What non-cheque systems are there to address these issues?
I guess if you're on the road for quite a while (several weeks) and don't have access to any trusted computer during that time, it might come in handy to be able to pay bills or such with cheques. I've never had that kind of a need, though.
As for paying people whose bank account details I don't know, if I can't pay in cash, I ask for the number of an account I can pay to. In any case, pretty much anybody I'd need to give money to would be either family, a friend, their friend, or someone else I'm in contact with, so asking for payment details has never been an issue. I suppose there can be use cases for cheques that I (and everyone else I know) just haven't run into but which some people still commonly encounter, but I tend to think those cases are pretty rare for most people.
If I want to give a friend or someone money, I either do a wire transfer in my online bank or give cash. Usually the former. Everyone can accept one of those.
I don't know a single non-geek in my country, or anywhere outside of the USA, who would use cheques. That includes my ~70-year-old parents who are definitely not Slashdot geeks. They just pay their bills through their online bank service, as do any number of other relatives who didn't grow up with computers either. As for paying for purchases at shops, it's cash or bank/credit/debit cards, as it has been for ages.
I have some relatives who have probably never used a computer at all, and I guess they still pay their bills either by physically visiting banks or at payment ATMs, but I don't know of anyone using cheques in any kinds of everyday situations.
Cheques might still be used for trophies in some kinds of lotteries etc., for their symbolic value of looking fancy, but not really much of anything else. I've never paid anything with a cheque, and I think I've received one exactly once, sometime about 20 years ago.
the majority of people find the shit-stained brownness of Ubuntu uninviting. So Canonical are trying something different, for better or worse.
I do agree that it makes sense for Canonical to try something different if the previous style has proven unpopular. However, I don't think Ubuntu's default colour scheme could have been described "shit-stained" in a long time. It's moved from the very non-glossy deep brown to more of an orange shade accompanied with very dark brown, and while some parts of it don't work out very well, I think some parts are actually pretty nice-looking. It just lacks in consistency a bit, and it's not very compatible with a lot of other colours, e.g. icons for some icons for applications that aren't part of the Ubuntu theme.
In any case, even the current theme (as of 9.10) is a long shot from the initial deep brown theme. I'm waiting to see the new theme on an actual desktop before forming an opinion on it.
If the OpenOffice guys didn't have to spend so much of their time reverse-engineering and building support for overly complex proprietary MS Office file formats, perhaps they'd have more time and resources to actually improve their offering rather than fighting artificial barriers imposed by the requirement for compatibility with proprietary technology.
The average Joe really doesn't give a shit about "free as in freedom" all he gives a shit about is does it work and is it easy.
That's why it's up to experts to give a shit.
Joe Common doesn't have expert-level knowledge of the issue, so Joe doesn't see the long-term effects of different alternatives. For example, a file format that can be used for free is better for encouraging new small players in the market than a format that is expensive or nearly impossible for such new players to use and support. The free format is more supportive of competition, and that competition between a greater number of vendors is also beneficial for Joe in the long run.
This may be less of an issue with audio or video formats with public documentation and more or less reasonable patent licensing costs, but it's still an issue to some extent. Complex formats that lack public documentation have a much more severe effect. As an extreme example, think of the MS Office formats which to date, after more than a decade of work and tons of very real resources thrown at it, still can't be fully supported by third party implementations. Yes, documents can be opened, but OpenOffice et al will often mess up a lot of the details in Office documents that have formatting of any complexity, and I'm not blaming OpenOffice but the complex proprietary format which is prohibitively complex to fully support. That does in fact severely limit competition between products that could otherwise compete with actual product quality and usability.
Again, that may be a somewhat extreme example, but the same applies to any proprietary protocol, data storage format or interface to some extent. That's why the professionals in the field and other knowledgeable people need to give a shit even if Joe doesn't. Unlike Joe, they are informed enough to understand the long-term benefits, and those should count.
Considering that legitimate MS products at full price probably weren't even an option, MS didn't even take a loss. The marginal cost for copies of software is almost zero (even considering the costs from salespeople etc.), so anything they can sell more means more profit. The realistic options for the administration where probably continued use of pirated MS software (no income for MS) or FOSS (no income for MS, plus loss of potential future market share).
