going to the movies. Don't like rich oil executives? Use less (or even no) gasoline for your transportation. Don't like X businessmen? Stop buying X product. It's that simple. Rich people get rich because they're doing something someone else wants; complain to the people who want it and pay for it if you think something about it is wrong.
Does anybody here really believe that a CEO's perspective changes if they get a $1 salary versus a multi-million dollar salary when they have a ton of stock and options? Good CEO's will feel a vested interest in the company's performance, and bad CEO's will not. Awarding them scads of cash may keep them on board with your company, but that's all it buys you.
RTFA: "Unlike insider sales that are made by company executives accused of unloading stock right before a suspected downturn, the Google executives' sales were decided long ago. They were coordinated under a schedule that allows insiders to pre-arrange the sale of a certain number of shares over a period of time. The plan, called a 10b5-1, allows them to sell stock on a regular basis without appearing as though they are reacting to market movements up or down."
In other words, at the time they make the decision to sell, they have no more information than anyone else about what will be going on at the company when the actual sale takes place (in the future).
What's wrong with flash? It does what it does quite well, it's flexible and extensible. It's mature and has almost 100% market penetration. Why does it need replacing.
Just today I experienced a considerable amount of frustration because of Flash. In my physics class at my university we have to turn in homework on the Internet, and the website we're using uses Flash for entering equations. Several of the problems required us to enter Greek symbols (like pi and omega). However, when I tried to enter these characters, half of the character would display and the cursor would remain in the same spot as before, so if you continued the equation, it would overwrite the Greek symbol. It's a weird bug and hard to describe (sorry if you don't understand what's going on), but the point is it prevented me from doing my homework. I ended up figuring out that when I tried doing it on Windows instead of Flash on Linux (the latest version still), it worked. So, clearly, the Linux version of Flash has some weird bug in it that Macromedia has failed to address. In the end, I was inconvenienced because I had to reboot into Windows to do my homework instead of on my normal operating system.
This isn't the first time I've encountered bugs with the Linux version of Flash; take a look at this (scroll down to glitches and then watch the cartoon for yourself on Linux). Obviously not getting to play a song on a cartoon website isn't going to scar me for life, but my point is that Macromedia (should I say Adobe?) isn't doing a very good of a job on the Linux version, probably because they feel that Linux doesn't have enough marketshare to significantly affect their profits.
If your answer involves "open source" then you can stop right there. Nobody (except about half the slashdot audience) gives a rat's ass about source code as long as the software works properly.
The reason that some people are concerned with open source is that it offers a way out of monopolies. The biggest problem isn't that the Flash player itself is proprietary (even though it would be nice if it weren't); it's that SWF is proprietary. This suppresses competition from would-be open source (or even other proprietary) Flash players that have to compete with Adobe/Macromedia. If SWF was open, an open source Flash player could be easily written that would eliminate such bugs.
We can always debate whether or not proprietary or open source development models produce better quality code, but proprietary formats are never good. All they do is hurt competition, which helps no one but the authors. Now that Adobe owns Macromedia, hopefully the Flash people will take a hint from PDF: open formats work. If SWF is opened, great; there would be no need to replace the format, only potentially the player. But as long as SWF remains proprietary, it needs to be replaced by a format that everyone can use.
that's fine for me (I have 7 years commercial programming experience on top of all the hobbyist stuff before that), but utterly meaningless for "normal" users; for them, this is still unpatched. Once the distros release patches, then it's patched.
Yes, but that's a moot point. The distros released patches already (before the story even hit Slashdot). So yes, in terms of practical implementations, you're right that a patch isn't a "real" patch until distributions distribute it, but their patches came right after the source patch, so there's almost no difference.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Safari the only browser that passes the Acid2 standards test?
Safari was the *first* browser to pass Acid2, but there are others now too. In fact, Konqueror was able to pass Acid2 largely because Apple contributed patches back into KHTML.
