By driving prices down to this level so rapidly, both Amazon and Google have irrevocably harmed the tablet market by creating unrealistic price expectations.
This is not true. Did Nokia irrevocably harm the phone market by constantly driving down the price of a phone until it hit a low of $19? Did Asus irrevocably harm the laptop market by releasing the first cheap netbook? Did Dell harm the PC market by pursuing lower and lower prices?
Agreed. It's stupid of the article's author to make a comparison between tablet and PC price wars, because in practical terms, all PCs were indistinguishable to the purchaser. They all just ran Windows, and they only had to be good enough to run Windows. The minority who actually cared about performance paid more for their kit and the rest just bought the cheapest PC they could find.
In other words, the PC industry went to shit because Windows ran like shit anyway (for the majority), so why waste money?
iOS, Mac OS X and their tight integration with the hardware platform(s) they run on makes it easy for purchasers to justify the added expense. My 27" iMac is clearly superior in terms of how it uses the display and maximises performance, so I'm willing to pay more for it than I would a similarly configured PC. For a counterfactual, my phone is a Galaxy SII for the same reasons. It has a better display than the iPhone, and with ICS on it, it behaves extremely well. The effort that Google has invested in creating a simple workflow for common tasks on Android has been rewarded by popular demand.
The moral of the story is that there are clear distinctions between the iPad, the Nexus 7 and the Amazon Kindles. They have common virtues, yes, but they each have unique features as well (OS/UX, hardware, performance, featureset) that offer clear distinctions to users. The article's author is guilty of false analogy - or, in layman's terms, he's full of shit.
If your interactions are only with people from the company then who cares what do you dress like ?
It does matter, on a psychological level. If your attire contrasts too much with everyone else's, people will think of you as unique, which is not to say strange. It's one of the tricks the modern BBC uses to make the Doctor weird and friendly at the same time - they dress him at the edge of plausibility, but using inoffensive colours and well-cut garments. It gives people under-the-skin cues for how they should feel about him.
I've found one tried-and-true method for taking advantage of this phenomenon: Dress more or less like everyone else, but spend a little more than they do on your clothes. So if your team tends towards jeans and t-shirts, buy really good quality jeans, iron them and wear unique, even hand-made shirts with interesting designs (but no slogans). Buy a really good quality belt and shoes.
The effect is that people will unconsciously identify you as one of them, but with a trifle more status than the others. Kind of like an animal with a sleeker coat of fur.
Nota Bene: Good quality does not mean flashy. It's almost the opposite. The hallmarks of quality are that it's subtle, understated and designed to look as good in a decade as it did on the day you bought it.
... or written a poem, for that matter. Make fun of those head in the cloud aesthetes all you like, but until you realise the depth of abstraction required to really grasp what Keats was saying when he wrote, 'truth is beauty, and beauty truth' you don't deserve to comment.
if they did this to prove a point, they could have just posted a sample of the data, but no, they reveal everyones data and show they have as little respect for people as the companies that they target.
An update in the Gizmodo article states that they did not reveal everyone's data - it was a partial dump containing only business and government account records. So, I think they're taking your advice. Ready to support them now? 8^)
- first thing MS does is it kills supernodes and installs THOUSANDS of Linux servers running grsecurity http://grsecurity.net/news.php#Skype - that means that ALL Skype traffic now passes through MS servers and can be easily wiretapped since MS holds all the keys and can easily perform a MITM attack
No, it means that SOME Skype traffic (i.e. text messages, but not voice calls) can be easily wiretapped.
tl;dr: Skype's a botnet and NSA paid MS to buy Skype
That's not borne out by your data. In fact, the Ars article referenced in your link states that supernodes play no role whatsoever in making calls.
I don't trust Microsoft at all; in fact, I think they can be relied on to do whatever they think is reasonable to get along with government (and by extension, law enforcement). But this particular issue - the establishment of grSecurity supernodes - doesn't get you an automatic MiTM capability.
