Aren't most of the current space missions done with space equipment based on soviet technology? And aren't a lot of those just going pretty nicely? (the modern european ariadne rockets seem to have less luck, also take a look at the far from unproblematic space shuttle launches). I wonder how much aging equipment there can be in rocket science, most of the stuff is not really made for re-use anyway. Everything that went up in space has to be built anew. The technological idea can be old, but 'old' is sometimes just a synonym for 'proven'.
In germany for DSL it was only possible to pay separately for bandwith and for traffic. Now, flatrate is the most common, but still these things are seen as separated.
As far as false advertizing is concerned, in the case of mobile internet (GPRS) the providers seem to have very flexible interpretations of 'flatrate', e.g. 300 MB per month or something. Again: that is only in the small print.
Funnily enough, the TURBO button was always on, except when it was used to slow down the PC in case you wanted to play an old dos game whose speed depended on the clock speed. So effectively it was more a slow-down button. Ah the days. Also I had stickerbooks with TURBO stickers in it, probably also glittering. Intel should've called it Hybrid memory. It would've probably also been true in a way and is much more contemporary.
Ah yes, I actually came very close to this, when a friend of mine used a free webmail service here in germany, and they had a special offer at one's birthday, giving extra storage and whatever. She clicked it, didn't really read all the stuff, and then later got bills and even legal-sounding threats that she should pay. So I checked the internet and found loads and loads of people with the same problems. The birthday offer appeared to be valid only for 3 months, after which it should be specifically cancelled or otherwise switch to a paid service. Apparently, in Germany, a 'click' like this can be seen as a contract confirmation, I remember ordering my DSL service without ever writing my signature somewhere. It is a shady business anyway, and it is very clear that the service was set up in such a way to trick the free webmail users into it. From what I've read, many people paid just to make sure to not get into legal troubles (Can you imagine, 10 euro per month or so for some crappy webmail service) Others were smarter and just ignored the letters. They never got into real legal trouble as the webmail company itself probably knows very well that they're on the edge.
I am talking about you, evil people from web.de!!!! Actually, one could see it coming, as this "free" webmail service makes a lot of advertisements on billboards or radio/tv, and these have to be paid from something, don't they.
I still think that you are right, a mouseclick can never ever substitute a signature. Also signatures can be copied of course, but the amount of effort to do that is significantly higher than the effort needed to click a button for someone else. ALSO!!! One could just fill in address and bank information, that is all that is needed. Nowhere in this process you identify yourself, and I think that the moment you protest against the validity of the contract, you will put be in your right and the contract will be deleted. Let them prove with 100% certainity that you were the one clicking the button! The main problem is that you will have to start with a lot of effort to fight this. Many people will end up just doing as they're told by the company, to avoid the stress inherent to fighting the company, even when they know they are in their right.
As far as I understood it, a person is rated by a website with some rating procedure the website worked out. So your example doesn't really hold. Someone else used a method on the calculator to calculate the result, and he complains about the method.
I don't know what to think of this. As a restaurant, you can earn michelin stars based on the grades you get from probably several testers. Did you ever hear of a restaurant that sued michelin for loosing a star? It doesn't seem to make sense.
Rmember, any person, magazine, or website can grade services, but they will only be taken seriously when they have a decent method. Systems like this work when not only the public has faith in the method, but also the people involved (e.g. the chefs), respect the way the testing was done. If restaurants would think that the michelin system is fake, they wouldn't be proud of their stars in the first place.
Since there seems to be quite a group of people that do not agree with the method used by that website, they can of course try to sue them, but I figure that the website will be rendered useless within the trade fast enough that they might as well just ignore the score of the website all together. Sueing might even be counterproductive, I didn't know before that the website existed in the first place.
And I think he has very much the right to do so. He never asked to be rated, but at the same time the rating will be of high economic importance to him (getting more high-profile jobs, etc.). Now you could compare this with a restaurant getting the famous michelin stars, it can make or brake the restaurant. Now
In cases like that, you need to be able to ask for a second opinion.
Living there probably isn't bad from the standpoint of background radiation; but I wouldn't want to eat food grown there or live in a house without a dust filter.