If they got almost any money at all, it meant profit, not loss, assuming that it at least covered the costs of preparing the contract and shaking hands.
Sure OS != GUI technically, but let's face it, most people associate OS X with the entire default software package on the Mac, not just a barebones OS. If you say that iPhone runs OS X, you'd expect it to behave close to OS X on the user level as well, not just to run the same kernel, base libraries and middleware.
As for the Linux comparison, if you say you run, say, SUSE, most people will expect you to have a desktop as well because SUSE is an entire collection of software built on top of the barebones Linux operating system, and it tends to have the GUI as well.
In other words:
Darwin ~ Linux OS X ~ $desktop_linux_distro
Sure you can say the iPhone runs OS X by defining "OS X" comfortably, but it really doesn't hold if you use "OS X" to mean what most people associate it with.
So then those Linksys routers that run Linux really don't because the functionality isn't the same.
Yes, they do, but they don't run SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
Putting kernel vs. OS nitpicking aside, Linux is a more generic term referring to any OS using the same low-level OS components as a basis. OS X, on the other hand, is associated with the entire desktop.
Sure, it's quite possible that the iPhone OS has been built on top of Darwin. That's a better comparison to routers running Linux. But no, it doesn't run OS X in any meaningful sense.
That's a good point. It's actually very difficult to both make a law exact and still take into account all kinds of special cases where the general rule just wouldn't make justice -- and if you somehow managed to make that kind of a law, in most cases all the special cases and exceptions would make it so abhorrently complex that a layperson would have even less of a chance at knowing and understanding it than now. Of course that doesn't mean exactness isn't valuable, and it should be pursued as far as reasonably possible within the other limiting factors, but you can never close all the loopholes.
IANAL, but I thought this was common knowledge, really.
Even "non-evil" companies like Google pull shit like this.
Google hasn't been non-evil in a long time.
Anyway, I suppose the difference is that most other companies, while sometimes purposefully leaking information, also often smell the air pretty publicly by actually making press releases about products they're planning.
Apple, on the other hand, uses leaks almost exclusively.
Deaths from preventable and not-practically-preventable causes shouldn't be compared in such a way, but a lot of people die of preventable causes as well (including some of the deaths on the road, but obviously not all). Comparing deaths from other preventable causes to the death toll from terrorist attacks is very reasonable because it all comes down to where the resources should be put.
As a purely imaginary example, if a "war on terror" costs n billion USD a year and potentially saves, say, a few hundred lives a year (on average), and with a similar amount of money spent in health care you could save 20k lives a year, clearly the latter figure dwarfs the former one, and this comparison does make sense because it gives a hint towards which one would be a better target for most of the money.
There was a brief spike in economy in Russia in 2000-2006, but that is over now, and was caused mostly by advantageous external conditions, not some genius policy making from inside.
I don't think grandparent meant to suggest that the growth was due to policy. It might well be happening in spite of the policy rather than thanks to it, and most people still wouldn't see the difference or complain as long as the growth continues.
If or when the growth stalls and external conditions no longer persist to create the illusion of good policy, people might notice and become less content, but it may already be too late by then. The powers that be in countries such as Belarus have already made good use of the time window they had to create the state they wanted.
Actually, that might be a good enough reason for other people to get vaccinated as well. Even if it's mostly people with risk factors that develop serious cases, having more people vaccinated reduces the spread of the flu in general, and that will mean fewer people with risk factors will catch it as well. The group of people who are at risk is not isolated from the rest of the population so their risk is not independent of how the flu spreads in the population in general. The normally healthy person might have a rather mild case himself but someone with higher risk could still contract the virus from him, and that's all the more likely if more people around them are infected. Also, just not being in contact when you have the flu is not enough due to the incubation period.
That's one reason I'll probably take the vaccine when its available to me sometime soon. Also, even though the first wave of the flu has been quite mild -- more or less on par with any yearly flu -- we don't know exactly yet what the second wave is going to be like. Other major flu pandemics have also had second or third waves, and those might be more devastating than the first one.
