You think Drupal has gotten to over 7 million installs based on good PR? I've been building Drupal sites for over four years. I remember the first time I tried it, I had a site up and running from scratch in a couple hours. I'm not sure what you bought the textbooks for. The facts speak for themselves: over 7 million installs, and one person who can't "understand how to make it work".
You're right. Christian missionaries were using "CardTalk" cardboard record players in the 60s and 70s to distribute recordings of the Bible to areas with no literacy, and no electricity to play conventional recordings. I remember donating money for these as a kid. They are described here http://globalrecordings.net/en/cardtalk The missionary who came up with the idea states he got the idea from something he saw first in Ireland.
With the increasing computing and communication power of consumer devices that everyone carries with them every day, we may eventually see the end of enterprise computers for the end user. Especially for smaller organizations, rather than trying to maintain a couple dozen computers across the organization, it may be more productive to take the same money and divide it among the employees as a stipend to maintain their own personal devices -- laptop, smartphone, whatever they need to be productive. In today's workplace, workers are often expected to be productive and stay connected throughout the day and on weekends. People are generally more productive with devices they own, understand and maintain themselves. Secure connections can be established between the end-user device and sensitive corporate applications and data, and strict data retention policies can be enforced. People are bringing their consumer device to work anyway -- why not leverage those instead of maintaining enterprise-wide desktops?
How does rescuing an app from a company that was going to destroy bring uncertainty? If anything, LibreOffice provides certainty by showing that good opensource apps will always be around, despite efforts by some companies to harm them. If you're concerned about uncertainty in your core apps, I'd be much more concerned about the next "ribbon" that Microsoft will throw at you in a couple years than by the ability of open source app to maintain and improve itself despite the best efforts by others to ruin it.
MS will have to wait 2 years for everyone's current smartphone contract to expire and be eligible for a new subsidized phone from their carrier. At which point they'll be lucky to grab 20% of the people seeking new phones.
The only chance MS really has is to totally shake up the cell phone business model, the way Google tried and failed with the Nexus One. Sell the phone, unlocked, for under $200 and figure out a way to get cell carriers to accept calls from it. Then it will be a hit.
I've worked in the schools for over 20 years. Trust me, schools need a lot of help, but better, more expensive, chairs is not anywhere on their list of their needs.
I appreciate designers' desire to help. But if they want to help, they should volunteer a couple hours per week at a local school. Or, if they are trying to drum up work for designers, the designers would be welcome to work as teachers. We'll even pay them!
Our children and our schools need a lot of help, but what they need is good people willing to work in the schools.
Um, your logic is a little off. I didn't say anything about what to do with those that don't pay taxes. And I didn't say anything about Federal income tax -- there are many more taxes and "government fees" besides the Federal income tax.
A case could be made that people who don't pay any taxes at all should still have a right to vote, but I never said they didn't -- and that is a little off topic anyway.
Voting requirements are typically established by local and state government, not by the Feds. I assume small-government types would like it that way. Historically, non-citizens have been able to vote in local, state and federal elections in over 40 states and territories. It is more recent, anti-immigrant sentiment that has started to restrict voting to citizens only.
Historically, voting has been considered a right of anyone who pays taxes. "No taxation without representation!" was the rally cry of the original Tea Party. The current "tea party" seems to have an altogether different agenda.
There are tens of millions of workers in the U.S. who are not citizens but pay taxes. According to the principles of the founders the U.S., their payment of taxes entitles them to vote.
Correct Title: Desktop is Dead, Linux wins Mobile
on
Desktop Linux Is Dead
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· Score: 1
If you follow the arguments in the article, the accurate conclusion is that desktop is becoming irrelevant, and the future is in cloud and mobile computing. Then there is an entire section on how Linux is winning in mobile, with projects like Android and WebOS. The correct title would be "Desktop is Dead, Linux wins Mobile".
