There's another side to the H1B issues that often gets overlooked by the slashdot audience. I guess it's because the majority of people who post here are tech workers and not business owners.
My dad used to run a computer consulting company which specialized in powerbuilder and AS/400. Circa 1997 it became very difficult to find people willing to work on AS/400 consulting at resonable raates. Not meager rates, i think they would still earn about $35 - $40 an hour. But most American applicants were either totally unqualified, or demanded a ridiculous amount of money that clients would not pay. Hence, he had to resort to using the H1B program. He figured that since he was an immigrated Indian it would not be difficult to find good quality people and bring them here.
This turned out to be a total disaster. Of the 5 he ended up hiring over the course of 2 years, 1 was incompetant, 1 got depressed and had to return home, and the rest jumped ship once some other company offered them a few dollars more an hour.
Granted, it may feel like indentured servitude for the worker, but many people don't really understand the costs that go into getting an H1B into your company. You need to hire a lawyer that specializes in visa issues. Screening applicants is extremely difficult to do remotely, and the business has to invest in trips abroad. Plane tickets are expensive, even more so when a leg condition forces you to fly business class only. And you still have to pay them an average wage. If an American jumps ship, you just lose the training costs, which are probably half the total cost for an H1B for a period of less than a year.
There are so many costs that go into recruiting one individual, that it makes sense that there should be protection for the company from an employee leaving the company high and dry. Forcing the H1B to restart the greencard processes is that protection.
The bottom line is that the H1B program can get ugly for everybody involved. There are lots of problems with it, and it's not as simple as saying "it's slavery and exploitation." There are two sides to the issue, and tons of propoganda on both.
I'm not sure that happens. We also used Macs k-12. But, and I know someone is going to flame me, macs sucked back then compared to your average pc. If you had access to a pc and a mac you'd notice that the applications for pc were much better. Plus it didn't help any that the computers used in school were older and slower, which was a big difference in those days. It's probably why I really hated using macs until someone with a modern G3 let me play with theirs.
However, in my University, we use Solaris. I can't afford a real sun machine, but using solaris exposed me to how cool and useful unix is and now i pretty much only use linux.
No amount of advertising is going to help you if your product is not very good.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this tread is trying to find some mom and pop's that want a web presence, but couldn't afford to do it back in the dotcom days. The problem is that these companies, no matter how badly they need/want a website or e-commerce, never post to monster.com or advertise the position because they are too busy with the day to day aspects of running their businesses. For instance, the customers were clamoring for a website for more than a year before they got anything up and running. And they only did it because they knew me personally and knew that I was a cs major. They just didn't have the time to shift through a pile of resumes and interview potential canidates.
If you want to gain experience fast, this is probably the best way to do it. You might only be good at programming, but in the end you'll have to learn databases, web design, and how to interact with people. Most places only know that they want to be on the internet. They don't know anything about hosting services and the like. You have to teach them about that stuff. But, that's the fun about working at a tiny shop. You are important, and the people listen to you. You also get to see exactly how a business works on a small scale, and gain a versitile skillset that will help you get jobs elsewhere. Of course, if you work at a mom and pop, they are likely to have customer's or suppliers who also need a webpage.
Unfortunatly, like i said earlier, these jobs exist mostly as dinner table disscussions. You have to create them. This can be difficult if you don't know people already, but it's not imposible. What you need to do is register yourself as a small business. All trades have trade shows. Even if you don't live in a very urban area, they are still likely to be in a civic center near you. These trade shows are surprisingly well attended and busy. In addition to the buyers and sellers, they often have a third catagory for people like catalogue printers, liquidators, and the like. Which means that you can sign up and meet with some companies face to face and see if they need anybody. Sure it might be a 1 in a 100 chance, but if 300 companies show up, it's 3 possible jobs.
Granted, it takes people skills and this is probably more for those seeking real work and not an internship, but the moral remains the same. In today's society, every business needs a programmer. Look off the beaten path and you'll have no end of interesting opportunites.
I've recently had the "pleasure" of reinstalling Red Hat Linux and neither Gnome nor KDE are user-friendly at all. . . . that's not going to help my father
I'm really confused by this statement. Correct me if i'm wrong, but you imply that win95 is more user-friendly than Gnome or KDE. The other day, my dad called complaining that his windows system was crashing more than usual. Finally we traced it down to the lack of RAM. However, to get there, i had to remember the somewhat arcane (to me) startmenu->programs->accessories->somewhe re in there. Where as, for UNIX, i could say "open a terminal type top, and tell me what it says for memory usage." So therefore, UNIX seems more user friendly.
In terms of application use, I think what's user friendly really depends on exactly what you are used to. When my school bought me a system for use on a project, it came with windows XP. I haven't seriously used windows in about 2 years. I found the system completely unuseable. I had no idea where anything was, how to configure things like the network and the gui, or how to make it prettier. I used it for about 20 mins, and went back to something I am far more comfortable with.
Which brings me to your point. Your dad couldn't use Gnome or KDE. Well the more i think about it, the more i think that he could use either of the systems. Granted, installing hardware like printers and scanners on a linux box is a pain. But then again, my dad doesn't really install these things himself. He always calls me anyway.