Don't get me wrong. I've been mostly just annoyed by what has sometimes approached hysteria around H1N1. I'm the last one to advocate panicking or useless measures whose only purpose is to create a false sense of security, or convince the public that something is being done. I do believe, however, that vaccinations against H1N1 are likely to actually save lives, perhaps someone else's even if I'm not at much risk myself.
Would you be ready to award the CEO of a major company a salary of more than $150k per year? Or other really successful people in really successful businesses? It's more honest to compare hugely successful artists and bands to other hugely successful people than to (more or less) Joe Commons, even Joes who do work their asses off.
They'd go in and reboot servers - servers with 100 people logged in and working on stuff - because they thought their database was out of memory. Not tell anyone, nothing. One time they enabled an rsync script that pretty much overwrote a week's worth of work. And who got blamed? The sysadmin, for not making it impossible for that script to work anymore.
That's not exactly about local admin rights. I understood the original question was about admin rights to the developers' workstations, not servers. That's a whole different matter.
Personally, I'd hate not being able to use the tools I need on my local machine to complete the job just because someone's being a control freak. (Not referring to you but to those who would deny developers local admin privileges to their workstations.)
How exactly would a laser beam cause enough of a kinetic effect on a large asteroid to change its trajectory away from a crash course? How huge would "huge" have to be?
Apparently Ubuntu's focus towards ease of use has been good enough to add competition and drive other distributions to change their thinking and design towards something friendlier to a non-technical user (and, I dare claim, without sacrificing friendliness towards technical users). That way Ubuntu has, at least indirectly, made Linux desktop/laptop systems better.
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What non-cheque systems are there to address these issues?
I guess if you're on the road for quite a while (several weeks) and don't have access to any trusted computer during that time, it might come in handy to be able to pay bills or such with cheques. I've never had that kind of a need, though.
As for paying people whose bank account details I don't know, if I can't pay in cash, I ask for the number of an account I can pay to. In any case, pretty much anybody I'd need to give money to would be either family, a friend, their friend, or someone else I'm in contact with, so asking for payment details has never been an issue. I suppose there can be use cases for cheques that I (and everyone else I know) just haven't run into but which some people still commonly encounter, but I tend to think those cases are pretty rare for most people.
If I want to give a friend or someone money, I either do a wire transfer in my online bank or give cash. Usually the former. Everyone can accept one of those.
I don't know a single non-geek in my country, or anywhere outside of the USA, who would use cheques. That includes my ~70-year-old parents who are definitely not Slashdot geeks. They just pay their bills through their online bank service, as do any number of other relatives who didn't grow up with computers either. As for paying for purchases at shops, it's cash or bank/credit/debit cards, as it has been for ages.
I have some relatives who have probably never used a computer at all, and I guess they still pay their bills either by physically visiting banks or at payment ATMs, but I don't know of anyone using cheques in any kinds of everyday situations.
Cheques might still be used for trophies in some kinds of lotteries etc., for their symbolic value of looking fancy, but not really much of anything else. I've never paid anything with a cheque, and I think I've received one exactly once, sometime about 20 years ago.
the majority of people find the shit-stained brownness of Ubuntu uninviting. So Canonical are trying something different, for better or worse.
I do agree that it makes sense for Canonical to try something different if the previous style has proven unpopular. However, I don't think Ubuntu's default colour scheme could have been described "shit-stained" in a long time. It's moved from the very non-glossy deep brown to more of an orange shade accompanied with very dark brown, and while some parts of it don't work out very well, I think some parts are actually pretty nice-looking. It just lacks in consistency a bit, and it's not very compatible with a lot of other colours, e.g. icons for some icons for applications that aren't part of the Ubuntu theme.
In any case, even the current theme (as of 9.10) is a long shot from the initial deep brown theme. I'm waiting to see the new theme on an actual desktop before forming an opinion on it.
If the OpenOffice guys didn't have to spend so much of their time reverse-engineering and building support for overly complex proprietary MS Office file formats, perhaps they'd have more time and resources to actually improve their offering rather than fighting artificial barriers imposed by the requirement for compatibility with proprietary technology.