I thought exactly the same thing. He has nothing to apologize for, Windows 8 is bad. It has one of the worst UI designs I've ever seen.
Ah, Grasshopper, you fail to understand the zen of Gartner.
In order to be taken seriously, that they base their statements on nothing more than what people want to hear from them. Because they therefore illuminate the inner brilliance that every CEO knows must exist inside of them somewhere, Gartner becomes the top research agency in technology today.
It is not sufficient that Gartner, like a stopped clock, accidentally be right from time to time. No, they have achieved release from the wheel of torment that is reality. They strive never to be right. Gartner, my child, is the apotheosis of Wrong.
You can take away their rights, and you can take away their money, but take away their porn, and the people will revolt.:-D
*sigh*
I think it would be fairer to say that you can take away their money, their rights and their lives, but that story won't get posted on Slashdot until it involves porn.
The Indonesian government and military have tried to maintain a complete media blackout on the ongoing human rights abuses -including torture and murder- in the occupied territory of West Papua, which was annexed while the world looked away. This oppression has been going on for a generation, but nobody chooses to care, because of Indonesia's status as the largest pro-US muslim country in the world.
But yeah, boobs. Let's support those horny Indonesians by slashdotting bringbacktheporn.com. That'll get the add revenue going.
> i got no problem with gay people whatso ever, but I think google should stick to gooogle things, and not political things.
It is a pretty strong confirmation of Derbyshire's Law:
"Any organization that admits frank and open homosexuals into its higher
levels will sooner or later abandon its original purpose and give
itself over to propagating and celebrating the homosexualist ethos, and
to excluding heterosexuals and denigrating heterosexuality."
See Andrew Sullivan for a personification of the law in action. Apparently, there is no such thing as a X-gay, all you ever get is gay-X, i.e. they are gay before anything else. Once they come out of the closet, being homosexual almost instantly overrides any other considerations. Or more bluntly, the old handbooks probably had it right, mental disorder.
I have mod points, but I'm going to resist the urge to assume you're trolling.
I hope nobody mods you down. In fact, I hope you get modded up to 5, just so the entire world can see how fucked up some people's beliefs actually are. Hopefully, this will make it clear why Google and other more insightful elements of human society actually do have to get on a podium and shout that being gay is as natural a part of human nature as red hair or left-handedness.
I for one take comfort from the fact that Michelangelo, Isaac Newton, Alan Turing and countless other giants on whose shoulder we now stand would have a safe, affirming environment in which to work, rather than being forced to conceal, to hide their nature, even to be punished -effectively murdered- by the state simply for being the way God made them.
Now that I'm done with my rational argument, allow me to close with a sincere, heartfelt, Fuck You to you and to all neanderthals who love nothing more than to single out scapegoats and punish them for their own inadequacies.
I'm generally not a big fan of web apps and "the cloud" as a substitute for native apps, but unless you host your own email server, you're relying on someone else to store your email anyway. Why not use the web interface? Email is simple enough that in my experience there really isn't a lot that a native app can do that a good webmail interface can't.
I download my mail and keep a copy on the server. That way -in theory, at least- I can index and search my 3+ GB of mail in real time, across multiple accounts.
That said, I agree with many posters here that Thunderbird is the least worst email client out there now. Its search has gotten worse in the last couple of versions, and it just loses the plot sometimes when trying to connect and sync with multiple IMAP accounts on a flaky Internet connection (which, tragically, is the only kind we have in my country). It's prone to weird behaviour that causes significant CPU load and all too often renders it so unresponsive that only a kill -9 will put me out of its misery.
BUT... Outlook gives me hives and, while Eudora was once a genuinely nice app, it's fallen by the wayside. It's almost enough to make me go back to mutt, if they've resolved their clunky approach to multiple accounts, that is....
