Of course you're right. But thing is, we _have to_ concentrate on global issues if we want to achieve any amount of long term improvements. The problem with this is that most everyday people don't really care for any time period longer than 2-3 human life times. To change anything in the current trends of pollution we'd probably need more time than that. And that doesn't mean that the social and industrial changes could be introduced in a slow pace, since there are areas on the planet and plant/animal species that could just disappear in a few dozen years.
Again, do you think "he's bad too" can make everything ok ? Guessed so. You could probably fairly quickly assemble a list of other not-innocent-either companies. That will not make Yahoo (or the others) any less "bad".
Sad story... my grandfather died a few years back, and he had the same mentality, he'd never go to doctor. Unfortunately my father is the same on this issue, and I noticed that I am also. It's not because "you didn't like to bother [the doctor]", it's because some hidden fear from doctors, not as persons per se, but that they might actually find that there's something wrong with you. As they say, no matter why you go, a dr always could find something on you:) which might be partially true since part of their income comes from prescribed medicine:) And in the case of societies where there's no public healthcare, money also might come up as an issue for many people.
seemed to be a lot more concerned with things like air quality, environmental impact
Yes, we generally are concerned about environmental pollution. But, honestly, it really doesn't matter what the EU and other countries do to reduce pollution globally, since what these countries reduce is probably just barely enough to balance the increase that the US produces.
Well, joke or not (mostly not), reasonable amounts of beer and wine can do good to most people's (i.e. who don't yet have some diseases like to liver, kidneys, blood pressure, etc.) helath. And yes, here in Europe we really have some really _fine_ beers and wines, thankfully.
ALmost every health analysis names another issue being the cause of the given results. But I almost always tend to agree that one of the most important cause is probably in the differences of the different countries' health care systems. Many arguments can be raised in favor and against the different systems, still, such high differences IMO can not be explained just with working culture/number of workfree days per year/income/immigrants. Just my 0.02.
I have karma to loose, but I still have to say this.
The whole thing seems - again - like whinings of some 10 year old, hysterics of people with less knowledge than a certain task would require, thinking that whining will do any good. You can not circumvent learning, adapting with hysterics. Some people just think it is extraordinarily outrageous when they hear they should learn to use something or need to pick up any new knowledge. They just - really - think everything should be done conforming to their levels. This is just idiotic.
It will never do us - in general - any good if we always aim for a level below the average. If there really are people who can not keep up with the pace, they are not lost: they _can_ _choose_ to use something else that fits their levels of expectations. But saying that a certain product - let it be a Linux distro or else - is not good because they lack the required level of knowledge and are not willing to broaden their skills in order to use it, is not an acceptable argument.
We thought of combining keyboard-mouse coding with voice recognition software as an aid, but in the end, it would cause too much extra time, which you could spend more effectively. I mean if you keep 15 minute breaks in the hour, switch keyboards and mice from time to time, use ergonomic chairs and well adjusted desk, height, keyboard/mouse location, etc. then you can _very_ much lighten, eliminate or postpone (whatever) any RSI-related injury. And by typing you can get your work done more faster - well, this also depends on many things, but usually speaking - and time saving is very important for many of us.
Anyway, coding with voice recognition would only be most useful if there would be a programming environment where you would program like this: "Computer, start new program. Write airport flight control program, and bring me a beer. Wake up signal when finished. Start.":P
It would make their image more shiny among FOSS people, but still, it's no necessity for them to be totally open source. They are pro-Linux all the time, they spend quite some money on FOSS/Linux support, and that's quite something.
I admit I have little problem with XP and use it as my daily operating system
He wasn't interested in the usability of XP, he was interested in whether this is worth the boot into XP for a try. I did the reboot, I tried it, and yes, I think it's worth the try, I hoenstly liked it pretty much. It's no Maya, it's no Blender either, but it's refreshingly easy to mock up some models in it. As many others, I also started with a house to see how easy it can get, and it left me quite pleasantly surprised.
Easy to use != powerfull. Blender is mostly not for the occasional wannabe but more for the somewhat willing to learn occasional hobbyist up to a somewhat professional level. Right tool for the right job.
tendency to kill the competitive market for the technologies that they make available for free
That is _exactly_ why open source (well, in this case it isn't open source, but it's free nonetheless) and free software encourages innovation. An idea is taken or is available free so you can't seem to get money from asking money for it ? Try to have a new, better idea. That's the whole point, it makes you think outside the box for a minute. For most people it indeed only takes only a minute because they just can't even imagine that this can work.
ou backup into small slices, any majority of which can be used
Ok, I'm numb in the morning, but what the hell does that mean ?... I won't trust my data to something I don't even understand. You can say to RTFM, but hey, this is the first paragraph about the software, it should be catchy and clear.
