Do you consider it a strength that you are too lazy to code to standards and work around flaws in the most popular browser?
That's two questions wrapped in a single bias, really. I don't consider myself being too lazy for coding to standards. It's time consuming, and doesn't display an enormous difference with a more lax coding. So, it's overall more efforts. Especially when you stick to -strict DTDs as I do.
On the other hand, "work around flaws in the most popular browser" isn't only about lazyness ; I can do it, and I refuse to do it because standards are usefull if they are respected, and useless when violated. Worse, it actually promotes lazyness a) from the users of IE7 because there's no incentive for them to switch if it simply works from their point of view - anyway, they won't reward you for any extra care you took, they feel they desserve your time. Well, too bad, wrong. And b) it promotes lazyness and malpractice at Microsoft, and it's akin in fact to active support of their "embrace and extend" strategy for coders to spend time where Microsoft really should have. And it help them defeat open standards at the same time. If something is needed at Microsoft, it's not complacency with their mischiefs, it's strict enforcement of general public rules. And this is up to any user vigilance.
So in a word, it neither is a strength nor a weakness to strictly enforce standards. It's a about politeness. I do my best to talk to whomever likes to read me in decent languages, both in "human" form and "computer" xhtml, and I expect visitors to be educated enough to understand both. And if I'm wrong, well, those are people I'm not very likely to have pleasure to have a relation with anyway.
I hit one page looking for a free/open source application (wish I could remember which one it was) and was greeted with a large banner at the top and an audio recording saying my computer was "infected" with internet explorer and I should switch to Firefox to remedy it.
Now I can understand the advantages and disadvantages of Firefox and IE, but annoying me by acting like a jackass isn't the way to convince me to switch.
After years of us, users of alternative browsers (opera, netscape 4, etc.), we've been fed up by litteraly thousands of "I don't care if it displays badly on your monitor because only IE matters" sites, you find offensive that a correctly designed site reminds you in a mild way that your attitude (among millions of "I pee on W3C standards" like you) has and will harm you ? Now that you're eating your own food, that sounds seriously funny. But I must admit a wave sound is a bit too much ; personaly, I validate my pages and make a warning that my site won't support any broken browser. This links to a list of good browsers, and IE isn't in it, full stop.
I'm sorry that I was misunderstood myself ; I was by no way implying that it's absolutely impossible to remotely bug a cell phone. But I don't think it's reasonably practical to do it, for a number of reasons, and I think anyway it makes a better headline to imply the contrary. Hence, my belief it's easier to bug conventionaly a phone (rewiring the mic or something like this) rather than fussing with the firmware, and I find it more probable the reporter exagerated the story.
Think about it for a minute : how long does a battery last while the phone is idle ? About a week generaly. How long does it last while phoning ? 2, maybe 5 hours ? And nobody would notice the depletion with the bug turned on ? Come on.
The alarming thing is the possibility that the bug could have been something that was not a physical modification to the phone's hardware, but a software modification. The article suggests that this may have been the case. So while it's probably not the case that the FBI could remotely turn any phone into a bug, the possibility of that being the case is alarming.
The probability that the judge and the reporter both misunderstood the technical parts of the case is certainly much higher than the probability you can remotely control the microphone of the cellular phone.
Microsoft became a "monopoly" because it sold products that people wanted.
That's complete BS ; you were probably the one on breast feeding at the time. MS ended where they are 'riding the bear' in own MS lingo, that is to say they were lifted from a successful 8 bit BASIC provider to king of OS solely by IBM. IBM could have and actually tried to get a better OS at the time, but G. Kildall (CP/M father and IDR CEO) refused flat out to give IBM copyrights on CP/M, and in IBM culture, it was unthinkable to not be the owner of the OS. Bill Gates was not that shy, essentially because he didn't have a true OS to sell in the first place, so he happily handed IBM half of his rights on - at that moment - nothing. And when the deal was cut, finally he ripped a blatant copy of CP/M named Dirty OS and slapped a MS-DOS tag on it (do as I say, not as I do). What makes me marvel everytime is how poorly IBM dealt the whole PC thing. They failed to assert their intellectual property on BIOS, leading to massive cloning ; they failed to prevent OEM sales from MS directly to cloners (because they thought there would be no clones !). They failed in keeping the lead in PC developpement from Compaq. In the meantime, MS raised from garage to near monopoly without selling a single copy directly to consumers, so to speak. So your classical liberal 'market explains it all' storyline doesn't hold water.