The only thing that worries me in usability terms (to gloss over legitimate concernes over hardware and propriatary applications) is will my dad be able to adjust to the special quirks of linux DE's as opposed to the special quirks of windows. I'm sure that there are plenty of things i take for granted on my linux machine that are really only intuitive because I know the system well. There are similar things my dad knows about windows.
The bottomline is, anybody who complains that Gnome and KDE aren't user-friendly is totally correct. However, to say that windows is user-friendly is a flawed statement. Both systems do get in your way when you try to do something, and both systems make somethings exceedingly dificult. It all depends on what you are used to. That's just the nature of the field right now.
I tried dropline a few weeks ago and have to say that i throughly enjoy using it. I used to never use anything more than a window manager, since I always felt like it got in the way. But drop line is so nice, it's like having the best of both world.
Of course, the best part of dropline is the painless install. You install the installer, run it, walk away for some appropriate time, restart X, and you have gnome 2.2 with all the features you've ever wanted. Thanks fflewddur for your good work.
You must be a lucky one. I got a Inspiron 3700 probably at the same time as yours. Mine's been home a few times, in the library twice. My case is cracked. My LCD has been replaced and needs to be replaced again. My fan died once. I'm on my third battery. The floppy drive doesn't work. I've gotten about 4 ethernet cards. The keyboard doesn't register keystrokes all the time. The mouse occasionally wanders off. The sound card sounds terrible under windows(?!). And the processor fried once.
I guess it really depends on the luck of the draw and which outsourcing company actually made your laptop. I was happy with the warranty service, so I was thinking about sticking with dell, but then the LCD on my dad's Inspiron 4000 died. Needless to say i'm looking else where for my new laptop.
I haven't looked at F1 in a while, but I know that two years ago all F1 cars had abs and traction control. While many racing purists complained about the addition of the technology, since it does somewhat detract from driver skill, I'm sure F1 added it to increase the saftey of the event. I've seen races (Monaco mostly) where only 8 cars or so finish. F1 cars also come with a semi automatic transmission that actually shifts faster than even the best driver with a manual transmision.
Race cars also don't have airbags because everything around them is designed to absorb the impact of the accident. A lof of US tracks even have softwalls which sit infront of the normal concrete wall to take some of the impact of the cars. On many road courses, tirewalls line the most dangerous parts of the track.
Then you have the cars themselves. The cockpits of open-wheel racers are fitted to the primary driver. They act much like the packaging that comes in your computer box. In NASCAR, they now have special head restrainers that are attach the helmet to the seat. Additionally, in many serieses, these cars are designed to disintegrate on impact, which reduces the total momentum and kinetic energy of the driver in addition to cushioning the impact. Everything the driver wears is flameretardent and also specifically designed to protect the driver in the event of an accident.
Therefore, you are right, you will never see an airbag in a racecar. But that's because all the protection that an airbag offers is already built into the car. Pasenger cars are designed to a different spec, where accidents are rare and creature comfort matters.
Unfortunatly, if you want a car without these, you're pretty much stuck buying a Dodge Viper with the performance package, a Porche GT2, or a Ferrari. Regular people won't buy regular cars without these features, so regular car manufacturers don't make them. It's probably the same reason you don't see Linux on OEM laptops.
I think your post is pretty close to target. Kids go missing outside all the time. But would the story get anywhere near the coverage if she was middle class and black? I don't think so. A lot of the undertones I see is that it happened to a rich white family.
Things like that aren't supposed to happen in rich neighborhoods. If it happened in the inner city, most people would just say, "well what's new?" To use an over-used example, it's the reason the columbine shootings got so much press. People get killed in the innercity schools, it will get a day of national coverage, if any at all. So while yeah, this case is scary because a child was taken from the house, it's amplified because of the class of the victims. Of course, this leaves out the sexual side, but that's for another post.
There is something I've been thinking about for a while. I wonder what kind of reaction people (friends and parents mostly) have when I start talking about why Linux is a better choice than Windows. Like I read the site, and nearlly collasped laughing. It was so ridiculous, "chmod 666" to unlock files?! But the people writing that honestly believe that. The same goes for the folks who normally read it. On slashdot, a lot of great points for Open source and free software get made, but does the outside observer take it seriously? Does the concept of using an operating system programmed by a loose coalition of geeks with spare time sound hilarious to them? I know I've gotten a few weird stares, and not just from windows users. I get them from solaris users too. I guess this might have been more of an issue before companies like IBM got involved, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still existed.
More on topic, I think I came across this site a few years ago when they posted something about halloween or homosexuals, can't remember which. Might have been homosexuals since I remember something about 100 sex partners, but that could apply to the girls in the devil costumes too, I guess.
Ok, sorry, I had no idea. I wasn't around for the early kernels.
The point I was trying to make is that we should understand the difference between Linux the business and linux the operating system. You want professionalism, but i don't think you can ever really get that from a bunch of developers. Most of the people that do linux do it for fun, and fixing obscure bugs is not fun. But that said, I don't think it's fair to critisize the kernel maintainers for a complete lack of professionalism. Atleast when they make a mistake, they come out and admit it. There have probably been hundreds of "professional" or commercial "whoops" releases, but we never know about them because thier developement process is closed.