*And a few faculty members still want Digital/True64 4G for their Fortran compilers, since the GCC-Fortran kludge sucks
Is this gcc-fortran as in the new Fortran95 compiler? Or are you talking about g77? (If g77, I don't do enough Fortran to know, but the physics professor I've talked to who does a lot of Fortran really, really likes g77... is it really that bad that it can be called a kludge?)
Aren't comet's supposed to consist mostly of frozen water and gasses? Wouldn't most of that melt when exposed to earth temperatures?
I know they handle the sample in a very clean room, but shouldn't it also be very cold?
Apparently some of the traces are empty because of ice landing in the aerogel and melting. So, it seems that ice that could melt has already melted. Still, some of the residue from the ice should still be left in the trace that the scientists could analyze, so all is not lost.
This mission is just one more example of why I feel manned missions are unnecessary. Thinking of sending people to a comet to catch particles is laughable, yet people clapped when Bush announced his "vision" to return to the Moon and put men are Mars.
I agree. Manned space missions will have to happen eventually simply because we have to get out of here at least by the time the Sun explodes 4.5 billion years from now, but that's looking at the super-ultra-ultra long-term. For the most part, manned space missions (like the ISS) are there to "promote international good will" and entertain the public. In other words, they're to entertain non-scientists. Robots really are the cheapest way to science in space, and often it's the only way simply because of the environment.
Slashdot Mirror
First thing after singing up on lastfm it told me to download 2 applications. A player and a application that sends songs that I play via itunes back to them.
No thanks. I'll stick with pandora.
I used Pandora for a while, but then I realized that it was using about 20% CPU. Maybe that's Adobe/Macromedia's fault, or maybe it's Pandora's, but whatever the case I don't think my media player needs a fifth of my computer's processing power. I'm now happily using the Last.fm player with about 2% CPU. So, my experience is that Pandora is very clunky, not Last.fm. Fortunately for me, I use amaroK, so support was built in and I only had to download one program, not two; nevertheless, I still think that if you're going to spend enough time to sign up with either service, it's not much more work to download two small programs.
Is there any project to create Free Software application compatible with Skype protocol?
No, Skype's protocol is proprietary, so no FOSS Skype clients can be written.
I d'led NS 8 just to see what they'd been up too for the past 4 years and I was amazed to see it used the freakin IE engine.
I don't know where you got that idea, but Netscape still uses Gecko (the Mozilla/Firefox rendering engine).
I'm sure Coke could be a lot cheaper if they dropped their marketing efforts but there's probably problems with that as well.
Well, there the fault lies with consumers. If they think that just because polar bears appear with a drink in a commercial that it's worth more, that's their business. The demand for a product is determined by how much consumers want it, not necessarily by how good it is. Since consumers aren't always rational, prices will not always be rational, but there's not really much we can or should do about that. Besides, consumers are usually rational enough that prices aren't completely disconnected from reality, and your experience with your company shows that.
If you already know that, and you haven't arrested him by the time he shows up to get on the plane, what's the point?
Um, because you can arrest him when he shows up. That's my whole point. Obviously just checking your ID won't do anything *by itself*. The logical extension of checking the ID is arresting them if you know that the person is probably up to no good.
Linux doesn't really count in this manner because it gets ignored as a "geek OS" and not really something anybody can run.
... Only geeks will really care about "OS competition," so your statement is a moot point. And really, the only geeky knowledge you need to at this point to run Linux is how to boot from a CD. My non-geek sister installed Ubuntu without my help and has run it with no more help than I had to give my other sister who runs Windows.
And I suppose you think that non-geeks are going to have a conversation like this:
Non-geek MS fan: Look at that! Finder takes 1.5 times as long as Explorer to display the contents of this directory.
Non-geek Apple fan: Pfff! Everyone knows that Trident (Explorer's renderer) sucks. It's not even close to Acid2 compliance!
Non-geek MS fan: It hardly matters. Acid2 isn't really of any practical value and it doesn't truly represent a test for compliance with HTML/CSS since it only accounts for a small subset of the standards.