I think that when most people say a non-profit should be "run like a business", they really just mean that the organization should be setting concrete goals and objectively measuring progress towards those goals and evaluating all the organizations actions as they relate to achieving those goals.
No, that's precisely the kind of talk I was objecting to. For one, it leads to insane reporting requirements, often in situations where every hour and every dollar spend doing actual work saves -or at least changes- lives. For another, it leads to a desire for quantifiable metrics, which mean that a ton of really important aspects of development work get left by the wayside, because they can't be easily measured. For yet another, it turns the conversation into a financial one. That's important, sure. Nobody wants their money to be wasted. But it should not be the only topic discussed when evaluating the success of a non-profit.
All too frequently, though, that's precisely what happens when people try to run a non-profit 'like a business.'
I know it sounds whippy-dippy to say that concrete goals are of secondary interest when the real goal is saving lives, but bear with me. As a good friend of mine who worked in disarmament used to say, it's hard to know if you're doing well when you measure your success in terms of the number of people who didn't die. They don't always show up when you're forced to measure your progress in terms of 'concrete goals.'
I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Good financial controls are essential. We're in screaming agreement on that count. But that's not nearly as big a part of the conversation as you might think when it comes to measuring success in this kind of work.
From what I read, instead of handing out money directly.. which just leads to corruption, he is leveraging it in a way that prevents the money from being abused. Free money never works when it comes to aid son.
Never say never, son.
A few years ago, Xanana Gusmao, the Prime Minister of Timor Leste was facing a crisis. As a result of the violence leading up to Timor's first free elections, almost 10% of the country (over 100,000 people) ended up in refugee camps. He asked the UN and other aid agencies for advice, and they came up with an 8 year plan at the end of which, the first houses would be built.
The PM immediately ordered cash payments to all internally displaced people to help them rebuild their homes. It was a partial answer, one that the government admitted would require significant further effort, but the move helped 60,000 people to begin rebuilding within a year.
The aid agencies went apeshit. They told him that the money would be wasted, stolen, spent on the wrong things, that there would be no way to measure the success, that they wouldn't be able to avoid fraud.... But Xanana insisted. Within two years, the camps were empty.
In retrospect, it's easy to see why: Nobody wants to live in a camp. The money each person received wasn't enough to build a house, but it was enough to get started. And that's all the encouragement people need.
William Easterly's Aid Watch blog also documents studies tracking how direct cash donations to displaced persons in sub-Saharan Africa were used. They found that less than 10% of the money was wasted or somehow misused. That's better than just about every other form of aid in terms of efficiency.
The moral of the story, therefore, is not that giving money is bad. The moral is that you need to give it to people with the reason and motivation to use it for the right things. I hate to break it to you, but the majority of multi-national corporations lack that motivation.
Well I know this won't be popular, but you shouldn't build a "business" out of a charity. You should, however, run your charity like a business to make sure it is efficient. If you make your charity a true business then it is no longer a charity...it's a business. I'm thinking not-for-profit or non-profit here, but I am not intelligent enough to understand the nuances.
Well, I agree most with your last sentence. 8^)
I've worked for and with NGOs and non-profits large and small, from UN agencies to universities to the independent think tank where I am now. Let me assure you that the death-knell of any non-profit is to have it taken over by someone who claims it needs to run more like a business.
Profit-making and non-profit organisations are very different in their nature and -more importantly- their culture. They each have a million ways to fail, but here's the key: Non-profit organisations can and must measure success by something other than financial returns. This impacts every single aspect of its work. It sometimes means that you can (and should) spend more time on seemingly pointless details getting things just right. It sometimes means that you work on things that you know have a high chance of failure, but you take them on precisely because no profit-making outfit can't afford the risk.
The killer on both sides of the equation, though, is complacency and power. Allow either to become too apparent and the same sociopathic personalities begin to appear at the head of the organisation. And though they die in different ways, their death is a painful spectacle. Non-profits, especially those with guaranteed budgets, get over-run by careerist know-nothings who spend more time agonising over their per diems and life-saving meetings than actually thinking about what they're supposed to be achieving.