Reality check! I have some friends from that area, living about 50 km up north just along the route of the cloud. Nearby is the city of Gomel that should have been evacuated, but it didn't happen because it would be too difficult as the town was too big (smaller towns did get evacuated). Now you have to realize the economical situation in the country. Monthly salaries are about 200-300 dollar if I remember correctly, and most of it will go to rent, most people are just coping through the month. Buying stuff at a supermarket is getting more reasonable only in the last few years, the main source of food is still the food grown from their small personal gardens at the "Datschas". It has also always been a habit there to eat berries from the forest or collect mushrooms. These habits just did not change, and couldn't. This may sound strange to someone in the west, but there is just no alternative. There is a huge economical difference for you if you get your vegetables from the garden of your family, in trade of some work on their house or whatever, compared to having to buy everything in a supermarket. The money to do that is just not there. Also the stuff in the supermarket just doesn't taste that good. Actually, I should taste myself, but apparently a lot of these things taste much better than the vegetables you can get in the supermarket here in europe, and then of course even more so when compared to the US (sorry, couldn't resist mentioning this);)
Also: air filter? Heh. How many people out there have an airco to put their air filter in do you think? How often do these things have to be exchanged, how much does a replacement cost? Also, where do you get it and the replacements in the first place. Every country has its fair share of rich people, and e.g. in the big cities in russia it is easier to find tech goodies than in most towns in europe. But out in the country you really have to go back in time.
I hope to visit there soon, all in all living out there is a different experience, I EXPLICITLY say different, not worse. Also it is interesting to see one of the countries from the 'Axis of evil' from the other side. Just think about why it is on the list: it has a government that actively tries to restrict the rights of the citizens. Now, tell me one place where this doesn't happen! All a point of perspective.
Well, that is what fud is, and it is very damaging because shareholders and PHBs tend to pay more attention to million dollar deals being made on this, than on the fact that people on slashdot think it is bullshit. But their plan is amazingly smart. They just don't even sue, as they saw by SCO that this didn't work well. Also, there is no money to gain by sueing. This way they end up weakening the position of linux and actually get paid for it instead of having to pay their lawyers for it. Now the sueing will have to be done by.... by whom? To have Microsoft show what patents they reallyy have.
The reaction of the Xandros boss in the summary is pretty dumb though. If the guy doesn't believe in it, then why does he pay them in the first place? Smells fishy.
Shame your comment got lost out here, bitlbee is a fantastic client that I've been using for years now. Also the integration in IRC is nice. You have to trust the bitlbee server your password, though. And no file transfers, but I just tell people to mail me their stuff.
Your second point brings me to a question: Is it possible to have a document remove your legal rights to anything? Will an EULA, which is not even signed, you just click a button, have more value in court than the general consumer rights? If I put this in the extreme, is it possible to have kill someone if you have him sign a paper which states that he discards of all his rights
to live? Would that be acceptable. I'm all in favor of private arbitrage to lessen the burden on the already overloaded justice system. But this arbitrage, I hope, is still below the law and not above it.
To the dupe people: I missed the first one on this, and am happy to read about it. It is already tagged dupe (luckily this is done again), so leave the stupid comments, ok.
oh no, a friend of mine had the same problem some years ago. Default suse install on his laptop just didn't activate the cooling fan. That story was over pretty fast. After talking to the local linux ubergeek it became clear that he had to start with some kernel options or god-knows-what. Mind you, this was a few years ago, but thinks like that make you want to buy a laptop with a certified linux version on it.
what a wonderful machine! The same size as current electric wheelchairs, but with the huge social difference that you can lift yourself up to eye level! I can imagine that this humble-looking thing has the power to bring wheelchair users closer to the people around them, make them feel more secure and independent, even make a lot of more jobs accessible as well. As they showed in the movie, this actually lets one speak to people in a bar, stupid as it may sound, this is very important, otherwise you'D be only looking at and talking to other peoples butts and crotches (which is probably not half as good as it may sound to some of you).
This is what technological advancement should all be about. Is it based on segway technology or something? Does it use a lot of battery power when in balance mode? Haven't seen one of these around europe yet, I really hope they will come available, not that I need one, but if I would've I'd certainly want one directly!
Exactly, I was thinking the same. Even if she gets free after this, what then? 4 years of her life lost, this poor woman must have some big trauma, a huge debt for the lawyer as well maybe? What will she do? I guess the american education system has lost another teacher for good.