The average Joe really doesn't give a shit about "free as in freedom" all he gives a shit about is does it work and is it easy.
That's why it's up to experts to give a shit.
Joe Common doesn't have expert-level knowledge of the issue, so Joe doesn't see the long-term effects of different alternatives. For example, a file format that can be used for free is better for encouraging new small players in the market than a format that is expensive or nearly impossible for such new players to use and support. The free format is more supportive of competition, and that competition between a greater number of vendors is also beneficial for Joe in the long run.
This may be less of an issue with audio or video formats with public documentation and more or less reasonable patent licensing costs, but it's still an issue to some extent. Complex formats that lack public documentation have a much more severe effect. As an extreme example, think of the MS Office formats which to date, after more than a decade of work and tons of very real resources thrown at it, still can't be fully supported by third party implementations. Yes, documents can be opened, but OpenOffice et al will often mess up a lot of the details in Office documents that have formatting of any complexity, and I'm not blaming OpenOffice but the complex proprietary format which is prohibitively complex to fully support. That does in fact severely limit competition between products that could otherwise compete with actual product quality and usability.
Again, that may be a somewhat extreme example, but the same applies to any proprietary protocol, data storage format or interface to some extent. That's why the professionals in the field and other knowledgeable people need to give a shit even if Joe doesn't. Unlike Joe, they are informed enough to understand the long-term benefits, and those should count.
Considering that legitimate MS products at full price probably weren't even an option, MS didn't even take a loss. The marginal cost for copies of software is almost zero (even considering the costs from salespeople etc.), so anything they can sell more means more profit. The realistic options for the administration where probably continued use of pirated MS software (no income for MS) or FOSS (no income for MS, plus loss of potential future market share).
If they got almost any money at all, it meant profit, not loss, assuming that it at least covered the costs of preparing the contract and shaking hands.
I don't imagine that's a huge number, and large areas of the Baltic seafloor are pretty dead anyway. I don't know if the areas with mines happen to be, though.
Sure OS != GUI technically, but let's face it, most people associate OS X with the entire default software package on the Mac, not just a barebones OS. If you say that iPhone runs OS X, you'd expect it to behave close to OS X on the user level as well, not just to run the same kernel, base libraries and middleware.
As for the Linux comparison, if you say you run, say, SUSE, most people will expect you to have a desktop as well because SUSE is an entire collection of software built on top of the barebones Linux operating system, and it tends to have the GUI as well.
In other words:
Darwin ~ Linux
OS X ~ $desktop_linux_distro
Sure you can say the iPhone runs OS X by defining "OS X" comfortably, but it really doesn't hold if you use "OS X" to mean what most people associate it with.
I once ran Darwin in a virtual machine on my Linux desktop. It didn't look much like full OS X to me.
So then those Linksys routers that run Linux really don't because the functionality isn't the same.
Yes, they do, but they don't run SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
Putting kernel vs. OS nitpicking aside, Linux is a more generic term referring to any OS using the same low-level OS components as a basis. OS X, on the other hand, is associated with the entire desktop.
Sure, it's quite possible that the iPhone OS has been built on top of Darwin. That's a better comparison to routers running Linux. But no, it doesn't run OS X in any meaningful sense.
That's a good point. It's actually very difficult to both make a law exact and still take into account all kinds of special cases where the general rule just wouldn't make justice -- and if you somehow managed to make that kind of a law, in most cases all the special cases and exceptions would make it so abhorrently complex that a layperson would have even less of a chance at knowing and understanding it than now. Of course that doesn't mean exactness isn't valuable, and it should be pursued as far as reasonably possible within the other limiting factors, but you can never close all the loopholes.
IANAL, but I thought this was common knowledge, really.
Windows solves that codec problem by having media codec plugins (VFW and DirectShow). Cannot understand why Linux does not have such infrastructure.
http://www.gstreamer.net/
Even "non-evil" companies like Google pull shit like this.
Google hasn't been non-evil in a long time.
Anyway, I suppose the difference is that most other companies, while sometimes purposefully leaking information, also often smell the air pretty publicly by actually making press releases about products they're planning.