In profit-making ventures, the organisations get overrun by strategic thinking business-school types who spend more time plotting strategy and market position than actually running the fricking company.
Non-profits die like old oak trees: They rot from the inside; they remain standing for far longer than they should, providing shade for a few but hosting an increasing army of parasites.
Profit-making companies die by fire. They remain standing until the first lightning strike, then collapse in flames, sometimes taking half the countryside with them.
Sorry, 'bug'? Isn't that a bit like saying a behavioural 'bug' caused Facebook to kick my grandmother in the shin? (Which I don't doubt they would do if there was money in it.)
Poverty in the third world is manufactured by the corrupt, miserable leadership of the third world.
False dichotomy. Corrupt, miserable leadership exists in many parts of the world. Italy and Greece are two examples off the top of my head. The corruption and miserable leadership - in my part of the developing world, at least - is assisted in no small part by wealthy business people and corporations from the developed world who are willing to grease palms in order to gain easier access to resources, to ignore workplace safety requirements, to hire at substandard wages and sometimes to commit acts of violence against the people whose land has been expropriated in order for the resource extraction to go ahead.
These corrupt governments did not spring sui generis from the developing world, and they are not unique to those countries. In many, if not most, cases, fledgling democracies were subverted by outside interests looking to avoid the encumbrances and obstacles that a healthy democracy would have placed in their path.
Avoid using overly abstract concepts, and try to put things in terms they can understand.
Arts major here, who's been working for about 20 years in IT. I'd offer a qualified agreement here. I found some science subjects innately easy, because I was able to visualise the forces at work. Vector equations in physics, geometry, etc. were dead easy, even when they became more advanced. But the moment the teacher began to fall back on jargon and symbolic shorthand, I'd get lost.
The reason is pretty straightforward. I am extremely good at certain kinds of pattern-identification, but quite poor at others. Among the ones I'm poor at are mathematical equations, which are not evaluated in the same way natural languages are. It's merely a left brain/right brain thing, and I can compensate by using different approaches. I thrived under teachers who understood this, and died under teachers who spent their entire time writing equations on the board without attempting to contextualise them.
First, yum is superior technically to debians packaging system. Not going to bother explaining, because I seriously doubt it would do any good.
By all means, please do.
I've worked professionally with the RPM build system and at one time was far too intimately aware of its shortcomings. I haven't built nearly as many.deb packages, but what exposure I've had to them sure made me feel good about their packaging toolkit.
From a sysadmin's perspective, I don't particularly hate yum, but I don't see anything that makes it more compelling than apt. In fact, I don't see a lot of daylight between them any more, except for yum's tendency to go online and update itself prior to every operation (a minor annoyance for those of us who live in a low-bandwidth part of the world).
So I'd be really interested in knowing what exactly makes yum superior to apt (and aptitude especially), because for the life of me I can't see it, despite using both Debian and Redhat since the 1990s.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
By driving prices down to this level so rapidly, both Amazon and Google have irrevocably harmed the tablet market by creating unrealistic price expectations.
This is not true. Did Nokia irrevocably harm the phone market by constantly driving down the price of a phone until it hit a low of $19? Did Asus irrevocably harm the laptop market by releasing the first cheap netbook? Did Dell harm the PC market by pursuing lower and lower prices?
Agreed. It's stupid of the article's author to make a comparison between tablet and PC price wars, because in practical terms, all PCs were indistinguishable to the purchaser. They all just ran Windows, and they only had to be good enough to run Windows. The minority who actually cared about performance paid more for their kit and the rest just bought the cheapest PC they could find.