So many questions. I really really really really don't understand this. Why is there no 'common sense' system to cut this whole idiot process off. Who is winning here? I can't imagine parents being happy with this kind of attention to their school, the kids will see pop-ups anyway, so why would they care? The local government wins what with this? Any highly-educated person will certainly make sure not to get a job in a state that has this idiotic justice system. Does a prosecutor have the time and money to just go around prosecuting the most stupid cases he can think of? Is he not assessed or something?
The best solution to this whole process was to have the IT guy come to the classroom, take the PC out, install spyware, FINISHED. 5 minutes of stress for the teacher, 30 minutes of work for the IT guy, and something to giggle about by the kids until the bell rings.
WTF is wrong with that country that this even made it to the police office. If you mention something like this to law enforcement in Europe, they would write it down on a post-it, wish you a good day, and then go on with reality (parking tickets, or whatever). Just a week ago a teacher sent two explitly sexual text messages to a pupil of his, now that is where the kid-teacher confidelity gets breached. Because he did it on -purpose-. How simple is that as a rule of thumb.
Amazing! Also with the gilette blades they had it right. Is this a proof that anything that sounds nonsense today sounds completely acceptable for the marketing departments of tomorrow? Or maybe the engineers at Gilette and Apple read the onion as well and tried to pull a practical joke on the marketing departments to see if it would work: "Hey, look what we've made, 5 blades, this will be a big hit!". Or maybe the onion should start a trend watching division, they'd surely score better than the predictions by dvorak or any other 'tech visionairy' for that matter. Or just use their intuition on the stock market and get filthy rich.
I hope that the people whose domain got transferred might take some time to overthink if choosing for the low-budget high-volume registrant was a good idea after all. Maybe they can find a more expensive solution that will actually do the trick in a reliable way, with decent service. Domain registration is about the smallest cost of the total costs for an internet service, why get scroogy on it? I pay about 14 euro now at the locally based server farm that also hosts my site, I could get it for less than 7 dollars at some unknown hard-to-reach registrar overseas, of course, but why would I think that would be a smart idea?
Anyone who ever tried to get rid of books of deceased family knows that most books aren't worth shit, second hand stores will not take them, and you end up bringing them to the paper bin. Is this sad? I don't know, I will not spend time reading most of these crappy books, neither would you or anybody else (silly love stories from the 60s, books about cooking porc feet, use your imagination here). Burning them is just the publicity stunt and this guy had these books selected as the crap that will never get sold anyway. His "good" (that means: likely to be sold) books where not this heap. Probably ever bookstore owner in the world brings the same amount of books to the junkyard without anyone being bothered by it.
As a book store owner, you have to know your field, buy certain directions that are popular in your neighbourhood, or make sure you have a good internet presence and sell your books world wide (there is an amazingly good database of the inventory of second hand bookstores). If you buy the right stuff, you will manage to get rid of it for a good price.
Are people still using those sheet transition options for Powerpoint? I haven't seen them since 1998, and I've seen a lot of Powerpoint presentations. Not in the corporate world though, so maybe there are still the crazy loonatic managers around that think this is 'professional'. What I did see last year was the use of 3D cube-like rotating transition in an Apple-made presentation. The audience ooh-ed and aah-ed every time the poor chap changed the sheets, and at the end he just stated he will remove these things from the presentation.
Point is, it is a waste of time, you and all the other people around want to spend their time in a better way than wasting it on looking at useless (3D) animations when copying files on their pc or watching a powerpoint presentation.
Didn't you notice the "anonymous" article submitter? It went like this: someone wanted to know the best way to increase his apache/php speed. Of course he could write an 'Ask slashdot' entry with this question, but would know that he would only get "don't use php" answers. So he had a cunning plan! Instead he wrote this mock-up article, posted it to slashdot, and is now reading the pretty useful comments out here! This is analogous to the way to get help from linux experts. Never ask them directly for the answer, you'll get a RTFM. Instead, say that you could do this-and-this much more efficiently on Windows before but linux is crap at it, and you will get al the 101 ways to do it perfectly explained.
Thank you for writing a summary that is understandeable. The summary didn't make any sense at all and also the slashdot tags have become pretty redundant (I didn't read slashdot for a few months, don't know the reason, but the way these tags are now they might as well just leave them out again), if they would have mentioned 'google ads' or whatever, the idea of the article would have been clearer. I could also have tried to read it of course, but with a summary like it was pretty hard to get interested.
