Or maybe they actually think about these things. They think about what most of their users are likely to have as hardware and what features their users would like to see. There's always a tradeoff between making an application compact and efficient and coding new "cool" features. Also, there's a tradeoff between supporting older machines and implementing an application with better features. Most mature software companies study the market and make decisions about the appropriate value at which to make that tradeoff.
I don't understand what idiot moderator marked that as a Troll. He's making a very valid point. You might disagree with it but that doesn't make it a Troll. A troll is a post which intentionally lies in order to provoke a reaction. If I get my hands on the 13-year-old who moderated this one I would like to ground them for a week.
Dude, if you're advertising your homepage, at least you should make sure it has something besides just the default Apache "no web page configured" screen.
Ok, with the loss of $5.6 at 4 cents a share indicates a total number of shares of 140 million. (I have no idea if this is the actual amount of RH shares; fractional amounts of cents aren't listed.)
It's amazing what looking up a company based on the stockticker will tell you. There it is, "# Shares Out. 161.6 Mil ".
Reminds me of the case where someone was descrambling DirecTV signals without authorization and the courts ruled that since DirecTV was sending those signals through his property he had the right to do with them as he pleased.
I suppose that could apply here where if they were sending their signals into public property or your property you automatically had a right to tap into them. It's interesting what you would consider your reciprocal signals going back into their private property, though.
Good question. Microsoft is playing a dual role here. One, Microsoft was the company whose identity was stolen and Two, Microsoft makes the operating system. To make it easier to think about, suppose that it was Oracle Corporations identity that was accidentally stolen instead. Microsoft would still (assuming they cared) be issuing the patches to allow users to distinguish between the real and the revoked certificates and other OS vendors would be responsible for issuing the patches to their OSes
Err.. no. Verisign is simply the authority that issues and authenticates certificates. At least on Windows, when you get the option "Always trust blah blah" you're not saying "Trust all certificates issued BY blah blah" but rather "Trust all certificiates issued TO blah blah as long as you trust the person issuing the certificate". Trusting Verisign to issue certificates is implicit in the verification code.
That's ridiculous. I wish people would keep activism out of the classroom. The decision on what software/products to use should be based solely upon what is the best tool for the job. I'm not saying Linux is not the best tool for schools but this decision was not made on that basis.
I wouldn't trust my children to educators who put the interests of projecting their viewpoint over the interests of the children to learn with the best tools available to use.
Whether something is wrong or not is completely orthogonal to whether or not it can be enforced. Yes, it is ridiculous to ban certain numbers or T-shirts but that doesn't make it ridiculous to ban DeCSS. You aren't proving anything by pointing out that DeCSS can be encoded in a prime number.
It's always a sure sign a company is going down, though, when they start by laying off their marketing folks. I can think of at least three friends who worked at marketing positions who've been laid off in the past 6 months. I know what companies I'm not investing in!
Let me take a stab at answering some of those questions:
Will developers that see bugs in the syntax report them to Microsoft?
I come from a Unix world myself. However, only lately have I come to realize the vast amount of developer support that Microsoft products enjoy. With the VS tools, there are tons of developers who think MS is the coolest thing since sliced bread and are eager to look at and contribute to the OS.
Will Microsoft take an active roll in using any "suggestions" from programers regarding bugs in future SPs or versions?
I'm pretty sure MS will look at the bug reports it receives. At the risk of sounding banal, I'll say that fixing bugs in software is not just a simple task of someone identifying an "obvious" bug and just fixing it. For about every 10 "obvious" bugs that you fix, you tend to cause one regression which will cost you tons of hours to find, identify and fix. Sometimes (not always) it is just not worth the risk to disturb a relatively stable product for the sake of fixing an obscure scenario.
Will the Windows OS improve as a result of this move, or just applications that run on the OS
Doesn't it lead to the same result? When a crappy driver causes your OS to bluescreen/hang, who do you blame?
Will this lead to some increases in bugs? If an application writer uses undocumented side effects of Windows (that she finds in the source code) and the code changes (SP, new version, etc.), will we see new bugs?
You're just screwing yourself if you're relying on an undocumented feature in the code. There's a reason some features aren't documented (no, and not just to srew the competitors) including that they might not be ready for primetime, have the adequate amount of testing or were pulled because of lack of demand. It would just be sheer stupidity to rely on an undocumented feature for your product.
Also, if they fail, you're still stuck with the bill for all the hardware they said you have to buy plus all the consulting they gave you. This can easily run to more than 1 million dollars. You get the $1,000,000 but you can't talk about it. We will never hear it when they fail the challenge!