The only way to realize the return on investment promised by CFLs is if you can keep the CFL for the normal life of the bulb. In my case, with three boys under 10 years old, the bulbs in the table and desk lamps in their bedrooms get broken at least once a month from all their rough-housing. I will never get the promised return on investment from CFLs, because bulbs get broken too often at my house; conventional incandescent bulbs are a much more economical choice for me. How come nobody mentions accidental bulb breakage when they talk about how great CFLs are. Am I the only person who has children? Why can't I choose the bulb that is most economical for me instead of having the government mandate a bulb that will cost my family more money?
My parents had an all-steel window fan, that lasted the entire 20 years of me growing up. Buying a similar window fan today, if you can find one, would easily cost $60 to $100. On the other hand, I can buy an all-plastic fan at the local discount store for $10.
Even if I have to replace my fan every 2 years, the $10 fan is the same cost of ownership as buying a $100 fan that lasts 20 years. Meanwhile, the plastic fan is easier to carry around, causes less injury, quieter, and uses less electricity. Plus, it is so cheap, you can often pick up a discarded $10 fan for free at the end of the season.
The plastic fan has many advantages, and at a lower cost of initial purchase, is affordable to more people. That is why cheap crap often wins out over expensive, high-quality stuff.
I think your proposal is very reasonable, but is missing one critical thing: what to do with the 40 million or so undocumented people that are already here, including your friend. A reasonable plan would be for them to acquire legal status as long as they adhere to the conditions you outline. That would be fine, but immediately gets labeled as "amnesty" by immigrant haters and we are back a square one again with no solution and thousands of people crossing the boarder every day to fill our demand for cheap labor.
$8-$10 per hour plus minimal benefits, employment tax, workers comp. and reasonable working conditions is *way* more than most farmers are paying illegal immigrants.
The jobs you lost to illegals are still there, it just costs the farmer less to hire illegals than it costs to hire you, even at $8 per hour. The farmer is doing the natural, free-market thing and hiring the cheaper labor. The illegals are doing the natural free-market thing and taking the work. You could take the work too, but you'd have to lower your wage and expectations.
I'm always amazed people are upset about illegal labor but I never hear complaints when my local supermarket runs a special on chicken. Americans love cheap labor and as long as they want it, the market will provide it, no matter how illegal it is.
We should realize cheap labor is exactly what we want and make it legal, instead of wasting effort criminalizing the very people providing the food we want for our families.
But low-wage workers from other countries _are_ wanted. Many industries depend on them, including the food you eat, the housekeeping at hospitals and hotels, the cleaning companies that clean our offices and shopping centers. Our economy would collapse without these low-wage workers.
If these workers are truly not wanted, the solution is very simple. Stop paying them, and they'll stop coming.
It is completely pathological to make it illegal to provide the labor that we that we want and pay for every day -- the labor that our economy depends on.
Many of the people crossing the Mexican border are from poorer countries in central and south america. And yes, they are the young, healthy ones. If you could choose one person to send overseas to try to earn enough money for your family to survive, would you send the old, sick ones? We should be glad it is the young, healthy ones coming in. They are the ones who will contribute most to our economy and pay for your and my social security when we retire.
The lazy ones *do* stay the fuck out. It is the hard-working ones who try repeatedly to get into the country. To work hard, better their family, improve our cities and economy, and pay our Social Security taxes. Would it be a such a terrible thing to give people a way to do this good work legally? Bad laws reward bad behavior. Good laws reward good behavior. Our current immigration policy is one of the worst laws we have.
The U.S. immigration process is not Byzantine if you have money. If you have a stable income and property in your home country, almost anyone can get a visa in weeks to travel to the U.S. It is the hard-working people who don't have money, whose only way for them and their family to survive is to risk their lives by sneaking across the boarder. It is an outrage that we can't fine a legal way for these people, who want to work hard and pay your and my Social Security income when we retire, to enter the U.S. legally.
Virgin Mobile MiFi. $40 per month for unlimited broadband, with no contract. A better price than many cable offerings, and available in almost every market.
That's what Google Instant Search is for. Nobody really wants to do an instant search of the entire web -- it is too big. But an instant search of a movie database makes much more sense. Google Instant Search is designed to make Google TV usable with a few keystrokes from a small remote.