MS has never been the choice of the consumer market, they were successulf as Of The Shelf software producers, because they helped computers makers keep their cost low instead of licensing better but costlier systems. Every time MS has tried to enter a market on their own, they took a beating or lost enough money to fund a third world country debt ; MSX, tablet PCs (twice, in 1993 and 2003), Xbox, name them all. Can't wait to see them plunge on Zune.
Re:This is cronyism at its finest
on
More A's, More Pay
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This is unbelievable and one of the reasons I've always "lobbied" against public education where teachers are also graders. It is my firm belief that you don't grade your own work.
You've never taught, have you ? Grading is by far the most time consuming part of the job, and the most unpleasant. It's so f*cking boring that I'd have rather filtered raw sewage by hand than do it, sometimes. Why ? Because after reading 10 times the same half-learned, half out-of-ass statements, including blatant ripoffs of the immediate neighbours, you're completely fed up, and you know you've still got 30 to go. In my branch, one essay is roughly 15 minutes worth of my time, do the maths.
Teaching is pleasant ; I'd be more than happy to have someone else grade for me. But it's so damn exhausting that it takes a teacher dedication to do it. I can't count how many times I was offered money to grade some private inter-universities competitions between students (sort of extracurricular events to know who's pissing farther) and flatly turned them down. Nobody in his right mind would grade alone, even for money.
I see people writing about the evils of DRM and the heart of the problem is that if people didn't copy music and everybody paid for what they enjoyed, there would be no need for DRM, so, realistically, it's our own fault that DRM is needed.
That's a fairy tale ; the recording industry pulled the copying stunt long before the copying had un actual economic impact. If you could use a time machine, you could notice such concerns raising in the late 80's. I'd be more inclined to believe the computing industry leaded by microsoft sold the DRM crap to the media industry long before we, consumers, actually noticed it coming, as a way to indefinitely lease the contents instead of selling them only once, and the media industry bought it on the spot forseeing enormous profits.
Putting the blame on the consumers when most of them simply used rights they were granted by laws at the time is simply propaganda.
Another interesting article to read on the current state of affairs is on "Ur Fascism" (PDF warning, page 5 is where the defining 14 features start) by Umberto Eco. A very interesting description on the current state of affairs.
Great article ; thank you for the link, it's so enlightening for our times - wherever we're from, as the pressure of neo-fascism is really creeping from everywhere, be it blairism in england, sarkosysm in France, bushism in the USA, and all those I forget here or don't know about yet. Your post desserves a better ranking.
[french] Food is pretty expensive (at least on US standards)
Now, you know why we're slimmer on average than our US counterparts. It's my understanding that's healthier too.
As of red tape and taxes, well... at least once it's paid, you don't have to be hypocritical and pretend being part of whatever community you're supposed to bond with in order to secure your 'privacy'. In the USA, I was stunned by the constant level of scrutinity you're exposed to, from everyone. Maybe you don't have to show ID and payslips at home, but do you think your neighbours know more or less about you ? I think that's the main difference between us and you : in the US you basically have more trust in your neighbours than in your governement, in France we trust more our administration (on which the gov't has basically no power) than our neighbours. And mind you, I prefer it this way. Especially considering that a constant in criminology, regardless of the country, is that 80% of crimes are committed by relatives, friends and neighbours.
SWIFT was not legal in EU *and* US jurisdictions. Over here, we take our privacy rights more seriously, and this is why, for example, for example the Belgian Data Privacy Commission and the Swiss Federal Data Protection Commissioner have denounced the scheme. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/17/swiss_swif t_transfers_illegal/ Oh, and by the way, the July 2005 bombings were carried out with only £3000. And Muslim terrorists use the hawala system to move money around without alerting banks, so its effectiveness is moot. Please tell me of a case where this data helped to catch a terrorist. Oh no! Wait, you can't tell me, because it's not just the detainees and the charges but the evidence that's secret. The scheme certainly was secret, though, even from those government departments whose remit is cross-border data transfer. Tom
It's not because it ruffles some feathers that it isn't true that the US knowingly trampled on EU laws. And it won't be soon forgiven.