I'm not exactly sure that linux is getting a bad reputation outside of the core of linux die-hard geeks. Who else reads/. and the kernel mailing lists to find out what the "whoops" releases are. Most people i know (yeah ok so that's about three people) equate linux with "Red Hat" or "Mandrake" and those two companies do a relatively good job of keeping thier noses clean. Those who are intersted in the developement process do find out about all the mistakes and stupid stuff that goes on, but on the whole, those just looking for finished product end up getting a polished and professional one.
6) Newspapers use narrow columns for a reason.
Newspapers can also manage layout better so narrow columns make sense. I can't think of anything that's more annoying than having to scroll up and down multiple times to read a website.
I've heard this all before, linus sucks, the kernel isn't stable, 2.4.x is horrible. How do you know 2.2 series wasn't plagued by crap like this before. When that series was in it's infancy, most of us didn't use Linux and weren't reading slashdot to discover all the mistakes that were made.
Btw, Linus didn't manage this release, Marcello did. People make mistakes and the best part of this open process is that it doesn't take long for someone to notice something isn't right and warn the community about it.
Ok so yeah, the kernel roll out for the 2.4 series hasn't been as smooth as we all would like it to be, but does that really matter? The casual geek, like me, updates his kernel whenever get gets a few free hours and there's one that's been around for a while. I used 2.4.5 and had no problems. I upgraded a few days ago. I don't go out looking for the newest kernel because it's not that important to me. You seem to be getting personally offended by the fact that things aren't perfect. It's a feeling that's pretty common and one i just don't understand. Yes we like things to be professional, but professionallism is for companies. The linux kernel has been and always will be the domain of a rag-tag group of developers, people who do it just for fun and they deserve credit for putting forth the effort at all. If you want professional, go to red hat, suse, or mandrake which are the professional front ends for linux, and are what most people see.
I'm guessing no, because if they go, slashdot won't be around to do a timeline. Wow, what a scary thought, i might actually get bored and have to work or something
You've obviously been through a lot and you're personal story is very interesting, but your conclusions are misguided.
First off, you complain that the CEO is not answerable to anybody, that's just false. For better or worse, the CEO is accountable to the shareholders. That's the reason you got laid off. If CEO's didn't have to, they wouldn't fire anybody. When you fire people, you reduce the number of people that can afford your product. However, they have to please the share holders and are forced to retain profits. Hence when revenue drops so too must costs and people get laid-off. If it wasn't done this way, all corporations would be as big and bloated as our federal government. As for the other stuff about law and order, the government does that. If there are people who are actually being abused, there would be hell for the corporation to pay. However, low pay (which was more than minimum wage), is not abuse. You are also there to work and not talk. If you want a better job, spend the time and make the sacrifies needed to get one. My parents did it, i'm doing it, you've done it. It maybe difficult for some, but it's not impossible.
Companies would rather have lower paid inexperienced workers because they are easier to push around, and it's very difficult to find high paid experienced workers to do manual labor. Once people get experience, they start looking for better jobs.
Ford priced his model-t so that the average person could buy it. Therefore, by default, his employee's could buy one too. Also, it never said what kind of printer they were shipping. There are a lot of inkjets for around $100 which is about two days worth of work. Yeah i know, rent is high, but if you aren't making 6 figures, what are you doing in california anyway? People suffer for thier own bad decisions.
Saying that some guy in a third world country deserves as much money as i do for the same task is ridiculous. Different countries have different costs of living and the wages should be appropriate to them. Someone making mid five figures would live like a king in most countries, but be doing only okay in the US. I'm not saying that it's okay for nike to set up armed camps in which they pay children 5 cents a day for stiching shoes. Wages should be reasonable, but what constitutes a reasonable wage depends greatly on the locality.
Having people buy our stuff will not reduce our forgien debt, maintaining a balanced budget will. People buying our stuff will reduce the trade deficit which is good for the economy. Eventually, this will lead to increased tax revenue which leads to more money to pay down debts, but it's not a direct relationship as you imply.
And finally, i think unions are a horrible idea. I don't like unions because they strip me of my individuality. A certian amount of money from every pay check i get goes to the union. They then use this money in any way they wish, often times contributing to the campaigns of politicans who i am not garanteed to support. I don't like the thought of my money bringing about a worse america. I also dislike unions because of the "gang" mentality of union workers. Union workers, as you experienced first hand, often times think that they have special rights just because they belong to a union. Therefore they do thier best to make the lives of non union members miserable. Plus, it wouldnt' have helped in this particular case because the people were temps and wouldn't have been in a union in the first place.
for places like atlanta, it's nearly impossible to build a decent mass transit system. I go to college near the city, but my parents live out in alpharetta. Freshman year, before we were allowed to have a car, it would have been nice if i could have used the system to get home and see them every now and then. But, unfortunatly, to do that, i would have had to walk a few blocks to a bus stop, take the bus to the train station, get on the train, get off in dunwoody and take another bus to alpharetta, only to be picked up by my parents in a car at the bus depot, who would have little hope of knowing when i was going to get there. It made absolutely no sence to use MARTA because of that. It doesn't help any that the more affluent communities don't want MARTA to come anywhere near them because they think (and they seriously do think this) that MARTA means Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta. Physcological barriers like that need to be overcomed before mass transit can be implimented in a lot of places.