Non-geek Apple fan: So what? Everyone knows that if you tie a browser so deeply into an OS you're going to have trouble.
Geek Linux fan: Well, KDE, though not a complete OS, relies pretty heavily on Konqueror, and it's Acid2 compliant.
Both non-geeks: Ugh! Begone you nerd!
Riiight
Apple will always have an "unfair" advantage on the hardware side because it tightly controls what hardware it uses. Windows has to run on a wide variety of hardware whose reliability will vary widely. Linux has to run on the same variety (actually more variety since it can run on both x86, PPC and many other platforms) without the clout that Microsoft has, so usually Linux developers have to write 3rd party drivers with documentation, if they're lucky, or reverse-engineering. The only way you'll have "real OS competition" is if (A) Apple lets OS X run on non-Apple PCs and (B) hardware manufacturers start writing Linux drivers. The former will probably never happen and the latter will only happen if Linux gains a lot of marketshare.
Mohammed Atta had a passport and credit cards, and there's no indication that he was reluctant to show them as he got on a plane at Logan airport on 9/11. Same with the shoe bomber.
Maybe checking ID doesn't really help.
Your statement assumes that the government has no idea of who Atta was. Of course, without *any* other measures ID checking "doesn't really help." But if you know who Mohammed Atta is, and you know what he wants to (potentially culled from intelligence), it might prevent an attack.
When you connect to a server, it logs your IP address. If the admin of the server realizes that you've been trying to attack the server from your IP address, he might simply ban connections from you. Everyone here agrees that IP logging is a way to help ensure security on computers; we should also agree that "person-logging" at airports benefits security in some way.
Whether or not giving up anonymous travel is worth this added layer of security is debatable. But saying that ID-checking is useless for security is like saying that IP-logging is useless as well.
What you're basically saying is that it's possible to progress with nothing going wrong, which any engineer will tell you is a load of bollocks.
Of course thinking that nothing will go wrong is ridiculous, and that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the original poster trivialized the Challenger accident as something we can live with every now and then; I guess it would be analagous to saying that the accident was within an acceptable error margin since the astronauts were aware of the dangers and spaceflight is inherently dangerous. Just because we had an accident doesn't mean that we should stop exploring space, but it doesn't mean that the accident wasn't a big deal.
These astronauts were accepting a risk and the whole thing was a bummer, but more people die getting hit by cars a day than being strapped on dangerous rockets.
Far more people ride on cars each day than ride into space.
The reason it was such a big deal was the media and politicians using it to full propaganda value. Nothing like a little shared greaf to bring the nation together. I should remind you, that America in the 1980's had lots of social conflict lying just below the surface.
You need to read myths 6 and 7. Politics had nothing to do with when the launch happened, and the accident did not have to happen. Dismissing this as just "something that goes with progress" suggests that we need not learn from our mistakes, since it's okay if we mess up every now and then. It's always important to learn from mistakes in engineering, especially when they end up tragically like in this case, so that they don't repeat themselves.
If you're friends or family died in a car crash, I don't think you'd find this idea very consoling: "hey, running around at 60 mph in a ton of metal with explosions going off in front of you is dangerous, so what? My friends knew about the risk and they accepted it."
hasn't he tried the competition enough ot know that the command in question is called "su" and that most people just use "sudo" to do superuser commands one at a time?
Not just that, but look at the "SUPERUSR ON" in context:
if they consent, just that task is elevated (this is more secure that SUPERUSR ON in Unix that elevates the entire session).
If you do "sudo task", task alone is run as the superuser. So, in that sense, the only difference here is that Unix asks you for a password before executing it. In this sense, Unix is more secure because once you've cracked someone's "protected admin" account, it doesn't take much effort to give superuser approval to tasks (assuming you don't yet know the user's password). What Mr. Nash was talking about was "su" which will elevate everything in your session, but so long as you're in X, it will only do that for the commands you enter into the terminal window, not your entire session.