Well different people have different ideas of what it means for the press to be free. For me, the right not to reveal sources is not fundamental to the freedom of press. On the other hand, many of these countries ranking high in "freedom of press" outlaw "hate speech". I consider the ability to speak one's opinion, no matter how nasty it is, as a necessary prerequisite for freedom of speech. So if you change those two aspects of the rankings, I imagine the ordering would change dramatically.
Free press is about reporting facts ; if a journalist can't assure his sources anonymity, some won't talk, and the press is matter of fatly gaged. On the other hand, hate speech is *not* free press. It is unfounded opinions, based on biaised facts - or no fact at all, and while I agree it should not be prosecuted, it's absolutely not in the same league.
spamhaus requested jurisdiction be moved to a federal court in this (PDF) document, thereby accepting jurisdiction of the court.
"thereby" is completely wrong ; a judge should assess his juridiction on proven grounds, even in the case a plaintiff or defendant doesn't rise an exception to it. A person is not supposed to know the law better than the judge.
How optimistic ! I've seen on webforums people actually complaining their ISP blocked their account for spamming because they had been trojaned, and brag the crowd it was unfair and the ISP should have protected them from trojans in the first place. The wanted vindicatively their connection back, no matter what, and got along the lines of "if a pirate had truely used my computer, I sure would have noticed ; antivirus ? What for ?". But the more disturbing part of the act was that other readers were actually agreeing with the retards ! People are incredibles.
if I was going to release Photoshop for Linux, damned if I would release the source. (See also proprietary nature of CMYK standard noted above.) There are applications that make sense to market and sell closed source - usually ones built around selling shrinkwrapped boxes. The OP is just asking for a dirt simple devkit that lets him squeeze out linux binaries that can be installed without editing sources.list. You know, like that double-clicky, drag-n-droppy thing that Apple does.
This is irrelevant to GNU/Linux ; it may be relevant for some specific platforms based on a linux flavor of a sort, but again the solution is handy : talk to the distrib editor you're targeting, strike an NDA, and they'll happily do it for a fee, or provide you with the necessary tidbits - you won't need to work beyond the realm you wish to access. Mandriva retails Power packs in that way since a long time. But we're no more into the realm of Free Linux (as in speech). Therefore, anybody's interested in his freedom won't bother. Plus, I'd say such app would necessarily be hard linked to static libs, therefore defeating the clean scheme of dynamic libs of a system, and mess everything around. No way I'd want to install something like this. The un-portable nature of such an app is a complete opposition, not only toward linux, but toward unix 'paradigm' as a whole.
A good example of such an app is Vuescan (http://www.hamrick.com/) ; downloaded the demo on a couple of distribs : many had failed dependencies, and while the app is highly praised among photography circles, I couldn't use it on any of my setups. Therefore, the real value of Vuescan for my needs is about equal to sewer rejects.
Say I'm a software developer. I need to make an app for 'Linux'. How do I put in the icons? How does the installer work? Things like that.
The trick is : you don't do it ; leave the grunt work to the distrib packagers. Just make sure your app compiles with sensible options (-Wall -O2), you can even provide an automake / autoconf script, and if your work is worth something, someone will make the adjustments, because the end user isn't supposed to know anything besides apt-get, emerge or yum.
Of course, it needs to be Open source, that's the catch.
what if I want/need to:
- Play games (Tux Racer doesn't count)
- Use Photoshop (don't say Gimp)
- Use 3D Studio Max (yes, there are some alternatives, but 3ds Max is an industry standard)
- Etc
Well, if it's a matter of life-or-death to you, keep eating the shit you're fed, and stop complaining. If you were smart, you'd make the switch without expecting linux to be *the same* as windows, because there's *no need* to offer an inferior product. Most of the happy linux users actually are, in case you missed it, windows power users who are tired of being riped of their time by said windows, and actually like and use linux for what it does better than windows, and find ways around to achieve their work ; and when it comes to advantages over windows, linux delivers. Linux needs a less powerful processor to achieve good performances when compared to a windows box, the memory management is a whole helluva better, and network speed and stability is without comparison. Not enough for you ? Too bad. You've obviously sold your soul to some devils, and now they're claiming it - pay the price and don't complain. All your rant only shows you're just envious, and there's no way this will change until you make the move yourself.