In other words, the PC industry went to shit because Windows ran like shit anyway (for the majority), so why waste money?
iOS, Mac OS X and their tight integration with the hardware platform(s) they run on makes it easy for purchasers to justify the added expense. My 27" iMac is clearly superior in terms of how it uses the display and maximises performance, so I'm willing to pay more for it than I would a similarly configured PC. For a counterfactual, my phone is a Galaxy SII for the same reasons. It has a better display than the iPhone, and with ICS on it, it behaves extremely well. The effort that Google has invested in creating a simple workflow for common tasks on Android has been rewarded by popular demand.
The moral of the story is that there are clear distinctions between the iPad, the Nexus 7 and the Amazon Kindles. They have common virtues, yes, but they each have unique features as well (OS/UX, hardware, performance, featureset) that offer clear distinctions to users. The article's author is guilty of false analogy - or, in layman's terms, he's full of shit.
If your interactions are only with people from the company then who cares what do you dress like ?
It does matter, on a psychological level. If your attire contrasts too much with everyone else's, people will think of you as unique, which is not to say strange. It's one of the tricks the modern BBC uses to make the Doctor weird and friendly at the same time - they dress him at the edge of plausibility, but using inoffensive colours and well-cut garments. It gives people under-the-skin cues for how they should feel about him.
I've found one tried-and-true method for taking advantage of this phenomenon: Dress more or less like everyone else, but spend a little more than they do on your clothes. So if your team tends towards jeans and t-shirts, buy really good quality jeans, iron them and wear unique, even hand-made shirts with interesting designs (but no slogans). Buy a really good quality belt and shoes.
The effect is that people will unconsciously identify you as one of them, but with a trifle more status than the others. Kind of like an animal with a sleeker coat of fur.
Nota Bene: Good quality does not mean flashy. It's almost the opposite. The hallmarks of quality are that it's subtle, understated and designed to look as good in a decade as it did on the day you bought it.
... or written a poem, for that matter. Make fun of those head in the cloud aesthetes all you like, but until you realise the depth of abstraction required to really grasp what Keats was saying when he wrote, 'truth is beauty, and beauty truth' you don't deserve to comment.
if they did this to prove a point, they could have just posted a sample of the data, but no, they reveal everyones data and show they have as little respect for people as the companies that they target.
An update in the Gizmodo article states that they did not reveal everyone's data - it was a partial dump containing only business and government account records. So, I think they're taking your advice. Ready to support them now? 8^)
- first thing MS does is it kills supernodes and installs THOUSANDS of Linux servers running grsecurity http://grsecurity.net/news.php#Skype
- that means that ALL Skype traffic now passes through MS servers and can be easily wiretapped since MS holds all the keys and can easily perform a MITM attack
No, it means that SOME Skype traffic (i.e. text messages, but not voice calls) can be easily wiretapped.
tl;dr: Skype's a botnet and NSA paid MS to buy Skype
That's not borne out by your data. In fact, the Ars article referenced in your link states that supernodes play no role whatsoever in making calls.
I don't trust Microsoft at all; in fact, I think they can be relied on to do whatever they think is reasonable to get along with government (and by extension, law enforcement). But this particular issue - the establishment of grSecurity supernodes - doesn't get you an automatic MiTM capability.
And this is a funny point request attached to a response to a comment on a post about a review of a review of a review.
- Jack
Someone should write a post suggesting that Parent be modded up.
I thought exactly the same thing. He has nothing to apologize for, Windows 8 is bad. It has one of the worst UI designs I've ever seen.
Ah, Grasshopper, you fail to understand the zen of Gartner.
In order to be taken seriously, that they base their statements on nothing more than what people want to hear from them. Because they therefore illuminate the inner brilliance that every CEO knows must exist inside of them somewhere, Gartner becomes the top research agency in technology today.
It is not sufficient that Gartner, like a stopped clock, accidentally be right from time to time. No, they have achieved release from the wheel of torment that is reality. They strive never to be right. Gartner, my child, is the apotheosis of Wrong.
Or do people want the competition to be just like apple ...a controlled garden of 1 device ....1 appstore ...1 updates for 1 thing.