Apple, on the other hand, uses leaks almost exclusively.
In this case, your luggage planted explosives in Soviet Russia... err, Ireland.
Deaths from preventable and not-practically-preventable causes shouldn't be compared in such a way, but a lot of people die of preventable causes as well (including some of the deaths on the road, but obviously not all). Comparing deaths from other preventable causes to the death toll from terrorist attacks is very reasonable because it all comes down to where the resources should be put.
As a purely imaginary example, if a "war on terror" costs n billion USD a year and potentially saves, say, a few hundred lives a year (on average), and with a similar amount of money spent in health care you could save 20k lives a year, clearly the latter figure dwarfs the former one, and this comparison does make sense because it gives a hint towards which one would be a better target for most of the money.
There was a brief spike in economy in Russia in 2000-2006, but that is over now, and was caused mostly by advantageous external conditions, not some genius policy making from inside.
I don't think grandparent meant to suggest that the growth was due to policy. It might well be happening in spite of the policy rather than thanks to it, and most people still wouldn't see the difference or complain as long as the growth continues.
If or when the growth stalls and external conditions no longer persist to create the illusion of good policy, people might notice and become less content, but it may already be too late by then. The powers that be in countries such as Belarus have already made good use of the time window they had to create the state they wanted.
People with breathing issues should be cautious.
Actually, that might be a good enough reason for other people to get vaccinated as well. Even if it's mostly people with risk factors that develop serious cases, having more people vaccinated reduces the spread of the flu in general, and that will mean fewer people with risk factors will catch it as well. The group of people who are at risk is not isolated from the rest of the population so their risk is not independent of how the flu spreads in the population in general. The normally healthy person might have a rather mild case himself but someone with higher risk could still contract the virus from him, and that's all the more likely if more people around them are infected. Also, just not being in contact when you have the flu is not enough due to the incubation period.
That's one reason I'll probably take the vaccine when its available to me sometime soon. Also, even though the first wave of the flu has been quite mild -- more or less on par with any yearly flu -- we don't know exactly yet what the second wave is going to be like. Other major flu pandemics have also had second or third waves, and those might be more devastating than the first one.
Don't get me wrong. I've been mostly just annoyed by what has sometimes approached hysteria around H1N1. I'm the last one to advocate panicking or useless measures whose only purpose is to create a false sense of security, or convince the public that something is being done. I do believe, however, that vaccinations against H1N1 are likely to actually save lives, perhaps someone else's even if I'm not at much risk myself.
As for antibiotics, TFA is probably spot on.
Would you be ready to award the CEO of a major company a salary of more than $150k per year? Or other really successful people in really successful businesses? It's more honest to compare hugely successful artists and bands to other hugely successful people than to (more or less) Joe Commons, even Joes who do work their asses off.
They'd go in and reboot servers - servers with 100 people logged in and working on stuff - because they thought their database was out of memory. Not tell anyone, nothing. One time they enabled an rsync script that pretty much overwrote a week's worth of work. And who got blamed? The sysadmin, for not making it impossible for that script to work anymore.
That's not exactly about local admin rights. I understood the original question was about admin rights to the developers' workstations, not servers. That's a whole different matter.
Personally, I'd hate not being able to use the tools I need on my local machine to complete the job just because someone's being a control freak. (Not referring to you but to those who would deny developers local admin privileges to their workstations.)
What use would they have for such a large brain just watcing TV? Or are you suggesting TV is the reason they went extinct?
But if you have no life, does that mean you can be considered extinct?
How exactly would a laser beam cause enough of a kinetic effect on a large asteroid to change its trajectory away from a crash course? How huge would "huge" have to be?
Why would it be a guy's name? Haven't you heard of female CEOs?
Also, a Canonical blog post regarding the change says she's American.
Apparently Ubuntu's focus towards ease of use has been good enough to add competition and drive other distributions to change their thinking and design towards something friendlier to a non-technical user (and, I dare claim, without sacrificing friendliness towards technical users). That way Ubuntu has, at least indirectly, made Linux desktop/laptop systems better.