The biggest problem with Linux is that it severely lacks blanket support[...]including solid driver support for many things
That's probably the funniest part. Considering how much support for perfectly good and sane hardware was *dropped* when XP got out, I'm looking forward for Vista because I'm sure garbage cans are going to be full of devices just wainting to be plugged in my linux boxes, just like it was 5 years ago. That's the way I got my scsi scanner, laser printer, and 35mm film scanner. They're old now, time to change, thank you for giving me out your *artificialy obsoleted* hardware.
So what do you think the judge should have done in this case, given that the defendant gave the court de facto jurisdiction and then failed to make an appearance?
If your juridictional system is sooo much brainfucked as to claim a de facto competence in retaliation to failed appearance, it's hopeless. I clearly know nothing about US judges and their power, but in general in the civilised world, a judge is supposed to know the law better than the people, and should deny his competence without being asked, even coming second in the process, after a false attribution made by a local court. (pardon my non-legal terminology, I'm actually a lawyer living under a much more pleasant sky).
I assert that your premise is wrong. The Nazi's torturous "experiments" had no scientific value. So the moral question of if doctors can use this information is entirely moot, as the information does not exist.
I mostly agree with you, except for the hypothermia datas that another person mentionned. But the moral question isn't completely moot, because nazis weren't alone torturing prisonners ; japanese did their share too, in the infamous unit 731. Obviously, scientists there had better results because in exchange of their datas, USA granted them a general amnesty even though they'd practiced on US POW, among others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Imagine relearning all they know about their desktop in a Linux environment.
Sorry ??? Who makes me re-learn everything for each upgrade ? Windows does ! All tools change their names, there's no consistency in the
programs naming scheme, and you're on your own to discover what those pesky radio buttons do in each and every config panel. On the other
hand, when you face any linux flavour, you know that at least your CLI works the same, and basic things like an editor and a handful of
other utilities will work just the same as everywhere else. All my linux learning has always been additive, I've never had to trash any
previously hard acquired knowledge. Can't say that about windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you consider it a strength that you are too lazy to code to standards and work around flaws in the most popular browser?
That's two questions wrapped in a single bias, really. I don't consider myself being too lazy for coding to standards. It's time consuming, and doesn't display an enormous difference with a more lax coding. So, it's overall more efforts. Especially when you stick to -strict DTDs as I do.
On the other hand, "work around flaws in the most popular browser" isn't only about lazyness ; I can do it, and I refuse to do it because standards are usefull if they are respected, and useless when violated. Worse, it actually promotes lazyness a) from the users of IE7 because there's no incentive for them to switch if it simply works from their point of view - anyway, they won't reward you for any extra care you took, they feel they desserve your time. Well, too bad, wrong. And b) it promotes lazyness and malpractice at Microsoft, and it's akin in fact to active support of their "embrace and extend" strategy for coders to spend time where Microsoft really should have. And it help them defeat open standards at the same time. If something is needed at Microsoft, it's not complacency with their mischiefs, it's strict enforcement of general public rules. And this is up to any user vigilance.
So in a word, it neither is a strength nor a weakness to strictly enforce standards. It's a about politeness. I do my best to talk to whomever likes to read me in decent languages, both in "human" form and "computer" xhtml, and I expect visitors to be educated enough to understand both. And if I'm wrong, well, those are people I'm not very likely to have pleasure to have a relation with anyway.
I hit one page looking for a free/open source application (wish I could remember which one it was) and was greeted with a large banner at the top and an audio recording saying my computer was "infected" with internet explorer and I should switch to Firefox to remedy it.
Now I can understand the advantages and disadvantages of Firefox and IE, but annoying me by acting like a jackass isn't the way to convince me to switch.
After years of us, users of alternative browsers (opera, netscape 4, etc.), we've been fed up by litteraly thousands of "I don't care if it displays badly on your monitor because only IE matters" sites, you find offensive that a correctly designed site reminds you in a mild way that your attitude (among millions of "I pee on W3C standards" like you) has and will harm you ? Now that you're eating your own food, that sounds seriously funny. But I must admit a wave sound is a bit too much ; personaly, I validate my pages and make a warning that my site won't support any broken browser. This links to a list of good browsers, and IE isn't in it, full stop.
I'm sorry that I was misunderstood myself ; I was by no way implying that it's absolutely impossible to remotely bug a cell phone. But I don't think it's reasonably practical to do it, for a number of reasons, and I think anyway it makes a better headline to imply the contrary. Hence, my belief it's easier to bug conventionaly a phone (rewiring the mic or something like this) rather than fussing with the firmware, and I find it more probable the reporter exagerated the story.