... And In Darkness Bind Them....
No, wait - that's the wrong reference. Er... ein volk, ein Fuhrer...?
[aside]: Dangit, Irene, come and help me with this. That goshdarn meme thingie you told me about - how do I work it?!?
You can take away their rights, and you can take away their money, but take away their porn, and the people will revolt. :-D
*sigh*
I think it would be fairer to say that you can take away their money, their rights and their lives, but that story won't get posted on Slashdot until it involves porn.
The Indonesian government and military have tried to maintain a complete media blackout on the ongoing human rights abuses -including torture and murder- in the occupied territory of West Papua, which was annexed while the world looked away. This oppression has been going on for a generation, but nobody chooses to care, because of Indonesia's status as the largest pro-US muslim country in the world.
But yeah, boobs. Let's support those horny Indonesians by slashdotting bringbacktheporn.com. That'll get the add revenue going.
Well, that explains Ewoks, I guess.
Hmmm.... George Lucas was actually right about something. Has anyone measured his skull capacity recently?
So do you propose a free cloud solution for starving kids in Africa?
Greetings from a least developed country;
Your words are so true! The absurdity of it all! After all, nobody ever used technology to improve their standard of living.
P.S. In case the sarcasm has escaped you so far: Fuck You.
Hugs,
The rest of the world.
Balmer just doesn't give a puck.
Ballmer heard that goalies win games, so he put 6 goalies on the ice. He's now substituting them with 6 wingers.
Here's the problem. Why should I pay money to make my OS worse?
Worth repeating.
Here's the problem. Why should I pay money to make my OS worse?
> i got no problem with gay people whatso ever, but I think google should stick to gooogle things, and not political things.
It is a pretty strong confirmation of Derbyshire's Law:
"Any organization that admits frank and open homosexuals into its higher levels will sooner or later abandon its original purpose and give itself over to propagating and celebrating the homosexualist ethos, and to excluding heterosexuals and denigrating heterosexuality."
See Andrew Sullivan for a personification of the law in action. Apparently, there is no such thing as a X-gay, all you ever get is gay-X, i.e. they are gay before anything else. Once they come out of the closet, being homosexual almost instantly overrides any other considerations. Or more bluntly, the old handbooks probably had it right, mental disorder.
I have mod points, but I'm going to resist the urge to assume you're trolling.
I hope nobody mods you down. In fact, I hope you get modded up to 5, just so the entire world can see how fucked up some people's beliefs actually are. Hopefully, this will make it clear why Google and other more insightful elements of human society actually do have to get on a podium and shout that being gay is as natural a part of human nature as red hair or left-handedness.
I for one take comfort from the fact that Michelangelo, Isaac Newton, Alan Turing and countless other giants on whose shoulder we now stand would have a safe, affirming environment in which to work, rather than being forced to conceal, to hide their nature, even to be punished -effectively murdered- by the state simply for being the way God made them.
Now that I'm done with my rational argument, allow me to close with a sincere, heartfelt, Fuck You to you and to all neanderthals who love nothing more than to single out scapegoats and punish them for their own inadequacies.
HTH HAND
I'm generally not a big fan of web apps and "the cloud" as a substitute for native apps, but unless you host your own email server, you're relying on someone else to store your email anyway. Why not use the web interface? Email is simple enough that in my experience there really isn't a lot that a native app can do that a good webmail interface can't.
I download my mail and keep a copy on the server. That way -in theory, at least- I can index and search my 3+ GB of mail in real time, across multiple accounts.
That said, I agree with many posters here that Thunderbird is the least worst email client out there now. Its search has gotten worse in the last couple of versions, and it just loses the plot sometimes when trying to connect and sync with multiple IMAP accounts on a flaky Internet connection (which, tragically, is the only kind we have in my country). It's prone to weird behaviour that causes significant CPU load and all too often renders it so unresponsive that only a kill -9 will put me out of its misery.