I think that a lot of what you said was right, but there are somethings that you're missing. One is that the american economic system is not a free market. The RIAA has the power it does simply because it has passed the nessecary laws that restrict the market to thier own advantage. If this was a free market, thier monopoly could not exist because of the multitutes of alternatives that have come into being. However, the RIAA has labeled this alternatives as "illegal" instead of "competition" and therefore can sustain its monopoly. Yes there was a lot of copyright theft taking place on napster, but it was also a legitamate alternative distribution method. In effect, they have increased the barriers of entry, which are essentially the cost of duplication, to price out most competition.
I assumed he meant that an O(n^t) solution with a very large value for t would be of theoretical interest but not have the kind of practical impact that he was thinking of. In other words, he meant O(n) or at least a relatively tractable O(n^t).
In essence you're right, an algo with a huge t would not be all that practical. However, once you have it down to poly time, it becomes relatively easy to get it into a more usable time space. I remember a lot of things from my datastructures class where the obvious solution was quadratic, with a little tweaking you got linear, and with some very convoluted code you got N/2 or better. I am not sure what that problem was (it may have been sorting), but that type of problem is pretty common. Despite that, for large problem spaces, the poly-time algo will be better than the exp-time algo.
First off, if they found an O(n) algorithm, that means that all NP problems would be in linear time. I'm assuming the poster means O(n^t) where t is independent of n.
now if that were the case, i'd use it to build nifty AI's. Most ai problems are NP complete since they involve non-deterministically searching a problem space. Stuff like crossword puzzles and route planning come to mind for this one. Most of these problems do map to SAT, so it would be very short time before we start seeing some really intelligent AIs for a lot of your typical tasks.
The primary purpose of advertising in the "real world" is to 1) differenciate your product from your competitors. The majority of the adds i hear on TV and radio are "we're cheaper than that other guy." or "our product is supierior in quality to thiers" and so on. 2) It's to fill a void that you weren't really aware of. How many times have you said to your self, i wish there was a way to do X. Well if people don't advertise, you'll never know that there is a way to do X.
One thing I've noticed about Perl people is that they are often very open-minded about using other languages to solve a problem.
Or it could be that we find it very funny to watch the people that beat us in the "let's develop in PERL" argument struggle for hours with some problem. And better yet, after they finish their exhausting work, we get to laugh with glee as we code up a script in 30 secs that does the exact same thing.
No, that's a really stupid analogy. First off, if i'm buying a car ( and i've done this 2 or 3 times ) i go to the dealership and they are VERY willing to let me test drive it. They want me to try out the car before i spend the cash. Hence, i don't need to break into a dealership late at night to give the car a test drive. I walk in with broad daylight, say i'm interested in car x, they photocopy my license, give me the keys off i go. If i like it, i buy, if i don't i go elsewhere. Worse comes to worse, i can go rent one, or go back and try it again in a few weeks.
Who the hell would spend that kind of money without giving it a go
with software i can't do that. I can't borrow software, or rent it legally. Hence, if i want to be a consious consumer and pick the best product, the software companies force me to steal it for a little while. In fact, software is one of the few things that works that way, with music being another. Even video games i can rent before i buy. So quit yapping about how evil it is. They've put us there, and the software companies should face some of the consequences.
hehe, I live in georgia, and was thinking about buying a volkswagon gti (i love pocket rockets). Guess which dealership is not getting my business. Hopefully, those morons in marketing will realize that having thier name spread across local tv, radio, and the internet because of a case where they treated thier customer like shit is going to cost a whole lot more in future sales than it would have cost to make the guy happy. Unfortunatly, in this country it is much easier just to sue than to think.
Censorship and monitoring amount to the same thing. If your SO is watching over your shoulder, you aren't going to go to that teen porn site that you're so fond of. Hence you've been kept from seeing that site. It works the same way with politics. If I know the government monitors what i do online, I'm more reluctant to go view sites that don't conform to the current governments view points. Sure it's okay to view JohnAshcroftIsASerialAssRapist.com but the government knows that i might be a subversive or a suspected "terrorist" and the next time i'm say doing 40 in a 35 i get pulled over. Or an audit from the IRS, or anything else that makes my life miserable. The government wants control, by monitoring what you do, they are basically censoring without explicitly saying that they are censoring. It's the same with cameras in public places. Any monitoring is an attempt to restrict movement. If they didn't care where you went, why would they monitor?
Your comment that if i value privacy i should move to the mountains of CO or to somolia is similarly simply minded. Who is the government protecting us from. The terrorists? They did just a wonderful job of that on 9/11. Please tell me how anything they've done so far is going to decrease the threat of terrorism. Most of our congressmen and senators are jumping with glee because they have thier opportunity to press their power-hungry draconian legislation on us. This is OUR government, which is supposed to serve US. If it's not serving the people, which it clearly stopped doing, then it must be destroyed, it's as simple as that. I like the united states, i like the principles it was founded on, but it's unfortunate that our current crop of politians' desire for power is greater than principles.