Think about it for a minute : how long does a battery last while the phone is idle ? About a week generaly. How long does it last while phoning ? 2, maybe 5 hours ? And nobody would notice the depletion with the bug turned on ? Come on.
The alarming thing is the possibility that the bug could have been something that was not a physical modification to the phone's hardware, but a software modification. The article suggests that this may have been the case. So while it's probably not the case that the FBI could remotely turn any phone into a bug, the possibility of that being the case is alarming.
The probability that the judge and the reporter both misunderstood the technical parts of the case is certainly much higher than the probability you can remotely control the microphone of the cellular phone.
Microsoft became a "monopoly" because it sold products that people wanted.
That's complete BS ; you were probably the one on breast feeding at the time. MS ended where they are 'riding the bear' in own MS lingo, that is to say they were lifted from a successful 8 bit BASIC provider to king of OS solely by IBM. IBM could have and actually tried to get a better OS at the time, but G. Kildall (CP/M father and IDR CEO) refused flat out to give IBM copyrights on CP/M, and in IBM culture, it was unthinkable to not be the owner of the OS. Bill Gates was not that shy, essentially because he didn't have a true OS to sell in the first place, so he happily handed IBM half of his rights on - at that moment - nothing. And when the deal was cut, finally he ripped a blatant copy of CP/M named Dirty OS and slapped a MS-DOS tag on it (do as I say, not as I do). What makes me marvel everytime is how poorly IBM dealt the whole PC thing. They failed to assert their intellectual property on BIOS, leading to massive cloning ; they failed to prevent OEM sales from MS directly to cloners (because they thought there would be no clones !). They failed in keeping the lead in PC developpement from Compaq. In the meantime, MS raised from garage to near monopoly without selling a single copy directly to consumers, so to speak. So your classical liberal 'market explains it all' storyline doesn't hold water.
MS has never been the choice of the consumer market, they were successulf as Of The Shelf software producers, because they helped computers makers keep their cost low instead of licensing better but costlier systems. Every time MS has tried to enter a market on their own, they took a beating or lost enough money to fund a third world country debt ; MSX, tablet PCs (twice, in 1993 and 2003), Xbox, name them all. Can't wait to see them plunge on Zune.
This is unbelievable and one of the reasons I've always "lobbied" against public education where teachers are also graders. It is my firm belief that you don't grade your own work.
You've never taught, have you ? Grading is by far the most time consuming part of the job, and the most unpleasant. It's so f*cking boring that I'd have rather filtered raw sewage by hand than do it, sometimes. Why ? Because after reading 10 times the same half-learned, half out-of-ass statements, including blatant ripoffs of the immediate neighbours, you're completely fed up, and you know you've still got 30 to go. In my branch, one essay is roughly 15 minutes worth of my time, do the maths.
Teaching is pleasant ; I'd be more than happy to have someone else grade for me. But it's so damn exhausting that it takes a teacher dedication to do it. I can't count how many times I was offered money to grade some private inter-universities competitions between students (sort of extracurricular events to know who's pissing farther) and flatly turned them down. Nobody in his right mind would grade alone, even for money.
I see people writing about the evils of DRM and the heart of the problem is that if people didn't copy music and everybody paid for what they enjoyed, there would be no need for DRM, so, realistically, it's our own fault that DRM is needed.
That's a fairy tale ; the recording industry pulled the copying stunt long before the copying had un actual economic impact. If you could use a time machine, you could notice such concerns raising in the late 80's. I'd be more inclined to believe the computing industry leaded by microsoft sold the DRM crap to the media industry long before we, consumers, actually noticed it coming, as a way to indefinitely lease the contents instead of selling them only once, and the media industry bought it on the spot forseeing enormous profits.
Putting the blame on the consumers when most of them simply used rights they were granted by laws at the time is simply propaganda.
Another interesting article to read on the current state of affairs is on "Ur Fascism" (PDF warning, page 5 is where the defining 14 features start) by Umberto Eco. A very interesting description on the current state of affairs.
Great article ; thank you for the link, it's so enlightening for our times - wherever we're from, as the pressure of neo-fascism is really creeping from everywhere, be it blairism in england, sarkosysm in France, bushism in the USA, and all those I forget here or don't know about yet. Your post desserves a better ranking.
