The assertion that "Facebook is a man in the middle attack" is utter bullshit. an "attack" would imply that Facebook is doing something that the user does not want to do.
The reality is that facebook/myspace/google+ et al. is a service in which the user willingly sends their information to them, and then they happen to share such information with some connections.
People do that willingly, people willingly sign up to facebook and send such information to facebook. The people who do not want to share information with facebook do not do it.
A company can outsource a development job to India for around $20/hour, and not have to pay FICA, health insurance, etc. on that. Compared to paying a decent fresh-out a salary of $60-70K, plus taxes and benefits, that's over twice the cost of the outsourced labor.
And yet, Americans still prefer to buy at Walmart, buy tech made by Foxconn because it is cheaper and get very cheap gas.
There should be something akin to "Fair Trade" but for first world countries (labeling and pushing all the stuff which is made 100% with "local" country labor and all that).
That's why you have some of Mexicans (disc:I am Mexican) doing some jobs for peanuts... because otherwise, how much more would you pay for a tomato?
Actually, doing translation might be an option for her. See, a lot of translation agencies look for native speakers to translate to some other language (or from, I don't remember). If she dominates a second language she can actually offer her services advertising as "native speaker" which will give her an advantage against all the Apus from India or the Josés from México.
Yeah, Europe is the Utopia of freedom... so much that they get their panties in a bunch because of a couple of pixelated blood:
Mortyr (2001-10-24) Banned because of Nazi references. Soldier of Fortune: Payback Banned due to high levels of gore (decapitations, dismemberments, and excessive blood-letting) KZ Manager (1990-10-29/1990-11-19) Banned because of Nazi references. Condemned: Criminal Origins (Decision AG Munic February 2008) Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty. Condemned 2: Bloodshot Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty. Manhunt (all versions, 2004-07-19) Banned because of high impact scary violence and cruelty. Manhunt 2 Banned because of high impact scary violence and cruelty. Dead Rising Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty. Silent Hill: Homecoming (Uncut) Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty. Wolfenstein (Uncut) Banned because of Nazi references. Scarface: The World is Yours (Uncut) Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty. Left 4 Dead 2 (Uncut) Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty. The Darkness (Uncut European XBox360 version) Banned because of Nazi signs in bonus comic. Bulletstorm Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty. Dead Island Banned because of extreme graphic violence.
This reminded me the time I was living in UK, whenever I told a Briton that I was travelling to France, Holland, Spain or Germany they invariably told me "Oh, so you are going to Europe!"... really?
I was using Firefox NIghtly until about a week. The last update rendered the alpha program unusable (it experienced several second pauses, even when clicking on the menu bar). Now I am using the release version and everything is fine.
Meh, just stack a bunch of porn in a TrueCrypt container and the important stuff in a hidden volume under two different passwords. When the judge orders to get the password just provide the password to the porn.
More and more I tend to agree with Hugo Chavez's view of the American government as an Economic Imperialist body. The fact that the EU can forcefully apply its laws and principles in other countires (and prosecute those who break those laws) is a sign of the strongold the American Economic Empire has on the world nations.
An equivalent situation would happen if Sharia law as applied in Iran was forced to the USA, EU or Latin America.
If Microsoft would stop insisting on supporting only their platforms for.NET and the CLR, C# could quite easily catch up to if not stomp Java into the dirt.
Indeed, nowadays C# is a better language than Java anyways. I worked in a startup about 10 years ago which used Microsoft technologies and thus we adpoted.NET (C# and VB.NET) when they were being introduced to the market. The version of C# I used was mainly Java, albeit a bit faster.
Fastforward to today, I have made all my development in Java (mainly because I got into research and Java has a huge amount of free libraries). But lately I have been reading and thinkering with C# and was absolutely amazed. Stuff like LINQ, properties, lambda expressions embedded *within the language* by default make it an absolute joy to work in.
Oh come on men. We already had a wave of "unskilled programmers" doing software some time ago with the introduciton of Visual Basic. That did not play very well (or maybe it did, for all the *real* programmers that had to fix the things initially written in VB).
Sure, you can learn "to code" (the minimum would be to understand what is an INSTRUCTION, IF and WHILE), but stuff like unti testing, source control, algorithms and design patterns (among others) is what makes a real valuable developper.
People should boycott companies in reaction to specific actions. If Sony puts a spying rootkit in CDs. People should join and massively stop buying Sony stuff (including discs) in response to that. If PayPal screws their customers, people should remove their money and stop using it to pay until PayPal recants.