If "consumers have a right to privacy", this same Do Not Track Me list would have to apply to credit card transactions and every retail website on the internet. They have been collecting and using similar information longer than Google. Right now, the only way to guarantee privacy is to always use cash and never give any identifying information on the internet. I'm all for privacy, but it is meaningless if the rules don't apply to everyone who currently collects individual consumer behavior data.
I do IT support in public schools in a major U.S. city. We have neither white nor black boards these days. All teachers now are using LCD projectors to display content that comes either from a PC or from a "document camera" -- a video camera aimed at a plain piece of paper. In addition, many teachers are using interactive whiteboards which digitize content as you write it on the board
So there is little reason for a student to take a snapshot in class -- everything is already digitized as it is displayed by the teacher, and the teacher can easily post all content on a website after class.
Once a human is involved, all computing is curated, by definition. Because people don't usually talk binary, but computers do. To resolve this inherent human / computer interface problem, there first were programming languages like assembly. Then there were high-level languages like Fortran or Basic. There were OS commands and command-line interpreters. All of these were curated interfaces; they hid the underlying structure and provided the user only what they needed for a specific task.
I remember when the first GUI interfaces came out in the early 80's -- people claimed they were not "real computing", but some limited, "curated" interface.
It is amazing how far we have come since then. But still today, every time someone tries to make an incremental improvement in human / computer interface, it is still is derided as not "real computing", and some kind of strange novelty of limited usefulness. All computer interfaces are limiting, by necessity. That is not a weakness. On the contrary, computer interfaces are most powerful and productive when they provide humans with exactly what they need and nothing more.
Then use Atrium or Acquia. Both provide turn-key social sites built on Drupal.
The point is, these guys are going to be spending 90% of their time writing behind-the-scenes functionality to make everything work, and 10% making it look good and easy to use. Drupal already provides the first 90%. If they really believe in open source, they could be contributing to work already done and making it better -- and end up with a better product than they could do on their own.
Sure, these guys are young and have time to waste. More power to them. But when their pet project is gone and forgotten, Drupal and projects built on Drupal will still be around. That is the whole point of open source
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You think Drupal has gotten to over 7 million installs based on good PR? I've been building Drupal sites for over four years. I remember the first time I tried it, I had a site up and running from scratch in a couple hours. I'm not sure what you bought the textbooks for. The facts speak for themselves: over 7 million installs, and one person who can't "understand how to make it work".
You're right. Christian missionaries were using "CardTalk" cardboard record players in the 60s and 70s to distribute recordings of the Bible to areas with no literacy, and no electricity to play conventional recordings. I remember donating money for these as a kid. They are described here http://globalrecordings.net/en/cardtalk The missionary who came up with the idea states he got the idea from something he saw first in Ireland.
With the increasing computing and communication power of consumer devices that everyone carries with them every day, we may eventually see the end of enterprise computers for the end user. Especially for smaller organizations, rather than trying to maintain a couple dozen computers across the organization, it may be more productive to take the same money and divide it among the employees as a stipend to maintain their own personal devices -- laptop, smartphone, whatever they need to be productive. In today's workplace, workers are often expected to be productive and stay connected throughout the day and on weekends. People are generally more productive with devices they own, understand and maintain themselves. Secure connections can be established between the end-user device and sensitive corporate applications and data, and strict data retention policies can be enforced. People are bringing their consumer device to work anyway -- why not leverage those instead of maintaining enterprise-wide desktops?
How does rescuing an app from a company that was going to destroy bring uncertainty? If anything, LibreOffice provides certainty by showing that good opensource apps will always be around, despite efforts by some companies to harm them. If you're concerned about uncertainty in your core apps, I'd be much more concerned about the next "ribbon" that Microsoft will throw at you in a couple years than by the ability of open source app to maintain and improve itself despite the best efforts by others to ruin it.
MS will have to wait 2 years for everyone's current smartphone contract to expire and be eligible for a new subsidized phone from their carrier. At which point they'll be lucky to grab 20% of the people seeking new phones.