Ah yes thank you, I read that but I forgot that that also was from Cringely. Sorry for me for nothing having part in the collective slashdot meme memory, as I don't look on this site every bloody minute of the day. In any case, Cringely seems to be hard on his way becoming the new Dvorak. Well good for him, bad attention is attention as well, isn't it.
so, a factor 10 overestimated according to wikipedia (12.000). But as far as I know, Google is still going around hiring. I think that we as IT interested people should be glad that apparently it is possible to build a healthy company where innovative ideas that actually work are developed.
Why should you want a company to go down if it's doing it's thing in a succesfull way. I am from Holland, and there someone who iis very sucessful is automatically an asshole in the public opinion. Well not if they 'Staid so normal'. I fear that cringely has gotten a severe case of this dutch disease...
Anyway, I think he forgets two main points. one overlooked concern is size. Size is needed to create momentum: you can only sell a lot of ads of you have a lot of viewers, you can only buy the computing capacity and bandwith if you have a lot of revenue. If you as a google-like company do not manage to get the critical momentum.
It is the same size that makes google inherently an 'evil' company. They have are so involved in your private life that they get a lot of potential power over you. Google tries to handle this power in one way or another, maybe you do not agree with many of their decisions, but what are their options, and is there one single correct way to handle this?
Then there is second factor, quality: Remember, in the case of google, you have the choice to use it or not. There are at least a few alternatives for every application that they offer. But you CHOOSE to use google, because of the quality of the products.
Apparently the designers behind google have a feeling for quality products that is outstanding. This is something to respect, it is not easy to make something technological easy. Just think about it, when was the last time you clicked the 'advanced' search button in google. They did an amazing job of opening the web in a way anyone can use. Imagine that they would work with regexes? Or via clickable boxes for every special option? No, the genius is in taking a complex problem, and presenting it in the most simple form understandable by humans. I for one, can not repeat this, can you? Can cringely? This is also where google can fail. Just this week I noticed that my terrible old pc has more and more problems with google every time. Google mail is getting pretty bloated with features in that it is very slow to load in my browser. As I said, to find the right balance between features and simpleness is an art, if they start really losing that, I will start useing something else pretty quickly.
I didn't read the article, but indeed, what load of BS. Do we need to know their books? Companies might mess with their books to look better for their (porspective) stockholders. In the case of MySQL, I don't know if they sell stocks outside of the public trade, but if so, then I'd say that their openness of their books is a matter of importance only for those who can and want to invest in them.
Here in Germany there are several supermarkets completely out of public trade. And they are doing very well indeed! They have no reason to mess with their books, because the only thing they could reach with it is fooling themselves. The biggest supermarket from Holland on the other hand (Ahold) is publicly traded, wanted to look good for their stockholders and did so by messing with the books of the (South) American offices (I think that their accountants actually cooperated with it, bad business). This mess had to be corrected, thereby almost bringing the whole company down. I can imagine that if Ahold was not publicly traded, it also wouldn't be so foolish to mess around.
Look, if a company is publicly traded or not does not tell anything about the quality. For some companies with irregular investments, it might be the only solution. Other companies might need the stability of closed trade, keeping their stocks in their own hand. Opening of the books is a responsibility only for the publicly traded companies, towards the stock holders and those considering to buy stock. In other cases the company only has responsibilities towards itself, you can not even buy stock, and therefore it is none of your business to look in their books or not. For you as a user it is important to know that you buy something from a viable company, but also there just the books don't tell you everything. What if your perfectly open company gets taken over and squeezed out by some investment fond? Could happen anytime.
I bought my IBM P200 in about the same time, for a whole lot of money, and I still use it every day. We're already in the late 00's now, so about 10 years good work from it! Great crystal clear image and it came with a 13w3-vga cable for extra nerd karma. But I must say that TFT by now is just as good what the image concerns. Probably I should switch to a TFT just because of their amazing cheap prize and lower power consumption , also I won't have to move these 30 kgs around anymore. (Not that I ever went there, but I can not advice the Trinitron for LAN parties). And BTW: I don't notice the lines anymore.