I have to concurr, tonight's show was awesome. I just got back from where we were viewing and I'm still in awe. I wasn't keeping count, but there were a lot more at 5:30 than there were at 4. The best was the multiple ones, every now and then 2 or 3 would fire down in rapid sucession. Once about 8 game down in 3 seconds or so. Definetly beats any 4th of july and i'm so glad I stayed up.
Slashdot Mirror
There's another side to the H1B issues that often gets overlooked by the slashdot audience. I guess it's because the majority of people who post here are tech workers and not business owners.
My dad used to run a computer consulting company which specialized in powerbuilder and AS/400. Circa 1997 it became very difficult to find people willing to work on AS/400 consulting at resonable raates. Not meager rates, i think they would still earn about $35 - $40 an hour. But most American applicants were either totally unqualified, or demanded a ridiculous amount of money that clients would not pay. Hence, he had to resort to using the H1B program. He figured that since he was an immigrated Indian it would not be difficult to find good quality people and bring them here.
This turned out to be a total disaster. Of the 5 he ended up hiring over the course of 2 years, 1 was incompetant, 1 got depressed and had to return home, and the rest jumped ship once some other company offered them a few dollars more an hour.
Granted, it may feel like indentured servitude for the worker, but many people don't really understand the costs that go into getting an H1B into your company. You need to hire a lawyer that specializes in visa issues. Screening applicants is extremely difficult to do remotely, and the business has to invest in trips abroad. Plane tickets are expensive, even more so when a leg condition forces you to fly business class only. And you still have to pay them an average wage. If an American jumps ship, you just lose the training costs, which are probably half the total cost for an H1B for a period of less than a year.
There are so many costs that go into recruiting one individual, that it makes sense that there should be protection for the company from an employee leaving the company high and dry. Forcing the H1B to restart the greencard processes is that protection.
The bottom line is that the H1B program can get ugly for everybody involved. There are lots of problems with it, and it's not as simple as saying "it's slavery and exploitation." There are two sides to the issue, and tons of propoganda on both.
I'm not sure that happens. We also used Macs k-12. But, and I know someone is going to flame me, macs sucked back then compared to your average pc. If you had access to a pc and a mac you'd notice that the applications for pc were much better. Plus it didn't help any that the computers used in school were older and slower, which was a big difference in those days. It's probably why I really hated using macs until someone with a modern G3 let me play with theirs.
However, in my University, we use Solaris. I can't afford a real sun machine, but using solaris exposed me to how cool and useful unix is and now i pretty much only use linux.
No amount of advertising is going to help you if your product is not very good.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this tread is trying to find some mom and pop's that want a web presence, but couldn't afford to do it back in the dotcom days. The problem is that these companies, no matter how badly they need/want a website or e-commerce, never post to monster.com or advertise the position because they are too busy with the day to day aspects of running their businesses. For instance, the customers were clamoring for a website for more than a year before they got anything up and running. And they only did it because they knew me personally and knew that I was a cs major. They just didn't have the time to shift through a pile of resumes and interview potential canidates.
If you want to gain experience fast, this is probably the best way to do it. You might only be good at programming, but in the end you'll have to learn databases, web design, and how to interact with people. Most places only know that they want to be on the internet. They don't know anything about hosting services and the like. You have to teach them about that stuff. But, that's the fun about working at a tiny shop. You are important, and the people listen to you. You also get to see exactly how a business works on a small scale, and gain a versitile skillset that will help you get jobs elsewhere. Of course, if you work at a mom and pop, they are likely to have customer's or suppliers who also need a webpage.
Unfortunatly, like i said earlier, these jobs exist mostly as dinner table disscussions. You have to create them. This can be difficult if you don't know people already, but it's not imposible. What you need to do is register yourself as a small business. All trades have trade shows. Even if you don't live in a very urban area, they are still likely to be in a civic center near you. These trade shows are surprisingly well attended and busy. In addition to the buyers and sellers, they often have a third catagory for people like catalogue printers, liquidators, and the like. Which means that you can sign up and meet with some companies face to face and see if they need anybody. Sure it might be a 1 in a 100 chance, but if 300 companies show up, it's 3 possible jobs.
Granted, it takes people skills and this is probably more for those seeking real work and not an internship, but the moral remains the same. In today's society, every business needs a programmer. Look off the beaten path and you'll have no end of interesting opportunites.
I'm really confused by this statement. Correct me if i'm wrong, but you imply that win95 is more user-friendly than Gnome or KDE. The other day, my dad called complaining that his windows system was crashing more than usual. Finally we traced it down to the lack of RAM. However, to get there, i had to remember the somewhat arcane (to me) startmenu->programs->accessories->somewhe re in there. Where as, for UNIX, i could say "open a terminal type top, and tell me what it says for memory usage." So therefore, UNIX seems more user friendly.
In terms of application use, I think what's user friendly really depends on exactly what you are used to. When my school bought me a system for use on a project, it came with windows XP. I haven't seriously used windows in about 2 years. I found the system completely unuseable. I had no idea where anything was, how to configure things like the network and the gui, or how to make it prettier. I used it for about 20 mins, and went back to something I am far more comfortable with.