There's probably much truth in what you say. It would be interesting to see some statistics about changes over a longer period in the number of people immigrating in the US who are/were in some sort of engineering fields, and another one in CS/IT-related fields (not necessarily code monkey programmers, but generally IT-related people with university degrees). The shortage - if there is really a shortage and not just somebody wanting to raise some guest worker limits - probably has some connections with some long time decrease in the above statistics. And yes, people would well to remember that how many immigrant scientists - jewish or else - were involved in the scientific and engineering evolution of the US in the last 50-60 years. Immigrants have probably done more good to the US than to any other country on this planet.
ACM contest is fun but that doesn't mean that the winners are the world's best CS people.
Certainly true, but then again, that could also be said about almost all other such and similar competitions. Nevertheless, trying to discredit those people by simply stating that "we didn't go there to compete, but to have fun" is just silly, to say the least. If you go to a competition without the wish to win, you shouldn't be there, do something more fun, or someting more productive. At the end, they were who won the competition, and whatever you say, after the race all it counts is who came out winning.
Prior to highschool (yes, before highschool) I also was at some local, even regional programming contests, and we had to solve quite good and challenging - now thinking back to them - problems in a few hours. Even when I knew that I won't be able to solve one in time, I tried to come up with some tricky solutions. It was fun, even if some other way of fun than your fun:)
All in all, these contests have nothing to do with real life problems or with real life work, or whatever. Still, quick problem solution and a special algorithmic and mathematical (and combined) way of thinking can be very useful in both (i.e. real life and these competitions). Neither winning nor loosing such competitions means much in the real world, still, it can be a measure. And this is for college students, which means those that can find their fun in such coding, they will have fun. The rest can find their fun time someplace else.
A work force that gets so spoiled that they riot in France because they're not given a job for life!
It isn't even annoying anymore when we see such all-knowing high-horse intelligence coming in waves from overseas. It's not funny either. We just simply got used to it so we don't care anymore.
The website operator (blogger) did nothing wrong, they violated no law. The person leaking it broke an NDA, but that's not their concern.
Ummm... so if somebody from the nsa or cia, or whatever that you might happen to know would come to you and tell you internal secrets and you would tell what you heard to everybody else and dog, nothing should happen to you ? You didn't sign nda with them, the guy did, but you knew the information was a secret and willingly and knowingly made it public. Still you would feel you did nothing wrong ?
I must call BS here. Journalists are journalists, sixpack bloggers are... guess what, they are _not_ journalists, however they might like it to be so. If a real journalist or a journal starts a web page (yeah, you can call it blog or any buzzword you can imagine) and they start publishing writings on it, they deserve all the rights they had as a non-internet journalist. But if mr prick comes around and starts a page of his own where he writes stuff, he should not feel offended when nobody that counts will treat him as a journalist. Because he ain't one. Just because everyone can afford to have a blog, they will not become instantly journalists. And no, because you can use dreamweaver you won't become a web developer either.
It's not always just about backups, as it's not always just about home user needs. There are plenty and one more areas where storage space is just never enough. E.g. 24 hours of video recorded from some hundreds of street cameras, multi-hour very high definition digital uncompressed video editing for effects and graphics, digitizing old movies for digital restoration from celluloids in 6K+ resolutions from which you also need at least a working copy and a backup. It's always nice to be able to instantly double or triple the storage space on the same m^2 area, or to have the same storage space but on a reduced m^2.
allow users to verify who important messages are really from
It's not even suprising or funny anymore when some people try to reinvent something under a different name and try to gain money/power on the "idea". PGP/GPG anyone ? Is it really necessary to rename and reinvent the e-mail signing idea over and over again ? Most people don't even know what e-mail signing is, so they won't notice but it's stupid nonetheless. Against all my efforts, among all my friends we are only two who use e-mail signing, the rest won't even consider. From among the thousands of (legitimate and valid) e-mails I read monthly usually _none_ of them is signed. People just don't care. No matter if we tell them why it's good, no matter that we ask them politely to use signing, nothing really helps. And I can't even say that I won't read unsigned e-mails, because I hardly ever receive signed mails...