Do you really want to be informed of every social wrong on the planet and given the responsibility to fix all of them with every motion of your body?
...
No, but you are misinterpreting what I said. All I'm saying is that worker's compensation should be decided between the company and the employees, with the caveat being that the labor market is fluid enough that workers have a choice in where they work. I'm also saying that the price of products should be decided between the company and the consumer. Since the company is responsible for two variables here, they will have to strike a balance to succeed. Any company that sets prices too low will have to pay too little, which means employees won't go there, which means it will go out of business. If it pays employees too much, its prices will go too high, and it will go out of business. Consumers will always want cheaper prices, and employees will always want higher salaries, but since it's impossible to please everyone, companies are there to set the most reasonable balance.
My statement doesn't extend beyond that. Let me quickly debunk each of your statements:
"Don't drive on that street, it was made with that cheap migrant labor from Mexico."
If the Mexican laborers are willing to work for less, so be it. Give the jobs to the most competitive workers. Don't like it? Go work somewhere else.
"Don't eat that, the boats they use for catching that seafood uses lead based paints on the hull."
That's an environmental issue that isn't relevant to my point. Companies usually lack the long-term vision to see the impact of such a decision, so government should stop that.
"You can't use Shell gasoline, they aren't nice people."
Riiight
"Why aren't you buying American you commie?"
In a global market, I don't care about preserving American jobs at the expense of foreign jobs and at the expense of the American economy unless Americans are doing the best job. I care about rewarding the best workers, whichever country they live in.
"Don't work there, they use Microsoft products on their workstations and they've been convicted and they use those evil H1-B visa people who steal our jobs."
1) Even if I don't like Microsoft, that doesn't mean I dislike its customers. 2) If they've served their sentence and got out, it's not my job to punish them further. 3) I don't know about the "H1-B visa" but if they're "stealing out jobs" because they're more competitive than American workers, good for them! Let's thank them for strengthening our economy.
The government should be policing things that we cannot police ourselves. I don't have the power to find out what paint is on the bottom of the ships that got the fish I eat; that's the sort of thing government is for. But we can definitely police our own wages; in fact, we can do that far better than the government can (this is why Germany, which has a lot of such intervention, has over 10% unemployment). Government is there to mind the business of the people as a whole; our brains are here to mind our own business.
K... but how does what you quoted relate to my comment?
The Enron debacle happened because executives dumped their stocks when they had insider information on the company. This system prevents Google from turning into Enron.
Shocking news: The SWF format IS open: Here you have a link. The license is quite similar to PDF.
Shocking news: The SWF format is NOT open. Read here. Here is the important part:
"Although a full specification of SWF is available, it is not an open format, as implementing software that plays the format is disallowed by the specification's license. Reverse engineering is therefore the only legal way to compete with the official SWF player, and no adequate competition yet exists."
In other words, the reason why libswf can exist and why gstreamer can make Flash animations is that you can make stuff that *writes* SWF files, but not programs that *read* them. This is completely unlike PDF, where we can write programs to both create PDFs and to display them.
The idealist (RMS) and the engineer (Linus) are definitely at a point of contention on this issue...it'll be interesting to see what happens.
I agree the general point of your post, but I just wanted to add that this "idealist/engineer" contrast is slightly inaccurate. In fact, I think Linus once said something like "RMS is the great philosopher, I am the engineer" (correct me if I'm wrong). RMS sure talks a lot about philosophy and Linus does not, but that doesn't mean that RMS isn't as much of an engineer. He's responsible for some of the most important and popular programs out there, such as GCC, GDB and Emacs. So, IMHO, it should be something more like "RMS is the idealist engineer, while Linus is the pragmatic engineer." In other words, RMS does work adhering to a strict philosophy, while Linus is more concerned with just getting the work done.
How is it that Nike has been accused for many years of running third world sweat shops (as has the rest of the garment industry) and yet the first thing we are concerned with when buying clothes is the cost. There is nothing which will stop this from happening unless it is artificially implimented (government regulations).
