The insane thing about it is the fact that no one supports the bill except a handful of entertainment companies. Probably not even the employees of the entertainment companies.
Why does anybody think the employees of a company have (or should have) any say in stuff like this? The editorial/political policy of a company is set by the management, who (at least in theory) represent the interest of the stockholders. Employees don't enter into the equation at all.
I don't tell my employer what to think, and they sure as heck don't tell me what to think. If I am truly upset at my employer's political views, I am free to quit (and, fortunately, the reverse is not true).
I was an early adopter of Mulberry, first on Mac, later on Linux. I really am sad to hear that the Cyrusoft folks couldn't make a go of it. Over the years, I got to know Cyrus and some of other people there; they were all nice folks, and the company was a pleasure to work with. That being said, this news really isn't that surprising, for two reasons.
One is that while each new release brought more features, it also brought more complexity. It got to the point where I was never quite sure I understood how to configure it any more (to be fair, the same is true of most mail clients these days, including Pine).
To a certain extent, some of the complexity was difficult to get away from, because IMAP itself is very complex. IMHO, one of the worse design decisions in IMAP was to not standardize how mailboxes are named. This means different servers export different sets of names, and this non-uniformity is visible to the user. It's especially annoying when you're using one client to connect to multiple servers. One of Mulberry's failings was to expose all of the underlying complexity to the user.
The second reason is that it's really hard to sell something into a market dominated by free software. They got squeezed in both directions. On the one hand, they had to compete with the Outlook jaugernaut, but people who rejected Outlook also had plenty of other choices for free.
Take a whole bunch of these and stack them up in series. As you approach each one, it opens as closes again behind you as you pass. You end up in a moving bubble. That would be cool.
In any endeavor, it is critical to have a shibboleth or five, to keep out the riff-raff.
When I was a teenager, the code requirement was exactly what kept me from getting my license. My first attempt to learn code was a few years prior, in the Boy Scouts (for some required merit badge). I couldn't get my head around it and eventually gave up and learned two-flag Semaphore instead to get past the requirement.
As others have mentioned, I next ran into code when I got my Private Pilot's license, because that's how navaids identify themselves. But, also as others have pointed out, you just have to follow along with the dots and dashes printed on the chart. That being said, I havn't identified a navaid by ear in years; all modern radios decode the morse ID for you and display it in letters right on the front panel.
Our website was built by a "website design bureau". We told them it had to be standard, so it would work on Mozilla as well.
If you want it to be standard, you have to specify an objective test procedure, such as passing the HTML validator on w3c.org, and specify the exact DTD you want it verified against. If you just say something vague like "It has to work on mozilla", you deserve what you get.
i tell you, it'd make up for the bizaare experience that can only be described as the last 5 years of 'Apple make the only Unix laptop worth a damn' reality bubble distortion field..
I happen to agree with you that OSX on a PowerBook is a heck of a combination (I'm typing on one right now), but you've been able to run Linux or various BSD flavors on Intel laptops for years (the Sony VAIO line, for example, is some very cool hardware). Of course, you need to roll-your-own install, but this is slashdot after all.
I don't even want to get into genital piercings and tattoos inside of lips.
If genital piercings are keeping you from getting a job, you're showing up for interviews WAY underdressed.
I'm not really into facial hardware, but I figure it's your face, you can do what you want with it. On the other hand, keep in mind that I'm the one who's got to look at it. "Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you produce" has been a good concept for a long time. It's probably applicable here too.
Some of us are/will be professional programmers, a thick book does not scare us. Have you ever seen physics and calculus books? But wait, we're programmers, we can't handle that amount of information.
Physics books describe the world around us. We have no control over how physics works; the best we can do is try to understand it as it is. Programming languages, on the other hand, are things we we design. We have control over how complicated they are.
I've read several of the books from this series. Every time I go back and look at them again, it just reinforces my revulsion at how bloated and complex C++ is. Don't get me wrong, they're good books, and Meyers does an admirable job of explaining all the pitfalls. The problem is that there are so many pitfalls to begin with. C++ is second system syndrome on steroids.
That depends. If the service is a commodity (you can get essentially the same quality product from any vendor), then certainly price becomes the only differentiator (and there's no better price than free).
But, the NY Times is not a commodity. The quality of the writing, and the depth of the news gathering organization sets it apart from others in the field. If I want commodity news, I'll read the AP newswire (and even that isn't free). Some people claim that the NY Times has a liberal bias to their news reporting. Even assuming that were true, that's still a differentiator which sets them apart:-)
The rule of thumb in the newspaper business is that the revenue from sales of the paper pays for the actual production costs (paper, ink, running the presses, delivery to newsstands, etc). Looking at their most recent financials (http://nytco.com/pdf-reports/2004-ar10K/cons-stmt s-of-income.pdf), that appears to be vaguely true. Circulation revenue was $0.9B, and total production costs were $1.5B. Advertising revenue was $2.2B. They make a lot more money from selling ads than selling newspapers.
I used to buy the NY Times (paper edition) almost every day. At today's prices, 5 days a week plus Sunday, minus some subscriber discount, figure I'd be spending $150-200/year on the paper. The WSJ charges $79/year for full access. If the NY Times were to charge that same amount, it would be a bargain. The hard thing to figure out is if enough people will actually pay for it that way.
Full disclosure: I own a few shares of NYT.