That's actually one of the nicest things Steve does for me: He makes sure I am always invited to the VIP guest area for the product rollouts. I appreciate that more than I can ever say.
I can appreciate one who knows what's most important in life, and one of those things is not forgetting who your friends are, and sticking by them all along. Even if it's just small things, which is the job of some secretary.
Thom again... This issue here is not about freedom of speech, freedom of opinion, or freedom to anything, or being killed because of your opinions, etc. This is about packs of "bloggers" who think a). they are professional writers just because they have a web page which they can edit, b). they publish information about which they _know_ are company secrets and think they can get away with it. It doesn't matter that they have not signed any NDAs, because they know these infos are company secrets and they knowingly make these public. I wouldn't defend a company, any company on this planet, never ever, still, some of these "professional" "bloggers" would really need some wakeup snap on their asses every once in a while.
It just smells wierd that there is so much time and article space wasted on speculated Vista hw requirements. And, besides, it really doesn't matter. We don't need no suggestion and benchmark on how an MS OS will run on some hardware, we'd need benchamarks that show that the how do the apps we want to use perform under Vista (on whatever hw). By the time Vista will be buyable most hw you will be able to buy will be probably fully capable to "run" Vista (it feels fairly peculiar to speakabout how a hw will run an OS).
And besides, why should I be interested in Vista anyway, since other OSes have all the features (and more) that Vista promises to have in a year from now (!). And I also don't care about what new features will it bring for developers, since - wakey, wakey, sunshine - there are other OSes that we can develop for and under.
This whole hype just feels stupid. It will come when it will come, we should _then_ read some reviews, test the latest pre-rtm betas and decide whether we should consider buying it.
Well, just a hypothetical question: in a lawsuit in London, what do you think who has more chance to win: someone who has the music of the Beatles, or someone from overseas "trying to steal their name" ? I guess another out of court cash agreement is more likely again.
they choose a technology - an operating system or an application - based on its ability to solve a particular problem
I also agree he's wrong with this, and he probably knows it all too well. Most people "choose" what they are used to and what they have been PR-fed into. This is MS's biggest luck. Many computers users probably don't even have a clue that they could do everything that they do on a free OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you're right. But thing is, we _have to_ concentrate on global issues if we want to achieve any amount of long term improvements. The problem with this is that most everyday people don't really care for any time period longer than 2-3 human life times. To change anything in the current trends of pollution we'd probably need more time than that. And that doesn't mean that the social and industrial changes could be introduced in a slow pace, since there are areas on the planet and plant/animal species that could just disappear in a few dozen years.
Again, do you think "he's bad too" can make everything ok ? Guessed so. You could probably fairly quickly assemble a list of other not-innocent-either companies. That will not make Yahoo (or the others) any less "bad".
Sad story... my grandfather died a few years back, and he had the same mentality, he'd never go to doctor. Unfortunately my father is the same on this issue, and I noticed that I am also. It's not because "you didn't like to bother [the doctor]", it's because some hidden fear from doctors, not as persons per se, but that they might actually find that there's something wrong with you. As they say, no matter why you go, a dr always could find something on you :) which might be partially true since part of their income comes from prescribed medicine :) And in the case of societies where there's no public healthcare, money also might come up as an issue for many people.
seemed to be a lot more concerned with things like air quality, environmental impact
Yes, we generally are concerned about environmental pollution. But, honestly, it really doesn't matter what the EU and other countries do to reduce pollution globally, since what these countries reduce is probably just barely enough to balance the increase that the US produces.
Well, joke or not (mostly not), reasonable amounts of beer and wine can do good to most people's (i.e. who don't yet have some diseases like to liver, kidneys, blood pressure, etc.) helath. And yes, here in Europe we really have some really _fine_ beers and wines, thankfully.
ALmost every health analysis names another issue being the cause of the given results. But I almost always tend to agree that one of the most important cause is probably in the differences of the different countries' health care systems. Many arguments can be raised in favor and against the different systems, still, such high differences IMO can not be explained just with working culture/number of workfree days per year/income/immigrants. Just my 0.02.
I have karma to loose, but I still have to say this.
The whole thing seems - again - like whinings of some 10 year old, hysterics of people with less knowledge than a certain task would require, thinking that whining will do any good. You can not circumvent learning, adapting with hysterics. Some people just think it is extraordinarily outrageous when they hear they should learn to use something or need to pick up any new knowledge. They just - really - think everything should be done conforming to their levels. This is just idiotic.