Which brings me to your point. Your dad couldn't use Gnome or KDE. Well the more i think about it, the more i think that he could use either of the systems. Granted, installing hardware like printers and scanners on a linux box is a pain. But then again, my dad doesn't really install these things himself. He always calls me anyway.
The only thing that worries me in usability terms (to gloss over legitimate concernes over hardware and propriatary applications) is will my dad be able to adjust to the special quirks of linux DE's as opposed to the special quirks of windows. I'm sure that there are plenty of things i take for granted on my linux machine that are really only intuitive because I know the system well. There are similar things my dad knows about windows.
The bottomline is, anybody who complains that Gnome and KDE aren't user-friendly is totally correct. However, to say that windows is user-friendly is a flawed statement. Both systems do get in your way when you try to do something, and both systems make somethings exceedingly dificult. It all depends on what you are used to. That's just the nature of the field right now.
I tried dropline a few weeks ago and have to say that i throughly enjoy using it. I used to never use anything more than a window manager, since I always felt like it got in the way. But drop line is so nice, it's like having the best of both world.
Of course, the best part of dropline is the painless install. You install the installer, run it, walk away for some appropriate time, restart X, and you have gnome 2.2 with all the features you've ever wanted. Thanks fflewddur for your good work.
You must be a lucky one. I got a Inspiron 3700 probably at the same time as yours. Mine's been home a few times, in the library twice. My case is cracked. My LCD has been replaced and needs to be replaced again. My fan died once. I'm on my third battery. The floppy drive doesn't work. I've gotten about 4 ethernet cards. The keyboard doesn't register keystrokes all the time. The mouse occasionally wanders off. The sound card sounds terrible under windows(?!). And the processor fried once.
I guess it really depends on the luck of the draw and which outsourcing company actually made your laptop. I was happy with the warranty service, so I was thinking about sticking with dell, but then the LCD on my dad's Inspiron 4000 died. Needless to say i'm looking else where for my new laptop.
I haven't looked at F1 in a while, but I know that two years ago all F1 cars had abs and traction control. While many racing purists complained about the addition of the technology, since it does somewhat detract from driver skill, I'm sure F1 added it to increase the saftey of the event. I've seen races (Monaco mostly) where only 8 cars or so finish. F1 cars also come with a semi automatic transmission that actually shifts faster than even the best driver with a manual transmision.
Race cars also don't have airbags because everything around them is designed to absorb the impact of the accident. A lof of US tracks even have softwalls which sit infront of the normal concrete wall to take some of the impact of the cars. On many road courses, tirewalls line the most dangerous parts of the track.
Then you have the cars themselves. The cockpits of open-wheel racers are fitted to the primary driver. They act much like the packaging that comes in your computer box. In NASCAR, they now have special head restrainers that are attach the helmet to the seat. Additionally, in many serieses, these cars are designed to disintegrate on impact, which reduces the total momentum and kinetic energy of the driver in addition to cushioning the impact. Everything the driver wears is flameretardent and also specifically designed to protect the driver in the event of an accident.
Therefore, you are right, you will never see an airbag in a racecar. But that's because all the protection that an airbag offers is already built into the car. Pasenger cars are designed to a different spec, where accidents are rare and creature comfort matters.
Unfortunatly, if you want a car without these, you're pretty much stuck buying a Dodge Viper with the performance package, a Porche GT2, or a Ferrari. Regular people won't buy regular cars without these features, so regular car manufacturers don't make them. It's probably the same reason you don't see Linux on OEM laptops.
Things like that aren't supposed to happen in rich neighborhoods. If it happened in the inner city, most people would just say, "well what's new?" To use an over-used example, it's the reason the columbine shootings got so much press. People get killed in the innercity schools, it will get a day of national coverage, if any at all. So while yeah, this case is scary because a child was taken from the house, it's amplified because of the class of the victims. Of course, this leaves out the sexual side, but that's for another post.
There is something I've been thinking about for a while. I wonder what kind of reaction people (friends and parents mostly) have when I start talking about why Linux is a better choice than Windows. Like I read the site, and nearlly collasped laughing. It was so ridiculous, "chmod 666" to unlock files?! But the people writing that honestly believe that. The same goes for the folks who normally read it. On slashdot, a lot of great points for Open source and free software get made, but does the outside observer take it seriously? Does the concept of using an operating system programmed by a loose coalition of geeks with spare time sound hilarious to them? I know I've gotten a few weird stares, and not just from windows users. I get them from solaris users too. I guess this might have been more of an issue before companies like IBM got involved, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still existed.
More on topic, I think I came across this site a few years ago when they posted something about halloween or homosexuals, can't remember which. Might have been homosexuals since I remember something about 100 sex partners, but that could apply to the girls in the devil costumes too, I guess.
Sure that happened. Uh huh, why do i get the feeling you got it from here.
Even if it didn't happen it wasn't original, when was the last time you met an intelligent tech at best buy?