The only chance MS really has is to totally shake up the cell phone business model, the way Google tried and failed with the Nexus One. Sell the phone, unlocked, for under $200 and figure out a way to get cell carriers to accept calls from it. Then it will be a hit.
I've worked in the schools for over 20 years. Trust me, schools need a lot of help, but better, more expensive, chairs is not anywhere on their list of their needs.
I appreciate designers' desire to help. But if they want to help, they should volunteer a couple hours per week at a local school. Or, if they are trying to drum up work for designers, the designers would be welcome to work as teachers. We'll even pay them!
Our children and our schools need a lot of help, but what they need is good people willing to work in the schools.
Um, your logic is a little off. I didn't say anything about what to do with those that don't pay taxes. And I didn't say anything about Federal income tax -- there are many more taxes and "government fees" besides the Federal income tax.
A case could be made that people who don't pay any taxes at all should still have a right to vote, but I never said they didn't -- and that is a little off topic anyway.
Voting requirements are typically established by local and state government, not by the Feds. I assume small-government types would like it that way. Historically, non-citizens have been able to vote in local, state and federal elections in over 40 states and territories. It is more recent, anti-immigrant sentiment that has started to restrict voting to citizens only.
Historically, voting has been considered a right of anyone who pays taxes. "No taxation without representation!" was the rally cry of the original Tea Party. The current "tea party" seems to have an altogether different agenda.
There are tens of millions of workers in the U.S. who are not citizens but pay taxes. According to the principles of the founders the U.S., their payment of taxes entitles them to vote.
If you follow the arguments in the article, the accurate conclusion is that desktop is becoming irrelevant, and the future is in cloud and mobile computing. Then there is an entire section on how Linux is winning in mobile, with projects like Android and WebOS. The correct title would be "Desktop is Dead, Linux wins Mobile".
Here: The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments
The only way to realize the return on investment promised by CFLs is if you can keep the CFL for the normal life of the bulb. In my case, with three boys under 10 years old, the bulbs in the table and desk lamps in their bedrooms get broken at least once a month from all their rough-housing. I will never get the promised return on investment from CFLs, because bulbs get broken too often at my house; conventional incandescent bulbs are a much more economical choice for me. How come nobody mentions accidental bulb breakage when they talk about how great CFLs are. Am I the only person who has children? Why can't I choose the bulb that is most economical for me instead of having the government mandate a bulb that will cost my family more money?
My parents had an all-steel window fan, that lasted the entire 20 years of me growing up. Buying a similar window fan today, if you can find one, would easily cost $60 to $100. On the other hand, I can buy an all-plastic fan at the local discount store for $10.
Even if I have to replace my fan every 2 years, the $10 fan is the same cost of ownership as buying a $100 fan that lasts 20 years. Meanwhile, the plastic fan is easier to carry around, causes less injury, quieter, and uses less electricity. Plus, it is so cheap, you can often pick up a discarded $10 fan for free at the end of the season.
The plastic fan has many advantages, and at a lower cost of initial purchase, is affordable to more people. That is why cheap crap often wins out over expensive, high-quality stuff.
Was the book called Hello World?
I think your proposal is very reasonable, but is missing one critical thing: what to do with the 40 million or so undocumented people that are already here, including your friend. A reasonable plan would be for them to acquire legal status as long as they adhere to the conditions you outline. That would be fine, but immediately gets labeled as "amnesty" by immigrant haters and we are back a square one again with no solution and thousands of people crossing the boarder every day to fill our demand for cheap labor.
$8-$10 per hour plus minimal benefits, employment tax, workers comp. and reasonable working conditions is *way* more than most farmers are paying illegal immigrants.
The jobs you lost to illegals are still there, it just costs the farmer less to hire illegals than it costs to hire you, even at $8 per hour. The farmer is doing the natural, free-market thing and hiring the cheaper labor. The illegals are doing the natural free-market thing and taking the work. You could take the work too, but you'd have to lower your wage and expectations.
I'm always amazed people are upset about illegal labor but I never hear complaints when my local supermarket runs a special on chicken. Americans love cheap labor and as long as they want it, the market will provide it, no matter how illegal it is.