If the people buying clothes (the general public) care more about the cost of their shoes than the conditions of the workers who make the shoes, why will they vote for laws that will increase the price of the shoes? The reasons for why this situation can occur are:
1. The public doesn't care about the workers (and if the public controls the government as in a democracy, it won't act to protect the workers either).
2. Nike has no competition for labor.
If Nike has a monopoly on labor, then government intervention may be warranted. I favor the government intervening to protect the right of workers to exercise their economic freedoms (i.e. striking, negotiating terms, or going to other places of work), and because everyone in the country works for someone, the people will support such a measure. But setting artificial requirements for wages or benefits are either redundant or harmful in the economy.
I'm not praising communism, but I am saying that there are some merits to limiting the amount of power CEO's and CoB's have. Perhaps even making them "the people"... it wouldn't hurt to make those dirty bastards have to EARN a living. They bleed the same as we do, perhaps they should put something back into society before they see another dime.
/.) chooses to pay its employees $10/hour, and company B (also making computers) chooses to pay $20/hour, who is going to get the workers? On the other hand, company B will have to raise its prices to $2000 for a computer, while company A will only have to charge $1000. Who's going to get the customers? It depends. If company B makes really great computers and A makes really crappy computers, people will buy from company A. So, company A will end up having to raise wages so that it ends its losing streak.
Here's a way to limit their power: stop paying them. There are two groups of people who CEOs need to attract: employees and customers. If company A (which makes computers because we're on
Companies have a vested interest in pleasing customers, which indirectly means they have a vested interest in pleasing employees, not breaking their backs. Obviously there are exceptions that can arise, such as corruption by the CEOs, and all of this depends on fluidity in the market, i.e. if consumers don't like company A, there needs to be a competitor they can go to, and the same holds for workers. But my point here is that how high wages are and what kind of working conditions workers have is set really by the consumer public; the CEO is just the messenger. Of course, CEOs are supposed to manage this relationship and set it in a general direction, and this is a job of its own which deserves pay, even though the pay is often extremely exaggerated. Still, it's easy to blame CEOs and "megacorporations" and "big business," but these people don't draw their influence from thin air. The reason CEOs get rich is because people voluntarily give them money. If the general public really cared about not paying CEOs lots of money, this wouldn't be an issue. I often think that various CEOs who are getting rich don't deserve it; that's why I'm not giving them money. Don't like wealthy movie actors? Stop going to the movies. Don't like rich oil executives? Use less (or even no) gasoline for your transportation. Don't like X businessmen? Stop buying X product. It's that simple. Rich people get rich because they're doing something someone else wants; complain to the people who want it and pay for it if you think something about it is wrong.
Enron. Enron. Enron. Ummm... Enron?
Does anybody here really believe that a CEO's perspective changes if they get a $1 salary versus a multi-million dollar salary when they have a ton of stock and options? Good CEO's will feel a vested interest in the company's performance, and bad CEO's will not. Awarding them scads of cash may keep them on board with your company, but that's all it buys you.
RTFA: "Unlike insider sales that are made by company executives accused of unloading stock right before a suspected downturn, the Google executives' sales were decided long ago. They were coordinated under a schedule that allows insiders to pre-arrange the sale of a certain number of shares over a period of time. The plan, called a 10b5-1, allows them to sell stock on a regular basis without appearing as though they are reacting to market movements up or down."
In other words, at the time they make the decision to sell, they have no more information than anyone else about what will be going on at the company when the actual sale takes place (in the future).
What's wrong with flash? It does what it does quite well, it's flexible and extensible. It's mature and has almost 100% market penetration. Why does it need replacing.