Yes, this would be the best thing. I like to reuse my bookmarks for other things, up till now this could be done with some perl hacking, it would be nice if there could be a way to access it from outside now as well. This would introduce a security issue as well, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't most of the current space missions done with space equipment based on soviet technology? And aren't a lot of those just going pretty nicely? (the modern european ariadne rockets seem to have less luck, also take a look at the far from unproblematic space shuttle launches). I wonder how much aging equipment there can be in rocket science, most of the stuff is not really made for re-use anyway. Everything that went up in space has to be built anew. The technological idea can be old, but 'old' is sometimes just a synonym for 'proven'.
As far as false advertizing is concerned, in the case of mobile internet (GPRS) the providers seem to have very flexible interpretations of 'flatrate', e.g. 300 MB per month or something. Again: that is only in the small print.
Funnily enough, the TURBO button was always on, except when it was used to slow down the PC in case you wanted to play an old dos game whose speed depended on the clock speed. So effectively it was more a slow-down button. Ah the days. Also I had stickerbooks with TURBO stickers in it, probably also glittering. Intel should've called it Hybrid memory. It would've probably also been true in a way and is much more contemporary.
I am talking about you, evil people from web.de!!!! Actually, one could see it coming, as this "free" webmail service makes a lot of advertisements on billboards or radio/tv, and these have to be paid from something, don't they.
I still think that you are right, a mouseclick can never ever substitute a signature. Also signatures can be copied of course, but the amount of effort to do that is significantly higher than the effort needed to click a button for someone else. ALSO!!! One could just fill in address and bank information, that is all that is needed. Nowhere in this process you identify yourself, and I think that the moment you protest against the validity of the contract, you will put be in your right and the contract will be deleted. Let them prove with 100% certainity that you were the one clicking the button! The main problem is that you will have to start with a lot of effort to fight this. Many people will end up just doing as they're told by the company, to avoid the stress inherent to fighting the company, even when they know they are in their right.
I don't know what to think of this. As a restaurant, you can earn michelin stars based on the grades you get from probably several testers. Did you ever hear of a restaurant that sued michelin for loosing a star? It doesn't seem to make sense.
Rmember, any person, magazine, or website can grade services, but they will only be taken seriously when they have a decent method. Systems like this work when not only the public has faith in the method, but also the people involved (e.g. the chefs), respect the way the testing was done. If restaurants would think that the michelin system is fake, they wouldn't be proud of their stars in the first place.
Since there seems to be quite a group of people that do not agree with the method used by that website, they can of course try to sue them, but I figure that the website will be rendered useless within the trade fast enough that they might as well just ignore the score of the website all together. Sueing might even be counterproductive, I didn't know before that the website existed in the first place. And I think he has very much the right to do so. He never asked to be rated, but at the same time the rating will be of high economic importance to him (getting more high-profile jobs, etc.). Now you could compare this with a restaurant getting the famous michelin stars, it can make or brake the restaurant. Now In cases like that, you need to be able to ask for a second opinion.
Reality check! I have some friends from that area, living about 50 km up north just along the route of the cloud. Nearby is the city of Gomel that should have been evacuated, but it didn't happen because it would be too difficult as the town was too big (smaller towns did get evacuated). Now you have to realize the economical situation in the country. Monthly salaries are about 200-300 dollar if I remember correctly, and most of it will go to rent, most people are just coping through the month. Buying stuff at a supermarket is getting more reasonable only in the last few years, the main source of food is still the food grown from their small personal gardens at the "Datschas". It has also always been a habit there to eat berries from the forest or collect mushrooms. These habits just did not change, and couldn't. This may sound strange to someone in the west, but there is just no alternative. There is a huge economical difference for you if you get your vegetables from the garden of your family, in trade of some work on their house or whatever, compared to having to buy everything in a supermarket. The money to do that is just not there. Also the stuff in the supermarket just doesn't taste that good. Actually, I should taste myself, but apparently a lot of these things taste much better than the vegetables you can get in the supermarket here in europe, and then of course even more so when compared to the US (sorry, couldn't resist mentioning this) ;)
Also: air filter? Heh. How many people out there have an airco to put their air filter in do you think? How often do these things have to be exchanged, how much does a replacement cost? Also, where do you get it and the replacements in the first place. Every country has its fair share of rich people, and e.g. in the big cities in russia it is easier to find tech goodies than in most towns in europe. But out in the country you really have to go back in time.