We should realize cheap labor is exactly what we want and make it legal, instead of wasting effort criminalizing the very people providing the food we want for our families.
But low-wage workers from other countries _are_ wanted. Many industries depend on them, including the food you eat, the housekeeping at hospitals and hotels, the cleaning companies that clean our offices and shopping centers. Our economy would collapse without these low-wage workers.
If these workers are truly not wanted, the solution is very simple. Stop paying them, and they'll stop coming.
It is completely pathological to make it illegal to provide the labor that we that we want and pay for every day -- the labor that our economy depends on.
Many of the people crossing the Mexican border are from poorer countries in central and south america. And yes, they are the young, healthy ones. If you could choose one person to send overseas to try to earn enough money for your family to survive, would you send the old, sick ones? We should be glad it is the young, healthy ones coming in. They are the ones who will contribute most to our economy and pay for your and my social security when we retire.
The lazy ones *do* stay the fuck out. It is the hard-working ones who try repeatedly to get into the country. To work hard, better their family, improve our cities and economy, and pay our Social Security taxes. Would it be a such a terrible thing to give people a way to do this good work legally? Bad laws reward bad behavior. Good laws reward good behavior. Our current immigration policy is one of the worst laws we have.
The U.S. immigration process is not Byzantine if you have money. If you have a stable income and property in your home country, almost anyone can get a visa in weeks to travel to the U.S. It is the hard-working people who don't have money, whose only way for them and their family to survive is to risk their lives by sneaking across the boarder. It is an outrage that we can't fine a legal way for these people, who want to work hard and pay your and my Social Security income when we retire, to enter the U.S. legally.
Virgin Mobile MiFi. $40 per month for unlimited broadband, with no contract. A better price than many cable offerings, and available in almost every market.
That's what Google Instant Search is for. Nobody really wants to do an instant search of the entire web -- it is too big. But an instant search of a movie database makes much more sense. Google Instant Search is designed to make Google TV usable with a few keystrokes from a small remote.
If "consumers have a right to privacy", this same Do Not Track Me list would have to apply to credit card transactions and every retail website on the internet. They have been collecting and using similar information longer than Google. Right now, the only way to guarantee privacy is to always use cash and never give any identifying information on the internet. I'm all for privacy, but it is meaningless if the rules don't apply to everyone who currently collects individual consumer behavior data.
I do IT support in public schools in a major U.S. city. We have neither white nor black boards these days. All teachers now are using LCD projectors to display content that comes either from a PC or from a "document camera" -- a video camera aimed at a plain piece of paper. In addition, many teachers are using interactive whiteboards which digitize content as you write it on the board
So there is little reason for a student to take a snapshot in class -- everything is already digitized as it is displayed by the teacher, and the teacher can easily post all content on a website after class.
Once a human is involved, all computing is curated, by definition. Because people don't usually talk binary, but computers do. To resolve this inherent human / computer interface problem, there first were programming languages like assembly. Then there were high-level languages like Fortran or Basic. There were OS commands and command-line interpreters. All of these were curated interfaces; they hid the underlying structure and provided the user only what they needed for a specific task.
I remember when the first GUI interfaces came out in the early 80's -- people claimed they were not "real computing", but some limited, "curated" interface.
It is amazing how far we have come since then. But still today, every time someone tries to make an incremental improvement in human / computer interface, it is still is derided as not "real computing", and some kind of strange novelty of limited usefulness. All computer interfaces are limiting, by necessity. That is not a weakness. On the contrary, computer interfaces are most powerful and productive when they provide humans with exactly what they need and nothing more.
Then use Atrium or Acquia. Both provide turn-key social sites built on Drupal.
The point is, these guys are going to be spending 90% of their time writing behind-the-scenes functionality to make everything work, and 10% making it look good and easy to use. Drupal already provides the first 90%. If they really believe in open source, they could be contributing to work already done and making it better -- and end up with a better product than they could do on their own.
Sure, these guys are young and have time to waste. More power to them. But when their pet project is gone and forgotten, Drupal and projects built on Drupal will still be around. That is the whole point of open source