The point I was trying to make is that we should understand the difference between Linux the business and linux the operating system. You want professionalism, but i don't think you can ever really get that from a bunch of developers. Most of the people that do linux do it for fun, and fixing obscure bugs is not fun. But that said, I don't think it's fair to critisize the kernel maintainers for a complete lack of professionalism. Atleast when they make a mistake, they come out and admit it. There have probably been hundreds of "professional" or commercial "whoops" releases, but we never know about them because thier developement process is closed.
I'm not exactly sure that linux is getting a bad reputation outside of the core of linux die-hard geeks. Who else reads /. and the kernel mailing lists to find out what the "whoops" releases are. Most people i know (yeah ok so that's about three people) equate linux with "Red Hat" or "Mandrake" and those two companies do a relatively good job of keeping thier noses clean. Those who are intersted in the developement process do find out about all the mistakes and stupid stuff that goes on, but on the whole, those just looking for finished product end up getting a polished and professional one.
6) Newspapers use narrow columns for a reason. Newspapers can also manage layout better so narrow columns make sense. I can't think of anything that's more annoying than having to scroll up and down multiple times to read a website.
I've heard this all before, linus sucks, the kernel isn't stable, 2.4.x is horrible. How do you know 2.2 series wasn't plagued by crap like this before. When that series was in it's infancy, most of us didn't use Linux and weren't reading slashdot to discover all the mistakes that were made.
Btw, Linus didn't manage this release, Marcello did. People make mistakes and the best part of this open process is that it doesn't take long for someone to notice something isn't right and warn the community about it.
Ok so yeah, the kernel roll out for the 2.4 series hasn't been as smooth as we all would like it to be, but does that really matter? The casual geek, like me, updates his kernel whenever get gets a few free hours and there's one that's been around for a while. I used 2.4.5 and had no problems. I upgraded a few days ago. I don't go out looking for the newest kernel because it's not that important to me. You seem to be getting personally offended by the fact that things aren't perfect. It's a feeling that's pretty common and one i just don't understand. Yes we like things to be professional, but professionallism is for companies. The linux kernel has been and always will be the domain of a rag-tag group of developers, people who do it just for fun and they deserve credit for putting forth the effort at all. If you want professional, go to red hat, suse, or mandrake which are the professional front ends for linux, and are what most people see.
I'm guessing no, because if they go, slashdot won't be around to do a timeline. Wow, what a scary thought, i might actually get bored and have to work or something
You've obviously been through a lot and you're personal story is very interesting, but your conclusions are misguided.
First off, you complain that the CEO is not answerable to anybody, that's just false. For better or worse, the CEO is accountable to the shareholders. That's the reason you got laid off. If CEO's didn't have to, they wouldn't fire anybody. When you fire people, you reduce the number of people that can afford your product. However, they have to please the share holders and are forced to retain profits. Hence when revenue drops so too must costs and people get laid-off. If it wasn't done this way, all corporations would be as big and bloated as our federal government. As for the other stuff about law and order, the government does that. If there are people who are actually being abused, there would be hell for the corporation to pay. However, low pay (which was more than minimum wage), is not abuse. You are also there to work and not talk. If you want a better job, spend the time and make the sacrifies needed to get one. My parents did it, i'm doing it, you've done it. It maybe difficult for some, but it's not impossible.
Companies would rather have lower paid inexperienced workers because they are easier to push around, and it's very difficult to find high paid experienced workers to do manual labor. Once people get experience, they start looking for better jobs.
Ford priced his model-t so that the average person could buy it. Therefore, by default, his employee's could buy one too. Also, it never said what kind of printer they were shipping. There are a lot of inkjets for around $100 which is about two days worth of work. Yeah i know, rent is high, but if you aren't making 6 figures, what are you doing in california anyway? People suffer for thier own bad decisions.
Saying that some guy in a third world country deserves as much money as i do for the same task is ridiculous. Different countries have different costs of living and the wages should be appropriate to them. Someone making mid five figures would live like a king in most countries, but be doing only okay in the US. I'm not saying that it's okay for nike to set up armed camps in which they pay children 5 cents a day for stiching shoes. Wages should be reasonable, but what constitutes a reasonable wage depends greatly on the locality.
Having people buy our stuff will not reduce our forgien debt, maintaining a balanced budget will. People buying our stuff will reduce the trade deficit which is good for the economy. Eventually, this will lead to increased tax revenue which leads to more money to pay down debts, but it's not a direct relationship as you imply.
And finally, i think unions are a horrible idea. I don't like unions because they strip me of my individuality. A certian amount of money from every pay check i get goes to the union. They then use this money in any way they wish, often times contributing to the campaigns of politicans who i am not garanteed to support. I don't like the thought of my money bringing about a worse america. I also dislike unions because of the "gang" mentality of union workers. Union workers, as you experienced first hand, often times think that they have special rights just because they belong to a union. Therefore they do thier best to make the lives of non union members miserable. Plus, it wouldnt' have helped in this particular case because the people were temps and wouldn't have been in a union in the first place.
for places like atlanta, it's nearly impossible to build a decent mass transit system. I go to college near the city, but my parents live out in alpharetta. Freshman year, before we were allowed to have a car, it would have been nice if i could have used the system to get home and see them every now and then. But, unfortunatly, to do that, i would have had to walk a few blocks to a bus stop, take the bus to the train station, get on the train, get off in dunwoody and take another bus to alpharetta, only to be picked up by my parents in a car at the bus depot, who would have little hope of knowing when i was going to get there. It made absolutely no sence to use MARTA because of that. It doesn't help any that the more affluent communities don't want MARTA to come anywhere near them because they think (and they seriously do think this) that MARTA means Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta. Physcological barriers like that need to be overcomed before mass transit can be implimented in a lot of places.