I hope to visit there soon, all in all living out there is a different experience, I EXPLICITLY say different, not worse. Also it is interesting to see one of the countries from the 'Axis of evil' from the other side. Just think about why it is on the list: it has a government that actively tries to restrict the rights of the citizens. Now, tell me one place where this doesn't happen! All a point of perspective.
The reaction of the Xandros boss in the summary is pretty dumb though. If the guy doesn't believe in it, then why does he pay them in the first place? Smells fishy.
Shame your comment got lost out here, bitlbee is a fantastic client that I've been using for years now. Also the integration in IRC is nice. You have to trust the bitlbee server your password, though. And no file transfers, but I just tell people to mail me their stuff.
To the dupe people: I missed the first one on this, and am happy to read about it. It is already tagged dupe (luckily this is done again), so leave the stupid comments, ok.
oh no, a friend of mine had the same problem some years ago. Default suse install on his laptop just didn't activate the cooling fan. That story was over pretty fast. After talking to the local linux ubergeek it became clear that he had to start with some kernel options or god-knows-what. Mind you, this was a few years ago, but thinks like that make you want to buy a laptop with a certified linux version on it.
This is what technological advancement should all be about. Is it based on segway technology or something? Does it use a lot of battery power when in balance mode? Haven't seen one of these around europe yet, I really hope they will come available, not that I need one, but if I would've I'd certainly want one directly!
So many questions. I really really really really don't understand this. Why is there no 'common sense' system to cut this whole idiot process off. Who is winning here? I can't imagine parents being happy with this kind of attention to their school, the kids will see pop-ups anyway, so why would they care? The local government wins what with this? Any highly-educated person will certainly make sure not to get a job in a state that has this idiotic justice system. Does a prosecutor have the time and money to just go around prosecuting the most stupid cases he can think of? Is he not assessed or something?
The best solution to this whole process was to have the IT guy come to the classroom, take the PC out, install spyware, FINISHED. 5 minutes of stress for the teacher, 30 minutes of work for the IT guy, and something to giggle about by the kids until the bell rings.
WTF is wrong with that country that this even made it to the police office. If you mention something like this to law enforcement in Europe, they would write it down on a post-it, wish you a good day, and then go on with reality (parking tickets, or whatever). Just a week ago a teacher sent two explitly sexual text messages to a pupil of his, now that is where the kid-teacher confidelity gets breached. Because he did it on -purpose-. How simple is that as a rule of thumb.
think of the kittens! you unsensitive clod!
Amazing! Also with the gilette blades they had it right. Is this a proof that anything that sounds nonsense today sounds completely acceptable for the marketing departments of tomorrow? Or maybe the engineers at Gilette and Apple read the onion as well and tried to pull a practical joke on the marketing departments to see if it would work: "Hey, look what we've made, 5 blades, this will be a big hit!". Or maybe the onion should start a trend watching division, they'd surely score better than the predictions by dvorak or any other 'tech visionairy' for that matter. Or just use their intuition on the stock market and get filthy rich.
I hope that the people whose domain got transferred might take some time to overthink if choosing for the low-budget high-volume registrant was a good idea after all. Maybe they can find a more expensive solution that will actually do the trick in a reliable way, with decent service. Domain registration is about the smallest cost of the total costs for an internet service, why get scroogy on it? I pay about 14 euro now at the locally based server farm that also hosts my site, I could get it for less than 7 dollars at some unknown hard-to-reach registrar overseas, of course, but why would I think that would be a smart idea?
As a book store owner, you have to know your field, buy certain directions that are popular in your neighbourhood, or make sure you have a good internet presence and sell your books world wide (there is an amazingly good database of the inventory of second hand bookstores). If you buy the right stuff, you will manage to get rid of it for a good price.
Point is, it is a waste of time, you and all the other people around want to spend their time in a better way than wasting it on looking at useless (3D) animations when copying files on their pc or watching a powerpoint presentation.
Didn't you notice the "anonymous" article submitter? It went like this: someone wanted to know the best way to increase his apache/php speed. Of course he could write an 'Ask slashdot' entry with this question, but would know that he would only get "don't use php" answers. So he had a cunning plan! Instead he wrote this mock-up article, posted it to slashdot, and is now reading the pretty useful comments out here! This is analogous to the way to get help from linux experts. Never ask them directly for the answer, you'll get a RTFM. Instead, say that you could do this-and-this much more efficiently on Windows before but linux is crap at it, and you will get al the 101 ways to do it perfectly explained.