There are a few places I would like to visit outside the United States but I am very thankful that I live IN the United States.
He is blind, he who refuses to see...
They left out North Korea.
Nope, because NK citizens are not allowed to travel at all. Hence, no permission to ask for.
[french] Food is pretty expensive (at least on US standards)
Now, you know why we're slimmer on average than our US counterparts. It's my understanding that's healthier too.
As of red tape and taxes, well... at least once it's paid, you don't have to be hypocritical and pretend being part of whatever community you're supposed to bond with in order to secure your 'privacy'. In the USA, I was stunned by the constant level of scrutinity you're exposed to, from everyone. Maybe you don't have to show ID and payslips at home, but do you think your neighbours know more or less about you ? I think that's the main difference between us and you : in the US you basically have more trust in your neighbours than in your governement, in France we trust more our administration (on which the gov't has basically no power) than our neighbours. And mind you, I prefer it this way. Especially considering that a constant in criminology, regardless of the country, is that 80% of crimes are committed by relatives, friends and neighbours.
SWIFT was not legal in EU *and* US jurisdictions. Over here, we take our privacy rights more seriously, and this is why, for example, for example the Belgian Data Privacy Commission and the Swiss Federal Data Protection Commissioner have denounced the scheme. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/17/swiss_swif t_transfers_illegal/ Oh, and by the way, the July 2005 bombings were carried out with only £3000. And Muslim terrorists use the hawala system to move money around without alerting banks, so its effectiveness is moot. Please tell me of a case where this data helped to catch a terrorist. Oh no! Wait, you can't tell me, because it's not just the detainees and the charges but the evidence that's secret. The scheme certainly was secret, though, even from those government departments whose remit is cross-border data transfer. Tom
It's not because it ruffles some feathers that it isn't true that the US knowingly trampled on EU laws. And it won't be soon forgiven.
Well different people have different ideas of what it means for the press to be free. For me, the right not to reveal sources is not fundamental to the freedom of press. On the other hand, many of these countries ranking high in "freedom of press" outlaw "hate speech". I consider the ability to speak one's opinion, no matter how nasty it is, as a necessary prerequisite for freedom of speech. So if you change those two aspects of the rankings, I imagine the ordering would change dramatically.
Free press is about reporting facts ; if a journalist can't assure his sources anonymity, some won't talk, and the press is matter of fatly gaged. On the other hand, hate speech is *not* free press. It is unfounded opinions, based on biaised facts - or no fact at all, and while I agree it should not be prosecuted, it's absolutely not in the same league.
One day while sending an e-mail, Steve Jobs accidentally hit the "i" key before typing Mac.
OMG, this demonstrates Jobs is a closet vi fanboy !
It's not because the US system is fucked up that any other system in the world should be.
spamhaus requested jurisdiction be moved to a federal court in this (PDF) document, thereby accepting jurisdiction of the court.
"thereby" is completely wrong ; a judge should assess his juridiction on proven grounds, even in the case a plaintiff or defendant doesn't rise an exception to it. A person is not supposed to know the law better than the judge.
How optimistic ! I've seen on webforums people actually complaining their ISP blocked their account for spamming because they had been trojaned, and brag the crowd it was unfair and the ISP should have protected them from trojans in the first place. The wanted vindicatively their connection back, no matter what, and got along the lines of "if a pirate had truely used my computer, I sure would have noticed ; antivirus ? What for ?". But the more disturbing part of the act was that other readers were actually agreeing with the retards ! People are incredibles.
if I was going to release Photoshop for Linux, damned if I would release the source. (See also proprietary nature of CMYK standard noted above.) There are applications that make sense to market and sell closed source - usually ones built around selling shrinkwrapped boxes. The OP is just asking for a dirt simple devkit that lets him squeeze out linux binaries that can be installed without editing sources.list. You know, like that double-clicky, drag-n-droppy thing that Apple does.
This is irrelevant to GNU/Linux ; it may be relevant for some specific platforms based on a linux flavor of a sort, but again the solution is handy : talk to the distrib editor you're targeting, strike an NDA, and they'll happily do it for a fee, or provide you with the necessary tidbits - you won't need to work beyond the realm you wish to access. Mandriva retails Power packs in that way since a long time. But we're no more into the realm of Free Linux (as in speech). Therefore, anybody's interested in his freedom won't bother. Plus, I'd say such app would necessarily be hard linked to static libs, therefore defeating the clean scheme of dynamic libs of a system, and mess everything around. No way I'd want to install something like this. The un-portable nature of such an app is a complete opposition, not only toward linux, but toward unix 'paradigm' as a whole.