Companies only look for their bottom line profit. They are "evil" because consumers let them be evil. Companies do not kill (well, some argue that those like Monsanto may actually have done so) because society would not allow it. As you correctly say, the more companies are held accountable for their actions (in a way that it hurts them, i.e., in the money) the better they will behave.
Our wonderful Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people.
This right here is the one thing I believe makes the whole American Capitalist system go down. I can imagine such a ruling was done in order to provide some rights to corporations. However, although I am not against handling such rights, I think Corporations should fall in a completely different legal framework than people.
Fucking Airbus: First the non-feedback double joystick with "cancelling input" mechanism. Then this lap joint fuselage weakness that they *knew about*. Now this small cracks in the plane which they *say* are harmless. Sure, they are harmless until some plane crashes.
Why do they let companies get away with such incompetence?
such as a stable ABI. Example: in Windows i can run most applications all the way back to the mid 90s without major problems
What makes you able to run such apps is not a stable ABI but an active Microsoft effort to provide backwards compatibility. One of the thigns that Microsoft has always tried very hard is to be compatible with the majority of software which is already run. That's why you have all those compatibility modes (Bill Gates mentioned in an interview that before releasing Win95 his team went to a local supermarket to buy all the software available so they could test it).
On the Open Source side, nobody really cares about that. Instead, you have comments like 0123456 saynig that it is a "feature" when you are not able to run some program after updating your OS:
Willingness to break backward compatibility in order to improve features or fix poor design choices is one of Linux's strengths, not a weakness.
QT was amazingly good for C++, Gnome couldn't compete
But the idea was to make an *open source* desktop environment. I am sure a lot of C++ programmers would have gone helped an effort to make an open-source version of QT.
I don't see how different is this "no sue" clause to what every other service and product have in their licenses (usually with all caps).
Strangely, Nintendo gets a lot of love even though it has a history of being even more evil than Sony.
Well, I haven't heard of Nintendo putting a Rootkit in any product to spy on users, or removing features from their consoles (well actually they did, they removed MP3 playing from the Wii so I take that back). But on this case, the PSN is a free service that Sony is providing and I sympathize with them. It is like people suing Linus because Kernel.org went down and they could not download the last Linux kernel. WTF?
Except that maybe he *already* has a Wii and doe snot want to spend $50 bucks more in another device that may clutter his living room.
I have a Wii and use it mostly to play videos and DVDs (WiiMC). My wife is the one who plays nowadays (the new Zelda shit). I only do Wii Fit Plus for 30 minutes every day.
I remember paying a high price for the GamePro magazine each month about 20 years ago (I lived in Mexico and imported magazines were expensive). But I really loved the content and the reviews (IIRC each time a game was reviewed, 3 persons gave their own score. After some time, you saw that the score of one of them agreed more with you and you could/trust/ the score, mini-review).
Additionally, in the magazines of before, you had this really good tactics guides. I remember a Mexican Magazine (Club Nintendo) which featured a really good guide for Donkey Kong country or Mortal Kombat II. Nowadays the best you can find are FAQs/walkthroughs... but unfortunately they are all in text (ASCII art maps just don't cut it), and there is no comparison in the editorial quality.
But it is true that printed magazines are killing themselves. Just a couple of months ago a UK magazine called "Total Film" changed radically their structure and content. My wife is subscribed (from Germany... were invariably we get the magazine *very* late/every/ month) because she liked it a lot. But now are just going to let the subscription expire due to the "improvements" (which include a lot more of advertising). Before they had two pages at the end advertising porn hotlines and the like, they removed those two pages and instead added like 10 pages of videogame ads... WHY!??
Well, we if we compare to Microsoft, at least MS has specific end of support dates that you know. Google will just come out of the shadows and announce that support will be ended in one month.
And more importantly, when Microsoft ends support for some product (say, Win 3.1, Word 6, etc) people can still use it, while I wont be able to use Google Notebook after it is discontinued.
This is a really big disadvantage, specially for companies and government offices on poorer countries which cannot buy new software and hardware every two years (yes, I know offices in Mexico's rural areas that still use Win 3.11 computers, mainly because they still work and there is no money to replace them).
Slashdot Mirror
The assertion that "Facebook is a man in the middle attack" is utter bullshit. an "attack" would imply that Facebook is doing something that the user does not want to do.
The reality is that facebook/myspace/google+ et al. is a service in which the user willingly sends their information to them, and then they happen to share such information with some connections.
People do that willingly, people willingly sign up to facebook and send such information to facebook. The people who do not want to share information with facebook do not do it.