It will never do us - in general - any good if we always aim for a level below the average. If there really are people who can not keep up with the pace, they are not lost: they _can_ _choose_ to use something else that fits their levels of expectations. But saying that a certain product - let it be a Linux distro or else - is not good because they lack the required level of knowledge and are not willing to broaden their skills in order to use it, is not an acceptable argument.
We thought of combining keyboard-mouse coding with voice recognition software as an aid, but in the end, it would cause too much extra time, which you could spend more effectively. I mean if you keep 15 minute breaks in the hour, switch keyboards and mice from time to time, use ergonomic chairs and well adjusted desk, height, keyboard/mouse location, etc. then you can _very_ much lighten, eliminate or postpone (whatever) any RSI-related injury. And by typing you can get your work done more faster - well, this also depends on many things, but usually speaking - and time saving is very important for many of us.
:P
Anyway, coding with voice recognition would only be most useful if there would be a programming environment where you would program like this: "Computer, start new program. Write airport flight control program, and bring me a beer. Wake up signal when finished. Start."
It would make their image more shiny among FOSS people, but still, it's no necessity for them to be totally open source. They are pro-Linux all the time, they spend quite some money on FOSS/Linux support, and that's quite something.
I admit I have little problem with XP and use it as my daily operating system
He wasn't interested in the usability of XP, he was interested in whether this is worth the boot into XP for a try. I did the reboot, I tried it, and yes, I think it's worth the try, I hoenstly liked it pretty much. It's no Maya, it's no Blender either, but it's refreshingly easy to mock up some models in it. As many others, I also started with a house to see how easy it can get, and it left me quite pleasantly surprised.
Easy to use != powerfull. Blender is mostly not for the occasional wannabe but more for the somewhat willing to learn occasional hobbyist up to a somewhat professional level. Right tool for the right job.
tendency to kill the competitive market for the technologies that they make available for free
That is _exactly_ why open source (well, in this case it isn't open source, but it's free nonetheless) and free software encourages innovation. An idea is taken or is available free so you can't seem to get money from asking money for it ? Try to have a new, better idea. That's the whole point, it makes you think outside the box for a minute. For most people it indeed only takes only a minute because they just can't even imagine that this can work.
ou backup into small slices, any majority of which can be used
... I won't trust my data to something I don't even understand. You can say to RTFM, but hey, this is the first paragraph about the software, it should be catchy and clear.
Ok, I'm numb in the morning, but what the hell does that mean ?
There's probably much truth in what you say. It would be interesting to see some statistics about changes over a longer period in the number of people immigrating in the US who are/were in some sort of engineering fields, and another one in CS/IT-related fields (not necessarily code monkey programmers, but generally IT-related people with university degrees). The shortage - if there is really a shortage and not just somebody wanting to raise some guest worker limits - probably has some connections with some long time decrease in the above statistics. And yes, people would well to remember that how many immigrant scientists - jewish or else - were involved in the scientific and engineering evolution of the US in the last 50-60 years. Immigrants have probably done more good to the US than to any other country on this planet.
ACM contest is fun but that doesn't mean that the winners are the world's best CS people.
:)
Certainly true, but then again, that could also be said about almost all other such and similar competitions. Nevertheless, trying to discredit those people by simply stating that "we didn't go there to compete, but to have fun" is just silly, to say the least. If you go to a competition without the wish to win, you shouldn't be there, do something more fun, or someting more productive. At the end, they were who won the competition, and whatever you say, after the race all it counts is who came out winning.
Prior to highschool (yes, before highschool) I also was at some local, even regional programming contests, and we had to solve quite good and challenging - now thinking back to them - problems in a few hours. Even when I knew that I won't be able to solve one in time, I tried to come up with some tricky solutions. It was fun, even if some other way of fun than your fun
All in all, these contests have nothing to do with real life problems or with real life work, or whatever. Still, quick problem solution and a special algorithmic and mathematical (and combined) way of thinking can be very useful in both (i.e. real life and these competitions). Neither winning nor loosing such competitions means much in the real world, still, it can be a measure. And this is for college students, which means those that can find their fun in such coding, they will have fun. The rest can find their fun time someplace else.
A work force that gets so spoiled that they riot in France because they're not given a job for life!
It isn't even annoying anymore when we see such all-knowing high-horse intelligence coming in waves from overseas. It's not funny either. We just simply got used to it so we don't care anymore.