BUT... Outlook gives me hives and, while Eudora was once a genuinely nice app, it's fallen by the wayside. It's almost enough to make me go back to mutt, if they've resolved their clunky approach to multiple accounts, that is....
I think that when most people say a non-profit should be "run like a business", they really just mean that the organization should be setting concrete goals and objectively measuring progress towards those goals and evaluating all the organizations actions as they relate to achieving those goals.
No, that's precisely the kind of talk I was objecting to. For one, it leads to insane reporting requirements, often in situations where every hour and every dollar spend doing actual work saves -or at least changes- lives. For another, it leads to a desire for quantifiable metrics, which mean that a ton of really important aspects of development work get left by the wayside, because they can't be easily measured. For yet another, it turns the conversation into a financial one. That's important, sure. Nobody wants their money to be wasted. But it should not be the only topic discussed when evaluating the success of a non-profit.
All too frequently, though, that's precisely what happens when people try to run a non-profit 'like a business.'
I know it sounds whippy-dippy to say that concrete goals are of secondary interest when the real goal is saving lives, but bear with me. As a good friend of mine who worked in disarmament used to say, it's hard to know if you're doing well when you measure your success in terms of the number of people who didn't die. They don't always show up when you're forced to measure your progress in terms of 'concrete goals.'
I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Good financial controls are essential. We're in screaming agreement on that count. But that's not nearly as big a part of the conversation as you might think when it comes to measuring success in this kind of work.
From what I read, instead of handing out money directly.. which just leads to corruption, he is leveraging it in a way that prevents the money from being abused. Free money never works when it comes to aid son.
Never say never, son.
A few years ago, Xanana Gusmao, the Prime Minister of Timor Leste was facing a crisis. As a result of the violence leading up to Timor's first free elections, almost 10% of the country (over 100,000 people) ended up in refugee camps. He asked the UN and other aid agencies for advice, and they came up with an 8 year plan at the end of which, the first houses would be built.
The PM immediately ordered cash payments to all internally displaced people to help them rebuild their homes. It was a partial answer, one that the government admitted would require significant further effort, but the move helped 60,000 people to begin rebuilding within a year.
The aid agencies went apeshit. They told him that the money would be wasted, stolen, spent on the wrong things, that there would be no way to measure the success, that they wouldn't be able to avoid fraud.... But Xanana insisted. Within two years, the camps were empty.
In retrospect, it's easy to see why: Nobody wants to live in a camp. The money each person received wasn't enough to build a house, but it was enough to get started. And that's all the encouragement people need.
William Easterly's Aid Watch blog also documents studies tracking how direct cash donations to displaced persons in sub-Saharan Africa were used. They found that less than 10% of the money was wasted or somehow misused. That's better than just about every other form of aid in terms of efficiency.
The moral of the story, therefore, is not that giving money is bad. The moral is that you need to give it to people with the reason and motivation to use it for the right things. I hate to break it to you, but the majority of multi-national corporations lack that motivation.
Well I know this won't be popular, but you shouldn't build a "business" out of a charity. You should, however, run your charity like a business to make sure it is efficient. If you make your charity a true business then it is no longer a charity...it's a business. I'm thinking not-for-profit or non-profit here, but I am not intelligent enough to understand the nuances.
Well, I agree most with your last sentence. 8^)
I've worked for and with NGOs and non-profits large and small, from UN agencies to universities to the independent think tank where I am now. Let me assure you that the death-knell of any non-profit is to have it taken over by someone who claims it needs to run more like a business.
Profit-making and non-profit organisations are very different in their nature and -more importantly- their culture. They each have a million ways to fail, but here's the key: Non-profit organisations can and must measure success by something other than financial returns. This impacts every single aspect of its work. It sometimes means that you can (and should) spend more time on seemingly pointless details getting things just right. It sometimes means that you work on things that you know have a high chance of failure, but you take them on precisely because no profit-making outfit can't afford the risk.