A company can outsource a development job to India for around $20/hour, and not have to pay FICA, health insurance, etc. on that. Compared to paying a decent fresh-out a salary of $60-70K, plus taxes and benefits, that's over twice the cost of the outsourced labor.
And yet, Americans still prefer to buy at Walmart, buy tech made by Foxconn because it is cheaper and get very cheap gas.
There should be something akin to "Fair Trade" but for first world countries (labeling and pushing all the stuff which is made 100% with "local" country labor and all that).
That's why you have some of Mexicans (disc:I am Mexican) doing some jobs for peanuts... because otherwise, how much more would you pay for a tomato?
Actually, doing translation might be an option for her. See, a lot of translation agencies look for native speakers to translate to some other language (or from, I don't remember). If she dominates a second language she can actually offer her services advertising as "native speaker" which will give her an advantage against all the Apus from India or the Josés from México.
Yeah, Europe is the Utopia of freedom... so much that they get their panties in a bunch because of a couple of pixelated blood:
Mortyr (2001-10-24) Banned because of Nazi references.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback Banned due to high levels of gore (decapitations, dismemberments, and excessive blood-letting)
KZ Manager (1990-10-29/1990-11-19) Banned because of Nazi references.
Condemned: Criminal Origins (Decision AG Munic February 2008) Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty.
Condemned 2: Bloodshot Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty.
Manhunt (all versions, 2004-07-19) Banned because of high impact scary violence and cruelty.
Manhunt 2 Banned because of high impact scary violence and cruelty.
Dead Rising Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty.
Silent Hill: Homecoming (Uncut) Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty.
Wolfenstein (Uncut) Banned because of Nazi references.
Scarface: The World is Yours (Uncut) Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty.
Left 4 Dead 2 (Uncut) Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty.
The Darkness (Uncut European XBox360 version) Banned because of Nazi signs in bonus comic.
Bulletstorm Banned because of high impact violence and cruelty.
Dead Island Banned because of extreme graphic violence.
And no, I am not from the USA.
And teeth!
exclude the UK from Europe.
This reminded me the time I was living in UK, whenever I told a Briton that I was travelling to France, Holland, Spain or Germany they invariably told me "Oh, so you are going to Europe!"... really?
Interesting that you note Nightly,
I was using Firefox NIghtly until about a week. The last update rendered the alpha program unusable (it experienced several second pauses, even when clicking on the menu bar). Now I am using the release version and everything is fine.
Meh, just stack a bunch of porn in a TrueCrypt container and the important stuff in a hidden volume under two different passwords. When the judge orders to get the password just provide the password to the porn.
More and more I tend to agree with Hugo Chavez's view of the American government as an Economic Imperialist body. The fact that the EU can forcefully apply its laws and principles in other countires (and prosecute those who break those laws) is a sign of the strongold the American Economic Empire has on the world nations.
An equivalent situation would happen if Sharia law as applied in Iran was forced to the USA, EU or Latin America.
Guilty until proven innocent. We have that in Mexico, please do not let the USA get into that.
There was a time when Slashdot was at the forefront of such kind of fights against "the man" (e.g., Sony Rootkit fiasco).
If Microsoft would stop insisting on supporting only their platforms for .NET and the CLR, C# could quite easily catch up to if not stomp Java into the dirt.
Indeed, nowadays C# is a better language than Java anyways. I worked in a startup about 10 years ago which used Microsoft technologies and thus we adpoted .NET (C# and VB.NET) when they were being introduced to the market. The version of C# I used was mainly Java, albeit a bit faster.
Fastforward to today, I have made all my development in Java (mainly because I got into research and Java has a huge amount of free libraries). But lately I have been reading and thinkering with C# and was absolutely amazed. Stuff like LINQ, properties, lambda expressions embedded *within the language* by default make it an absolute joy to work in.
Oh come on men. We already had a wave of "unskilled programmers" doing software some time ago with the introduciton of Visual Basic. That did not play very well (or maybe it did, for all the *real* programmers that had to fix the things initially written in VB).
Sure, you can learn "to code" (the minimum would be to understand what is an INSTRUCTION, IF and WHILE), but stuff like unti testing, source control, algorithms and design patterns (among others) is what makes a real valuable developper.
This, a thousand times!
People should boycott companies in reaction to specific actions. If Sony puts a spying rootkit in CDs. People should join and massively stop buying Sony stuff (including discs) in response to that. If PayPal screws their customers, people should remove their money and stop using it to pay until PayPal recants.