People who make decisions that matter (CEO's, CIO's, VP's of IT departments, etc) don't read People or The Enquirer. They read the NY Times. I'm sure they've all heard of Firefox, but seeing a full-page ad in the NY Times says, "This is real" in a language they understand.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does anybody think the employees of a company have (or should have) any say in stuff like this? The editorial/political policy of a company is set by the management, who (at least in theory) represent the interest of the stockholders. Employees don't enter into the equation at all.
I don't tell my employer what to think, and they sure as heck don't tell me what to think. If I am truly upset at my employer's political views, I am free to quit (and, fortunately, the reverse is not true).
I was an early adopter of Mulberry, first on Mac, later on Linux. I really am sad to hear that the Cyrusoft folks couldn't make a go of it. Over the years, I got to know Cyrus and some of other people there; they were all nice folks, and the company was a pleasure to work with. That being said, this news really isn't that surprising, for two reasons.
One is that while each new release brought more features, it also brought more complexity. It got to the point where I was never quite sure I understood how to configure it any more (to be fair, the same is true of most mail clients these days, including Pine).
To a certain extent, some of the complexity was difficult to get away from, because IMAP itself is very complex. IMHO, one of the worse design decisions in IMAP was to not standardize how mailboxes are named. This means different servers export different sets of names, and this non-uniformity is visible to the user. It's especially annoying when you're using one client to connect to multiple servers. One of Mulberry's failings was to expose all of the underlying complexity to the user.
The second reason is that it's really hard to sell something into a market dominated by free software. They got squeezed in both directions. On the one hand, they had to compete with the Outlook jaugernaut, but people who rejected Outlook also had plenty of other choices for free.
Take a whole bunch of these and stack them up in series. As you approach each one, it opens as closes again behind you as you pass. You end up in a moving bubble. That would be cool.
When I was a teenager, the code requirement was exactly what kept me from getting my license. My first attempt to learn code was a few years prior, in the Boy Scouts (for some required merit badge). I couldn't get my head around it and eventually gave up and learned two-flag Semaphore instead to get past the requirement.
As others have mentioned, I next ran into code when I got my Private Pilot's license, because that's how navaids identify themselves. But, also as others have pointed out, you just have to follow along with the dots and dashes printed on the chart. That being said, I havn't identified a navaid by ear in years; all modern radios decode the morse ID for you and display it in letters right on the front panel.
If you want it to be standard, you have to specify an objective test procedure, such as passing the HTML validator on w3c.org, and specify the exact DTD you want it verified against. If you just say something vague like "It has to work on mozilla", you deserve what you get.
Subject says it all (but the posting UI insists I type something here).
I happen to agree with you that OSX on a PowerBook is a heck of a combination (I'm typing on one right now), but you've been able to run Linux or various BSD flavors on Intel laptops for years (the Sony VAIO line, for example, is some very cool hardware). Of course, you need to roll-your-own install, but this is slashdot after all.
I'm not really into facial hardware, but I figure it's your face, you can do what you want with it. On the other hand, keep in mind that I'm the one who's got to look at it. "Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you produce" has been a good concept for a long time. It's probably applicable here too.
Physics books describe the world around us. We have no control over how physics works; the best we can do is try to understand it as it is. Programming languages, on the other hand, are things we we design. We have control over how complicated they are.
I've read several of the books from this series. Every time I go back and look at them again, it just reinforces my revulsion at how bloated and complex C++ is. Don't get me wrong, they're good books, and Meyers does an admirable job of explaining all the pitfalls. The problem is that there are so many pitfalls to begin with. C++ is second system syndrome on steroids.
Film at 11.
There's an old joke about what the airplane cockpit of the future is going to look like. It's going to have a computer, a pilot, and a dog.
The pilot is there to feed the dog.
The dog is there to bite the pilot if he tries to touch the computer.
This goes well with "IT: 95% of IT Projects Not Delivered On Time" reported earlier today.
That depends. If the service is a commodity (you can get essentially the same quality product from any vendor), then certainly price becomes the only differentiator (and there's no better price than free). But, the NY Times is not a commodity. The quality of the writing, and the depth of the news gathering organization sets it apart from others in the field. If I want commodity news, I'll read the AP newswire (and even that isn't free). Some people claim that the NY Times has a liberal bias to their news reporting. Even assuming that were true, that's still a differentiator which sets them apart :-)
The rule of thumb in the newspaper business is that the revenue from sales of the paper pays for the actual production costs (paper, ink, running the presses, delivery to newsstands, etc). Looking at their most recent financials (http://nytco.com/pdf-reports/2004-ar10K/cons-stmt s-of-income.pdf), that appears to be vaguely true. Circulation revenue was $0.9B, and total production costs were $1.5B. Advertising revenue was $2.2B. They make a lot more money from selling ads than selling newspapers.
I used to buy the NY Times (paper edition) almost every day. At today's prices, 5 days a week plus Sunday, minus some subscriber discount, figure I'd be spending $150-200/year on the paper. The WSJ charges $79/year for full access. If the NY Times were to charge that same amount, it would be a bargain. The hard thing to figure out is if enough people will actually pay for it that way.
Full disclosure: I own a few shares of NYT.
You can be assured, I'd rather be scared. The new Garmin G1000 (http://www.garmin.com/products/g1000/) include an infra-red programming port.
People who make decisions that matter (CEO's, CIO's, VP's of IT departments, etc) don't read People or The Enquirer. They read the NY Times. I'm sure they've all heard of Firefox, but seeing a full-page ad in the NY Times says, "This is real" in a language they understand.
Regarding the raised topo maps, try http://www.raised-relief-maps.com/index.mgi