The website operator (blogger) did nothing wrong, they violated no law. The person leaking it broke an NDA, but that's not their concern.
Ummm... so if somebody from the nsa or cia, or whatever that you might happen to know would come to you and tell you internal secrets and you would tell what you heard to everybody else and dog, nothing should happen to you ? You didn't sign nda with them, the guy did, but you knew the information was a secret and willingly and knowingly made it public. Still you would feel you did nothing wrong ?
online journalists receive the same rights
... guess what, they are _not_ journalists, however they might like it to be so. If a real journalist or a journal starts a web page (yeah, you can call it blog or any buzzword you can imagine) and they start publishing writings on it, they deserve all the rights they had as a non-internet journalist. But if mr prick comes around and starts a page of his own where he writes stuff, he should not feel offended when nobody that counts will treat him as a journalist. Because he ain't one. Just because everyone can afford to have a blog, they will not become instantly journalists. And no, because you can use dreamweaver you won't become a web developer either.
I must call BS here. Journalists are journalists, sixpack bloggers are
It's not always just about backups, as it's not always just about home user needs. There are plenty and one more areas where storage space is just never enough. E.g. 24 hours of video recorded from some hundreds of street cameras, multi-hour very high definition digital uncompressed video editing for effects and graphics, digitizing old movies for digital restoration from celluloids in 6K+ resolutions from which you also need at least a working copy and a backup. It's always nice to be able to instantly double or triple the storage space on the same m^2 area, or to have the same storage space but on a reduced m^2.
allow users to verify who important messages are really from
It's not even suprising or funny anymore when some people try to reinvent something under a different name and try to gain money/power on the "idea". PGP/GPG anyone ? Is it really necessary to rename and reinvent the e-mail signing idea over and over again ? Most people don't even know what e-mail signing is, so they won't notice but it's stupid nonetheless. Against all my efforts, among all my friends we are only two who use e-mail signing, the rest won't even consider. From among the thousands of (legitimate and valid) e-mails I read monthly usually _none_ of them is signed. People just don't care. No matter if we tell them why it's good, no matter that we ask them politely to use signing, nothing really helps. And I can't even say that I won't read unsigned e-mails, because I hardly ever receive signed mails...
That's actually one of the nicest things Steve does for me: He makes sure I am always invited to the VIP guest area for the product rollouts. I appreciate that more than I can ever say.
I can appreciate one who knows what's most important in life, and one of those things is not forgetting who your friends are, and sticking by them all along. Even if it's just small things, which is the job of some secretary.
Thom again... This issue here is not about freedom of speech, freedom of opinion, or freedom to anything, or being killed because of your opinions, etc. This is about packs of "bloggers" who think a). they are professional writers just because they have a web page which they can edit, b). they publish information about which they _know_ are company secrets and think they can get away with it. It doesn't matter that they have not signed any NDAs, because they know these infos are company secrets and they knowingly make these public. I wouldn't defend a company, any company on this planet, never ever, still, some of these "professional" "bloggers" would really need some wakeup snap on their asses every once in a while.
It just smells wierd that there is so much time and article space wasted on speculated Vista hw requirements. And, besides, it really doesn't matter. We don't need no suggestion and benchmark on how an MS OS will run on some hardware, we'd need benchamarks that show that the how do the apps we want to use perform under Vista (on whatever hw). By the time Vista will be buyable most hw you will be able to buy will be probably fully capable to "run" Vista (it feels fairly peculiar to speakabout how a hw will run an OS).
And besides, why should I be interested in Vista anyway, since other OSes have all the features (and more) that Vista promises to have in a year from now (!). And I also don't care about what new features will it bring for developers, since - wakey, wakey, sunshine - there are other OSes that we can develop for and under.
This whole hype just feels stupid. It will come when it will come, we should _then_ read some reviews, test the latest pre-rtm betas and decide whether we should consider buying it.
Well, just a hypothetical question: in a lawsuit in London, what do you think who has more chance to win: someone who has the music of the Beatles, or someone from overseas "trying to steal their name" ? I guess another out of court cash agreement is more likely again.
they choose a technology - an operating system or an application - based on its ability to solve a particular problem
I also agree he's wrong with this, and he probably knows it all too well. Most people "choose" what they are used to and what they have been PR-fed into. This is MS's biggest luck. Many computers users probably don't even have a clue that they could do everything that they do on a free OS.