Thank you for writing a summary that is understandeable. The summary didn't make any sense at all and also the slashdot tags have become pretty redundant (I didn't read slashdot for a few months, don't know the reason, but the way these tags are now they might as well just leave them out again), if they would have mentioned 'google ads' or whatever, the idea of the article would have been clearer. I could also have tried to read it of course, but with a summary like it was pretty hard to get interested.
Ah yes thank you, I read that but I forgot that that also was from Cringely. Sorry for me for nothing having part in the collective slashdot meme memory, as I don't look on this site every bloody minute of the day. In any case, Cringely seems to be hard on his way becoming the new Dvorak. Well good for him, bad attention is attention as well, isn't it.
Also, this 'news' was pretty familiar to me:
Creation(ist) museum to be opened in Kentucky Wednesday August 09, @06:03PM Rejected
August 2006, that is... Apparently, this museum took a bit more than 7 days to build!
Anyway, I think he forgets two main points. one overlooked concern is size. Size is needed to create momentum: you can only sell a lot of ads of you have a lot of viewers, you can only buy the computing capacity and bandwith if you have a lot of revenue. If you as a google-like company do not manage to get the critical momentum. It is the same size that makes google inherently an 'evil' company. They have are so involved in your private life that they get a lot of potential power over you. Google tries to handle this power in one way or another, maybe you do not agree with many of their decisions, but what are their options, and is there one single correct way to handle this?
Then there is second factor, quality: Remember, in the case of google, you have the choice to use it or not. There are at least a few alternatives for every application that they offer. But you CHOOSE to use google, because of the quality of the products. Apparently the designers behind google have a feeling for quality products that is outstanding. This is something to respect, it is not easy to make something technological easy. Just think about it, when was the last time you clicked the 'advanced' search button in google. They did an amazing job of opening the web in a way anyone can use. Imagine that they would work with regexes? Or via clickable boxes for every special option? No, the genius is in taking a complex problem, and presenting it in the most simple form understandable by humans. I for one, can not repeat this, can you? Can cringely? This is also where google can fail. Just this week I noticed that my terrible old pc has more and more problems with google every time. Google mail is getting pretty bloated with features in that it is very slow to load in my browser. As I said, to find the right balance between features and simpleness is an art, if they start really losing that, I will start useing something else pretty quickly.
Here in Germany there are several supermarkets completely out of public trade. And they are doing very well indeed! They have no reason to mess with their books, because the only thing they could reach with it is fooling themselves. The biggest supermarket from Holland on the other hand (Ahold) is publicly traded, wanted to look good for their stockholders and did so by messing with the books of the (South) American offices (I think that their accountants actually cooperated with it, bad business). This mess had to be corrected, thereby almost bringing the whole company down. I can imagine that if Ahold was not publicly traded, it also wouldn't be so foolish to mess around.
Look, if a company is publicly traded or not does not tell anything about the quality. For some companies with irregular investments, it might be the only solution. Other companies might need the stability of closed trade, keeping their stocks in their own hand. Opening of the books is a responsibility only for the publicly traded companies, towards the stock holders and those considering to buy stock. In other cases the company only has responsibilities towards itself, you can not even buy stock, and therefore it is none of your business to look in their books or not. For you as a user it is important to know that you buy something from a viable company, but also there just the books don't tell you everything. What if your perfectly open company gets taken over and squeezed out by some investment fond? Could happen anytime.
I bought my IBM P200 in about the same time, for a whole lot of money, and I still use it every day. We're already in the late 00's now, so about 10 years good work from it! Great crystal clear image and it came with a 13w3-vga cable for extra nerd karma. But I must say that TFT by now is just as good what the image concerns. Probably I should switch to a TFT just because of their amazing cheap prize and lower power consumption , also I won't have to move these 30 kgs around anymore. (Not that I ever went there, but I can not advice the Trinitron for LAN parties). And BTW: I don't notice the lines anymore.
Yes, this would be the best thing. I like to reuse my bookmarks for other things, up till now this could be done with some perl hacking, it would be nice if there could be a way to access it from outside now as well. This would introduce a security issue as well, though.