Just today I experienced a considerable amount of frustration because of Flash. In my physics class at my university we have to turn in homework on the Internet, and the website we're using uses Flash for entering equations. Several of the problems required us to enter Greek symbols (like pi and omega). However, when I tried to enter these characters, half of the character would display and the cursor would remain in the same spot as before, so if you continued the equation, it would overwrite the Greek symbol. It's a weird bug and hard to describe (sorry if you don't understand what's going on), but the point is it prevented me from doing my homework. I ended up figuring out that when I tried doing it on Windows instead of Flash on Linux (the latest version still), it worked. So, clearly, the Linux version of Flash has some weird bug in it that Macromedia has failed to address. In the end, I was inconvenienced because I had to reboot into Windows to do my homework instead of on my normal operating system.
This isn't the first time I've encountered bugs with the Linux version of Flash; take a look at this (scroll down to glitches and then watch the cartoon for yourself on Linux). Obviously not getting to play a song on a cartoon website isn't going to scar me for life, but my point is that Macromedia (should I say Adobe?) isn't doing a very good of a job on the Linux version, probably because they feel that Linux doesn't have enough marketshare to significantly affect their profits.
If your answer involves "open source" then you can stop right there. Nobody (except about half the slashdot audience) gives a rat's ass about source code as long as the software works properly.
The reason that some people are concerned with open source is that it offers a way out of monopolies. The biggest problem isn't that the Flash player itself is proprietary (even though it would be nice if it weren't); it's that SWF is proprietary. This suppresses competition from would-be open source (or even other proprietary) Flash players that have to compete with Adobe/Macromedia. If SWF was open, an open source Flash player could be easily written that would eliminate such bugs.
We can always debate whether or not proprietary or open source development models produce better quality code, but proprietary formats are never good. All they do is hurt competition, which helps no one but the authors. Now that Adobe owns Macromedia, hopefully the Flash people will take a hint from PDF: open formats work. If SWF is opened, great; there would be no need to replace the format, only potentially the player. But as long as SWF remains proprietary, it needs to be replaced by a format that everyone can use.
Well, that sure does sound like a kludge. Why doesn't the professor just use a real Fortran compiler like g77?
I think this could work out: Google language filter "EULA to AOLspeak", perhaps?
Why would translating something that's almost gibberish into complete gibberish help?
that's fine for me (I have 7 years commercial programming experience on top of all the hobbyist stuff before that), but utterly meaningless for "normal" users; for them, this is still unpatched. Once the distros release patches, then it's patched.
Yes, but that's a moot point. The distros released patches already (before the story even hit Slashdot). So yes, in terms of practical implementations, you're right that a patch isn't a "real" patch until distributions distribute it, but their patches came right after the source patch, so there's almost no difference.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Safari the only browser that passes the Acid2 standards test?
Safari was the *first* browser to pass Acid2, but there are others now too. In fact, Konqueror was able to pass Acid2 largely because Apple contributed patches back into KHTML.
*And a few faculty members still want Digital/True64 4G for their Fortran compilers, since the GCC-Fortran kludge sucks
... is it really that bad that it can be called a kludge?)
Is this gcc-fortran as in the new Fortran95 compiler? Or are you talking about g77? (If g77, I don't do enough Fortran to know, but the physics professor I've talked to who does a lot of Fortran really, really likes g77
Aren't comet's supposed to consist mostly of frozen water and gasses? Wouldn't most of that melt when exposed to earth temperatures?
I know they handle the sample in a very clean room, but shouldn't it also be very cold?
Apparently some of the traces are empty because of ice landing in the aerogel and melting. So, it seems that ice that could melt has already melted. Still, some of the residue from the ice should still be left in the trace that the scientists could analyze, so all is not lost.
This mission is just one more example of why I feel manned missions are unnecessary. Thinking of sending people to a comet to catch particles is laughable, yet people clapped when Bush announced his "vision" to return to the Moon and put men are Mars.
I agree. Manned space missions will have to happen eventually simply because we have to get out of here at least by the time the Sun explodes 4.5 billion years from now, but that's looking at the super-ultra-ultra long-term. For the most part, manned space missions (like the ISS) are there to "promote international good will" and entertain the public. In other words, they're to entertain non-scientists. Robots really are the cheapest way to science in space, and often it's the only way simply because of the environment.