The killer on both sides of the equation, though, is complacency and power. Allow either to become too apparent and the same sociopathic personalities begin to appear at the head of the organisation. And though they die in different ways, their death is a painful spectacle. Non-profits, especially those with guaranteed budgets, get over-run by careerist know-nothings who spend more time agonising over their per diems and life-saving meetings than actually thinking about what they're supposed to be achieving.
In profit-making ventures, the organisations get overrun by strategic thinking business-school types who spend more time plotting strategy and market position than actually running the fricking company.
Non-profits die like old oak trees: They rot from the inside; they remain standing for far longer than they should, providing shade for a few but hosting an increasing army of parasites.
Profit-making companies die by fire. They remain standing until the first lightning strike, then collapse in flames, sometimes taking half the countryside with them.
Sorry, 'bug'? Isn't that a bit like saying a behavioural 'bug' caused Facebook to kick my grandmother in the shin? (Which I don't doubt they would do if there was money in it.)
Bullshit.
Poverty in the third world is manufactured by the corrupt, miserable leadership of the third world.
False dichotomy. Corrupt, miserable leadership exists in many parts of the world. Italy and Greece are two examples off the top of my head. The corruption and miserable leadership - in my part of the developing world, at least - is assisted in no small part by wealthy business people and corporations from the developed world who are willing to grease palms in order to gain easier access to resources, to ignore workplace safety requirements, to hire at substandard wages and sometimes to commit acts of violence against the people whose land has been expropriated in order for the resource extraction to go ahead.
These corrupt governments did not spring sui generis from the developing world, and they are not unique to those countries. In many, if not most, cases, fledgling democracies were subverted by outside interests looking to avoid the encumbrances and obstacles that a healthy democracy would have placed in their path.
And what do you do when the kernel change causes your system to start crashing, when it had previously operated for years with no failures?
Er, you restart with the older kernel, which is right there on the grub boot menu.
... Sorry, was this a trick question or something...?
Yes I know, we'll have a great hue and cry, but so be it.
You're not worried about someone seeing red? (hint: it's 'hew')
Exactly. They are negotiating. "War" involves shooting and death. Using it to describe sabotage is just hyperbole.
Hyperbole, yes, but not without a purpose. You could also call it fund-raising.
This is another example of a military-industrial complex ginning up a new theatre of operations in which to spend billions^W^Wdeploy.
Avoid using overly abstract concepts, and try to put things in terms they can understand.
Arts major here, who's been working for about 20 years in IT. I'd offer a qualified agreement here. I found some science subjects innately easy, because I was able to visualise the forces at work. Vector equations in physics, geometry, etc. were dead easy, even when they became more advanced. But the moment the teacher began to fall back on jargon and symbolic shorthand, I'd get lost.
The reason is pretty straightforward. I am extremely good at certain kinds of pattern-identification, but quite poor at others. Among the ones I'm poor at are mathematical equations, which are not evaluated in the same way natural languages are. It's merely a left brain/right brain thing, and I can compensate by using different approaches. I thrived under teachers who understood this, and died under teachers who spent their entire time writing equations on the board without attempting to contextualise them.
First, yum is superior technically to debians packaging system. Not going to bother explaining, because I seriously doubt it would do any good.
By all means, please do.
I've worked professionally with the RPM build system and at one time was far too intimately aware of its shortcomings. I haven't built nearly as many .deb packages, but what exposure I've had to them sure made me feel good about their packaging toolkit.
From a sysadmin's perspective, I don't particularly hate yum, but I don't see anything that makes it more compelling than apt. In fact, I don't see a lot of daylight between them any more, except for yum's tendency to go online and update itself prior to every operation (a minor annoyance for those of us who live in a low-bandwidth part of the world).
So I'd be really interested in knowing what exactly makes yum superior to apt (and aptitude especially), because for the life of me I can't see it, despite using both Debian and Redhat since the 1990s.