9. Performance - simple databases are fast with simple queries, but sophisticated databases are fast with complex queries (and, maybe, slower with simple queries...). M$ uses simple benchmarks to tell their customers that they are fast (TCP-C), but most other vendors have stopped three years ago to post TCP-C benchmarks, so M$ is able to beat three year old databases on three year old hardware... TCP-D is more complex, and M$ couldn't show that their database wasn't 100 (one hundred) times slower on a specific TCP-D part than Oracle - though they tried hard. But benchmarking is a complex matter...
Are you trolling or astroturfing for Oracle?
Go visit the TPC website. Funny how they don't mention the "all important" TPC-D benchmark on their front page. The TPC-D benchmark is listed under the obsolete section under "benchmarks".
Now go visit the TPC-C results page.. The last posted results by Oracle are from January the 18th 2001. Doesn't quite sound like something they don't care about to me. (Although the results are listed as being posted by the hardware manufacturer, anyone who has worked with benchmarks knows it's impossible to post strong results without strong support from the database vendor).
AssetView tells me the OS Version is 3.0. The interface is NOT bound to a desktop metaphor. There are elements of commonality like a "Start" bar but those only make it easier to use for people who know what those metaphors mean in a Windows environment.
I would seriously suggest you try one out for yourself because I can't do justice to describing the interface here. Unfortunately, Compaq has them on backorder for several months wait time. I ordered mine in early November and got it in February.
There's one major difference between technologies like this and DivX. DivX was intrusive, annoying and obvious. Something like this is not advertised, except in fine print somewhere that says you can't use it in a country outside where you bought it.
Further, the difference between DivX and something like this is that DivX affected what most people did normally. I don't know that many people that transport dishwashers between countries. Most people I know buy their dishwashers in the US and use them there. These people would not care if their dishwasher would not work in Hong Kong because they don't intend to take it there!
How is investing in a company and buying non-voting stock "draining it of all it's worth?"
Microsoft invested in Corel which gave them some much needed cash. Corel's stock price fell since then, not because of, but inspite of this investment. My understanding of why Microsoft is moving to sell (note they haven't actually sold, just applied for conversion which they have to do before they can sell) is to avoid a DoJ investigation into what seems like a conflict of interest to invest in a competitor. (If you do anything that involves a computer you are a competitor of Microsoft)
Yes and yes. Theoretically, this is simply Napster asking the major record labels to drop their case against Napster. If Joe Singer had his music "stolen" by Napster against his wishes, he has the option to resort to the same lawsuit against Napster for doing so. No one else can sell the rights that Joe Singer or Joe Recording Label own over their music.
You still need direct line of sight with something that reflects the light, though. Picture yourself as a grain of sand on the moon floor. Now imagine how many objects you see that are in the sunlight and not obstructed. In most cases, these are zero. On the other hand, you have the full face of the Earth reflecting light at you. Moonlight is pretty darn bright here on earth. Imagine an object with a face 10 times as big and with a much better reflection %age. (The Earth is known to have a better percentage of reflection than the moon).
The light reflected off the surface of the moon would get reflected directly off into space so unless there were significant lighted faces of the moon that were pointing in the direction of the occluded region, that is quite unlikely. On the Earth, light from snow creates an illuminating effect because this reflected light is reflected back down by the atmosphere - the moon has no atmosphere.
That is actually the only error I found in the rebuttal article. He explains the "filled in" shadows as moonlight. It makes a lot more sense to suppose that that was earthlight, instead.
One man's child labor abuse is another mans living
on
Nike: Just Don't Do It
·
· Score: 3
I grew up in a third-world country so I believe I'm qualified to comment on this. I'm not aware of the actual labor practices Nike practices so I'm not commenting on Nike in particular but about child labor in general.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that all children should be in school, sheltered and with the opportunity to learn so that they can grow up to be contributors to society at large.
However, the reality of the situation is that in several third-world countries there is rampant poverty. The governments in those countries are not able to provide free education and many times, even if they do, many people can't afford to send their children there because they still need to pay for food and clothing and shelter and the parents can just not afford to do so. This is not an exaggeration. People actually do live like this and I have seen this myself.
From the perspective of the children being employed, this is many times the best thing that could have happened to them. The children who work there don't greet the closing of the factories with jubiliation - to them it doesn't mean being able to go to school - to them it means that their family will go hungry.
None of this defends child labor practices where the children are unfairly exploited - that is not what I'm defending here. Outside of those situations, child labor is not bad, per se because it is often times better than the alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe they actually think about these things. They think about what most of their users are likely to have as hardware and what features their users would like to see. There's always a tradeoff between making an application compact and efficient and coding new "cool" features. Also, there's a tradeoff between supporting older machines and implementing an application with better features. Most mature software companies study the market and make decisions about the appropriate value at which to make that tradeoff.