Companies only look for their bottom line profit. They are "evil" because consumers let them be evil. Companies do not kill (well, some argue that those like Monsanto may actually have done so) because society would not allow it. As you correctly say, the more companies are held accountable for their actions (in a way that it hurts them, i.e., in the money) the better they will behave.
Our wonderful Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people.
This right here is the one thing I believe makes the whole American Capitalist system go down. I can imagine such a ruling was done in order to provide some rights to corporations. However, although I am not against handling such rights, I think Corporations should fall in a completely different legal framework than people.
Fucking Airbus: First the non-feedback double joystick with "cancelling input" mechanism. Then this lap joint fuselage weakness that they *knew about*. Now this small cracks in the plane which they *say* are harmless. Sure, they are harmless until some plane crashes.
Why do they let companies get away with such incompetence?
Once all this uncertainty started about a year ago, I switched to Mageia [mageia.org], which is a community fork of Mandrake.
So... let's see what this Mageia is about...
NEWS:
Dec 19 2011Server outage
Ahmmm, no thanks.
(For those asking about the name, Mandrake merged with the Brazilian distro Connectiva and combined the names to get Mandriva.)
Please do not tell me you just explained where the Mandriva name comes from here in /.
Man times have changed in here.
while the *BSD projects languish in obscurity?
Hello, you are full of shit
such as a stable ABI. Example: in Windows i can run most applications all the way back to the mid 90s without major problems
What makes you able to run such apps is not a stable ABI but an active Microsoft effort to provide backwards compatibility. One of the thigns that Microsoft has always tried very hard is to be compatible with the majority of software which is already run. That's why you have all those compatibility modes (Bill Gates mentioned in an interview that before releasing Win95 his team went to a local supermarket to buy all the software available so they could test it).
On the Open Source side, nobody really cares about that. Instead, you have comments like 0123456 saynig that it is a "feature" when you are not able to run some program after updating your OS:
Willingness to break backward compatibility in order to improve features or fix poor design choices is one of Linux's strengths, not a weakness.
QT was amazingly good for C++, Gnome couldn't compete
But the idea was to make an *open source* desktop environment. I am sure a lot of C++ programmers would have gone helped an effort to make an open-source version of QT.
I don't see how different is this "no sue" clause to what every other service and product have in their licenses (usually with all caps).
Strangely, Nintendo gets a lot of love even though it has a history of being even more evil than Sony.
Well, I haven't heard of Nintendo putting a Rootkit in any product to spy on users, or removing features from their consoles (well actually they did, they removed MP3 playing from the Wii so I take that back). But on this case, the PSN is a free service that Sony is providing and I sympathize with them. It is like people suing Linus because Kernel.org went down and they could not download the last Linux kernel. WTF?
Except that maybe he *already* has a Wii and doe snot want to spend $50 bucks more in another device that may clutter his living room.
I have a Wii and use it mostly to play videos and DVDs (WiiMC). My wife is the one who plays nowadays (the new Zelda shit). I only do Wii Fit Plus for 30 minutes every day.
I remember paying a high price for the GamePro magazine each month about 20 years ago (I lived in Mexico and imported magazines were expensive). But I really loved the content and the reviews (IIRC each time a game was reviewed, 3 persons gave their own score. After some time, you saw that the score of one of them agreed more with you and you could /trust/ the score, mini-review).
Additionally, in the magazines of before, you had this really good tactics guides. I remember a Mexican Magazine (Club Nintendo) which featured a really good guide for Donkey Kong country or Mortal Kombat II. Nowadays the best you can find are FAQs/walkthroughs... but unfortunately they are all in text (ASCII art maps just don't cut it), and there is no comparison in the editorial quality.
But it is true that printed magazines are killing themselves. Just a couple of months ago a UK magazine called "Total Film" changed radically their structure and content. My wife is subscribed (from Germany... were invariably we get the magazine *very* late /every/ month) because she liked it a lot. But now are just going to let the subscription expire due to the "improvements" (which include a lot more of advertising). Before they had two pages at the end advertising porn hotlines and the like, they removed those two pages and instead added like 10 pages of videogame ads... WHY!??
Well, we if we compare to Microsoft, at least MS has specific end of support dates that you know. Google will just come out of the shadows and announce that support will be ended in one month.
And more importantly, when Microsoft ends support for some product (say, Win 3.1, Word 6, etc) people can still use it, while I wont be able to use Google Notebook after it is discontinued.
This is a really big disadvantage, specially for companies and government offices on poorer countries which cannot buy new software and hardware every two years (yes, I know offices in Mexico's rural areas that still use Win 3.11 computers, mainly because they still work and there is no money to replace them).