A good example of such an app is Vuescan (http://www.hamrick.com/) ; downloaded the demo on a couple of distribs : many had failed dependencies, and while the app is highly praised among photography circles, I couldn't use it on any of my setups. Therefore, the real value of Vuescan for my needs is about equal to sewer rejects.
Say I'm a software developer. I need to make an app for 'Linux'. How do I put in the icons? How does the installer work? Things like that.
The trick is : you don't do it ; leave the grunt work to the distrib packagers. Just make sure your app compiles with sensible options (-Wall -O2), you can even provide an automake / autoconf script, and if your work is worth something, someone will make the adjustments, because the end user isn't supposed to know anything besides apt-get, emerge or yum.
Of course, it needs to be Open source, that's the catch.
what if I want/need to:
- Play games (Tux Racer doesn't count)
- Use Photoshop (don't say Gimp)
- Use 3D Studio Max (yes, there are some alternatives, but 3ds Max is an industry standard)
- Etc
Well, if it's a matter of life-or-death to you, keep eating the shit you're fed, and stop complaining. If you were smart, you'd make the switch without expecting linux to be *the same* as windows, because there's *no need* to offer an inferior product. Most of the happy linux users actually are, in case you missed it, windows power users who are tired of being riped of their time by said windows, and actually like and use linux for what it does better than windows, and find ways around to achieve their work ; and when it comes to advantages over windows, linux delivers. Linux needs a less powerful processor to achieve good performances when compared to a windows box, the memory management is a whole helluva better, and network speed and stability is without comparison. Not enough for you ? Too bad. You've obviously sold your soul to some devils, and now they're claiming it - pay the price and don't complain. All your rant only shows you're just envious, and there's no way this will change until you make the move yourself.
The biggest problem with Linux is that it severely lacks blanket support[...]including solid driver support for many things
That's probably the funniest part. Considering how much support for perfectly good and sane hardware was *dropped* when XP got out, I'm looking forward for Vista because I'm sure garbage cans are going to be full of devices just wainting to be plugged in my linux boxes, just like it was 5 years ago. That's the way I got my scsi scanner, laser printer, and 35mm film scanner. They're old now, time to change, thank you for giving me out your *artificialy obsoleted* hardware.
So what do you think the judge should have done in this case, given that the defendant gave the court de facto jurisdiction and then failed to make an appearance?
If your juridictional system is sooo much brainfucked as to claim a de facto competence in retaliation to failed appearance, it's hopeless. I clearly know nothing about US judges and their power, but in general in the civilised world, a judge is supposed to know the law better than the people, and should deny his competence without being asked, even coming second in the process, after a false attribution made by a local court. (pardon my non-legal terminology, I'm actually a lawyer living under a much more pleasant sky).
A spelling nitpick:[...]
No excuse, I know, but I'm not a native english speaker ; thank you anyway, it helps me improving to be shown my errors.
To bring back on topic, the Nazis/Japanese were not the only ones to do research of questionable ethics. Consider the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study.
I've heard of it, but I wanted to pick my example as close as possible to the subject - unethical experiments in war context.
I assert that your premise is wrong. The Nazi's torturous "experiments" had no scientific value. So the moral question of if doctors can use this information is entirely moot, as the information does not exist.
I mostly agree with you, except for the hypothermia datas that another person mentionned. But the moral question isn't completely moot, because nazis weren't alone torturing prisonners ; japanese did their share too, in the infamous unit 731. Obviously, scientists there had better results because in exchange of their datas, USA granted them a general amnesty even though they'd practiced on US POW, among others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
I don't want a FS where some inodes are unlinked on a random and concealed basis.
Imagine relearning all they know about their desktop in a Linux environment.
Sorry ??? Who makes me re-learn everything for each upgrade ? Windows does ! All tools change their names, there's no consistency in the programs naming scheme, and you're on your own to discover what those pesky radio buttons do in each and every config panel. On the other hand, when you face any linux flavour, you know that at least your CLI works the same, and basic things like an editor and a handful of other utilities will work just the same as everywhere else. All my linux learning has always been additive, I've never had to trash any previously hard acquired knowledge. Can't say that about windows.