I don't understand what idiot moderator marked that as a Troll. He's making a very valid point. You might disagree with it but that doesn't make it a Troll. A troll is a post which intentionally lies in order to provoke a reaction. If I get my hands on the 13-year-old who moderated this one I would like to ground them for a week.
Dude, if you're advertising your homepage, at least you should make sure it has something besides just the default Apache "no web page configured" screen.
Ok, with the loss of $5.6 at 4 cents a share indicates a total number of shares of 140 million. (I have no idea if this is the actual amount of RH shares; fractional amounts of cents aren't listed.)
It's amazing what looking up a company based on the stockticker will tell you. There it is, "# Shares Out. 161.6 Mil ".
Sorry about that. With some research, apparently I was wrong about the argument about the signals trespassing your property being held up in court.
Reminds me of the case where someone was descrambling DirecTV signals without authorization and the courts ruled that since DirecTV was sending those signals through his property he had the right to do with them as he pleased.
I suppose that could apply here where if they were sending their signals into public property or your property you automatically had a right to tap into them. It's interesting what you would consider your reciprocal signals going back into their private property, though.
Good question. Microsoft is playing a dual role here. One, Microsoft was the company whose identity was stolen and Two, Microsoft makes the operating system. To make it easier to think about, suppose that it was Oracle Corporations identity that was accidentally stolen instead. Microsoft would still (assuming they cared) be issuing the patches to allow users to distinguish between the real and the revoked certificates and other OS vendors would be responsible for issuing the patches to their OSes
Err.. no. Verisign is simply the authority that issues and authenticates certificates. At least on Windows, when you get the option "Always trust blah blah" you're not saying "Trust all certificates issued BY blah blah" but rather "Trust all certificiates issued TO blah blah as long as you trust the person issuing the certificate". Trusting Verisign to issue certificates is implicit in the verification code.
That's ridiculous. I wish people would keep activism out of the classroom. The decision on what software/products to use should be based solely upon what is the best tool for the job. I'm not saying Linux is not the best tool for schools but this decision was not made on that basis.
I wouldn't trust my children to educators who put the interests of projecting their viewpoint over the interests of the children to learn with the best tools available to use.
Whether something is wrong or not is completely orthogonal to whether or not it can be enforced. Yes, it is ridiculous to ban certain numbers or T-shirts but that doesn't make it ridiculous to ban DeCSS. You aren't proving anything by pointing out that DeCSS can be encoded in a prime number.
It's always a sure sign a company is going down, though, when they start by laying off their marketing folks. I can think of at least three friends who worked at marketing positions who've been laid off in the past 6 months. I know what companies I'm not investing in!
Will developers that see bugs in the syntax report them to Microsoft?
I come from a Unix world myself. However, only lately have I come to realize the vast amount of developer support that Microsoft products enjoy. With the VS tools, there are tons of developers who think MS is the coolest thing since sliced bread and are eager to look at and contribute to the OS.
Will Microsoft take an active roll in using any "suggestions" from programers regarding bugs in future SPs or versions?
I'm pretty sure MS will look at the bug reports it receives. At the risk of sounding banal, I'll say that fixing bugs in software is not just a simple task of someone identifying an "obvious" bug and just fixing it. For about every 10 "obvious" bugs that you fix, you tend to cause one regression which will cost you tons of hours to find, identify and fix. Sometimes (not always) it is just not worth the risk to disturb a relatively stable product for the sake of fixing an obscure scenario.
Will the Windows OS improve as a result of this move, or just applications that run on the OS
Doesn't it lead to the same result? When a crappy driver causes your OS to bluescreen/hang, who do you blame?
Will this lead to some increases in bugs? If an application writer uses undocumented side effects of Windows (that she finds in the source code) and the code changes (SP, new version, etc.), will we see new bugs?
You're just screwing yourself if you're relying on an undocumented feature in the code. There's a reason some features aren't documented (no, and not just to srew the competitors) including that they might not be ready for primetime, have the adequate amount of testing or were pulled because of lack of demand. It would just be sheer stupidity to rely on an undocumented feature for your product.
Hmm.. world domination. Does this have anything to do with the rumor of Microsoft moving to Canada?
Also, if they fail, you're still stuck with the bill for all the hardware they said you have to buy plus all the consulting they gave you. This can easily run to more than 1 million dollars. You get the $1,000,000 but you can't talk about it. We will never hear it when they fail the challenge!