I think that a lot of what you said was right, but there are somethings that you're missing. One is that the american economic system is not a free market. The RIAA has the power it does simply because it has passed the nessecary laws that restrict the market to thier own advantage. If this was a free market, thier monopoly could not exist because of the multitutes of alternatives that have come into being. However, the RIAA has labeled this alternatives as "illegal" instead of "competition" and therefore can sustain its monopoly. Yes there was a lot of copyright theft taking place on napster, but it was also a legitamate alternative distribution method. In effect, they have increased the barriers of entry, which are essentially the cost of duplication, to price out most competition.
I assumed he meant that an O(n^t) solution with a very large value for t would be of theoretical interest but not have the kind of practical impact that he was thinking of. In other words, he meant O(n) or at least a relatively tractable O(n^t).
In essence you're right, an algo with a huge t would not be all that practical. However, once you have it down to poly time, it becomes relatively easy to get it into a more usable time space. I remember a lot of things from my datastructures class where the obvious solution was quadratic, with a little tweaking you got linear, and with some very convoluted code you got N/2 or better. I am not sure what that problem was (it may have been sorting), but that type of problem is pretty common. Despite that, for large problem spaces, the poly-time algo will be better than the exp-time algo.
First off, if they found an O(n) algorithm, that means that all NP problems would be in linear time. I'm assuming the poster means O(n^t) where t is independent of n.
now if that were the case, i'd use it to build nifty AI's. Most ai problems are NP complete since they involve non-deterministically searching a problem space. Stuff like crossword puzzles and route planning come to mind for this one. Most of these problems do map to SAT, so it would be very short time before we start seeing some really intelligent AIs for a lot of your typical tasks.
The primary purpose of advertising in the "real world" is to 1) differenciate your product from your competitors. The majority of the adds i hear on TV and radio are "we're cheaper than that other guy." or "our product is supierior in quality to thiers" and so on. 2) It's to fill a void that you weren't really aware of. How many times have you said to your self, i wish there was a way to do X. Well if people don't advertise, you'll never know that there is a way to do X.
One thing I've noticed about Perl people is that they are often very open-minded about using other languages to solve a problem.
Or it could be that we find it very funny to watch the people that beat us in the "let's develop in PERL" argument struggle for hours with some problem. And better yet, after they finish their exhausting work, we get to laugh with glee as we code up a script in 30 secs that does the exact same thing.
No, that's a really stupid analogy. First off, if i'm buying a car ( and i've done this 2 or 3 times ) i go to the dealership and they are VERY willing to let me test drive it. They want me to try out the car before i spend the cash. Hence, i don't need to break into a dealership late at night to give the car a test drive. I walk in with broad daylight, say i'm interested in car x, they photocopy my license, give me the keys off i go. If i like it, i buy, if i don't i go elsewhere. Worse comes to worse, i can go rent one, or go back and try it again in a few weeks. Who the hell would spend that kind of money without giving it a go
with software i can't do that. I can't borrow software, or rent it legally. Hence, if i want to be a consious consumer and pick the best product, the software companies force me to steal it for a little while. In fact, software is one of the few things that works that way, with music being another. Even video games i can rent before i buy. So quit yapping about how evil it is. They've put us there, and the software companies should face some of the consequences.
hehe, I live in georgia, and was thinking about buying a volkswagon gti (i love pocket rockets). Guess which dealership is not getting my business. Hopefully, those morons in marketing will realize that having thier name spread across local tv, radio, and the internet because of a case where they treated thier customer like shit is going to cost a whole lot more in future sales than it would have cost to make the guy happy. Unfortunatly, in this country it is much easier just to sue than to think.
Your comment that if i value privacy i should move to the mountains of CO or to somolia is similarly simply minded. Who is the government protecting us from. The terrorists? They did just a wonderful job of that on 9/11. Please tell me how anything they've done so far is going to decrease the threat of terrorism. Most of our congressmen and senators are jumping with glee because they have thier opportunity to press their power-hungry draconian legislation on us. This is OUR government, which is supposed to serve US. If it's not serving the people, which it clearly stopped doing, then it must be destroyed, it's as simple as that. I like the united states, i like the principles it was founded on, but it's unfortunate that our current crop of politians' desire for power is greater than principles.
I have to concurr, tonight's show was awesome. I just got back from where we were viewing and I'm still in awe. I wasn't keeping count, but there were a lot more at 5:30 than there were at 4. The best was the multiple ones, every now and then 2 or 3 would fire down in rapid sucession. Once about 8 game down in 3 seconds or so. Definetly beats any 4th of july and i'm so glad I stayed up.