9. Performance - simple databases are fast with simple queries, but sophisticated databases are fast with complex queries (and, maybe, slower with simple queries...). M$ uses simple benchmarks to tell their customers that they are fast (TCP-C), but most other vendors have stopped three years ago to post TCP-C benchmarks, so M$ is able to beat three year old databases on three year old hardware... TCP-D is more complex, and M$ couldn't show that their database wasn't 100 (one hundred) times slower on a specific TCP-D part than Oracle - though they tried hard. But benchmarking is a complex matter...
Are you trolling or astroturfing for Oracle?
Go visit the TPC website. Funny how they don't mention the "all important" TPC-D benchmark on their front page. The TPC-D benchmark is listed under the obsolete section under "benchmarks".
Now go visit the TPC-C results page.. The last posted results by Oracle are from January the 18th 2001. Doesn't quite sound like something they don't care about to me. (Although the results are listed as being posted by the hardware manufacturer, anyone who has worked with benchmarks knows it's impossible to post strong results without strong support from the database vendor).
Microsoft licenses CE for free, I believe.
Have you even used a newer version iPaq?
AssetView tells me the OS Version is 3.0. The interface is NOT bound to a desktop metaphor. There are elements of commonality like a "Start" bar but those only make it easier to use for people who know what those metaphors mean in a Windows environment.
I would seriously suggest you try one out for yourself because I can't do justice to describing the interface here. Unfortunately, Compaq has them on backorder for several months wait time. I ordered mine in early November and got it in February.
There's one major difference between technologies like this and DivX. DivX was intrusive, annoying and obvious. Something like this is not advertised, except in fine print somewhere that says you can't use it in a country outside where you bought it.
Further, the difference between DivX and something like this is that DivX affected what most people did normally. I don't know that many people that transport dishwashers between countries. Most people I know buy their dishwashers in the US and use them there. These people would not care if their dishwasher would not work in Hong Kong because they don't intend to take it there!
How is investing in a company and buying non-voting stock "draining it of all it's worth?"
Microsoft invested in Corel which gave them some much needed cash. Corel's stock price fell since then, not because of, but inspite of this investment. My understanding of why Microsoft is moving to sell (note they haven't actually sold, just applied for conversion which they have to do before they can sell) is to avoid a DoJ investigation into what seems like a conflict of interest to invest in a competitor. (If you do anything that involves a computer you are a competitor of Microsoft)
Yes and yes. Theoretically, this is simply Napster asking the major record labels to drop their case against Napster. If Joe Singer had his music "stolen" by Napster against his wishes, he has the option to resort to the same lawsuit against Napster for doing so. No one else can sell the rights that Joe Singer or Joe Recording Label own over their music.
You still need direct line of sight with something that reflects the light, though. Picture yourself as a grain of sand on the moon floor. Now imagine how many objects you see that are in the sunlight and not obstructed. In most cases, these are zero. On the other hand, you have the full face of the Earth reflecting light at you. Moonlight is pretty darn bright here on earth. Imagine an object with a face 10 times as big and with a much better reflection %age. (The Earth is known to have a better percentage of reflection than the moon).
The light reflected off the surface of the moon would get reflected directly off into space so unless there were significant lighted faces of the moon that were pointing in the direction of the occluded region, that is quite unlikely. On the Earth, light from snow creates an illuminating effect because this reflected light is reflected back down by the atmosphere - the moon has no atmosphere.
Q:What do you call someone who's crazy about the moon?
A lunatic
That is actually the only error I found in the rebuttal article. He explains the "filled in" shadows as moonlight. It makes a lot more sense to suppose that that was earthlight, instead.
I grew up in a third-world country so I believe I'm qualified to comment on this. I'm not aware of the actual labor practices Nike practices so I'm not commenting on Nike in particular but about child labor in general.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that all children should be in school, sheltered and with the opportunity to learn so that they can grow up to be contributors to society at large.
However, the reality of the situation is that in several third-world countries there is rampant poverty. The governments in those countries are not able to provide free education and many times, even if they do, many people can't afford to send their children there because they still need to pay for food and clothing and shelter and the parents can just not afford to do so. This is not an exaggeration. People actually do live like this and I have seen this myself.
From the perspective of the children being employed, this is many times the best thing that could have happened to them. The children who work there don't greet the closing of the factories with jubiliation - to them it doesn't mean being able to go to school - to them it means that their family will go hungry.
None of this defends child labor practices where the children are unfairly exploited - that is not what I'm defending here. Outside of those situations, child labor is not bad, per se because it is often times better than the alternatives.