Write letters, join or form activist groups, make your voice heard, and if all else fails, run for office.
I refuse to accept that all is hopeless just because the person I vote for loses. Not saying you're advocating that stance, but a lot of people do.
And if you're not from the US and this would cause a burden for you, then write to either your ambassador(s) or your own government so they can lobby the US and point out how this will hurt international business. If you think other countries don't lobby the American congress any less than American corporations, you are incorrect.
I just skimmed the bill linked in the summary... is it just me, or does this 1) not appear to apply to email whatsoever (it's not mentioned anywhere in the bill, though VOIP is) and 2) only applies to business doing $5 million USD or more in business a year.
Just FYI, I'm pretty sure the 32bit Flash will work on a 64bit system. Give it a whirl.
I know Flash is working on mine (I'm running OpenSUSE 10.2) anyways.
It's called a "Straw Man Argument." The abstract is attributing the inability to change ISPs to having email through Gmail, though that doesn't seem to be a likely outcome to me. From the all-knowing Wiki:
A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "set up a straw man" or "set up a straw-man argument" is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent. A straw-man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it is in fact a misleading fallacy, because the opponent's actual argument has not been refuted.
But yet I see racks of these things at grocery stores. Who is buying these things? Middle management who want to keep up to date with the computer world?
Yep. One of my 5 bosses has a subscription for our department and the magazines land on a table in the call center. They're a fun alternative to gouging ones eyes out.
BTW, magical thing called email which notifies me when people reply. Allows me to not have to spam refresh the page constantly to see if people are paying attention to me;-)
This comment will probably get lost in the general hubub of Slashdot, but I find it somewhat amusing that I've spent my day trying to get Beryl to work in a VM of OpenSUSE (my first time working with Beryl at all) and then come to Slashdot on a mini-break and find myself faced with it again. Is Slashdot reading my mind like Google, or is Beryl taking over the universe?
Personally, with the tight budgeting we have, I'm not about to recommend we throw money at a group to try and accomplish a goal we don't know they could do. Could someone make an open source product that works with Exchange? If they did, would Microsoft sue us afterwards? Both of those questions need to be answered before any sane company would or should invest.
And the first won't be answered until someone does it. Don't expect to get paid before you do the work. Very little in our world works that way, and it's silly to expect otherwise.
Now, if private investors see that there's a profit to be made, sure, they might kick in to compete with Microsoft... but seriously, if a company is running Exchange already, they're probably running Outlook and don't need an open source equivalent. If they wanted to go open source, they'd probably just ditch Exchange altogether. Beyond that, I certainly don't expect anyone to provide any real competition to Microsoft, and I'm not going to invest in a small, independent, untested and untried group who can't show me a finished and working product in advance.
That's why you run the applications on virtual machines. Then you don't have to worry about conflicts.
The issue is, like you started to say, bandwidth/networking needs. For a smaller company, sure, this is definitely the best solution. Roaming profiles, everything through a terminal... cuts costs, there's massive redundancy, higher security, less maintenance and tech support needed. But when you've got 20,000+ people with over 2-3,000 computers (like our university has--I've never gotten an exact count on how many compys we have), trying to do everything over the network just isn't feasible.
Departments aren't going to pay for servers. It's much cheaper to buy individual machines with good warranties.
I work at a state university in the US that has a number of "legacy" privately developed apps that won't work under Vista. Of course, Vista's key management has been such a pain and Microsoft's responses have been so unhelpful that we're not actually planning to move to Vista any time soon. Nevertheless, we'll have to eventually, and so are having to spend millions now to update all of the apps our various departments use. Gotta love it.
Aren't volunteers, in some ways, inherently altruistic? That's sort of the impression I get... what we really need are 3 distinct test groups: people who volunteered, people getting paid, and people we drugged, clubbed, and strapped into a lab.
Real yoghurt (and real cheese) are available in the U.S., but typically only at high-priced cheese shops, specialty stores, or similar venues that escape notice from regulators. IIRC, it's illegal (as much so as Cuban cigars), but the market for the stuff is alive and well (again, pun intended)
I think I'm just not understanding something, so I was wondering if you could comment back and clarify for me... I know you can't be saying that real yoghurt and cheese is illegal, right? Please tell me dairy products haven't been put on the terrorist list...
Because those countries aren't, by and large, contributing to the environmental problem? They have nothing to contribute one way or the other (no offense to Tonga Tonga). And what does it matter what other countries do? There's a problem, we're a leading contributor to that problem, we're a leading nation in the world, and instead we decide that our economy is more important. Ironically, countries that have agreed to better environmental practices, particularly concerning the auto industry, are stomping American corporations on efficiency, productivity, and value.
And yeah, Bush broke a treaty Clinton had established with NK when he came into office. We were giving them food/medicine and light water nuclear reactors for energy so long as NK stopped its nuclear program (which they did). Bush decided not to and set up a blockade instead, prompting them to begin their nuclear program once again.
The op wasn't advocating isolationism, he/she was advocating diplomacy and multilateralism. If you'll remember, the months following 9/11 Bush stated that we would move unilaterally, regardless of what the UN thought "because they don't run this country," and that we'd pretty much do what we damn well please.
Also, nixxing the ABM Treaty and giving an emphatic middle finger to the Kyoto Treaty pretty much pissed off everyone, harming our relations further and scaring the hell out of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The US being less of a dick would help things a lot, but you don't do that by locking yourself in your room, you do it by working together with other countries towards common goals and through diplomatic channels.
The difference is, OS X from 10.0 to 10.1 (faster) to 10.2 (smoother looking) to 10.3 (expose) to 10.4 (dashboard, spotlight) has had lots of improvements, and each previous release was only a year or so apart, and 10.4 came out over a year ago, while Vista took the largest software company in the world 5 years to come up, stripping features the whole time, which is is just coming out now.
To be honest, I'd still rather buy a release every 5 years for substantial changes than every year for minimal changes. We might bitch and moan about the cost of Microsoft products, but it's nothing compared to Apple's continual program of holding back and releasing something every 6 months to a year so slav^H^H^H^Hcustomers can buy yet another just-a-bit-better copy of what they already have (how many iPods are there these days, anyways?).
Ditto. After Abraham was told he would father a people greater in number than the grains of sand, he and Sarah worried that this would not happen because they were old and Sarah was past her mothering years. Therefore, Sarah gave her servant Hagar to Abraham so he could have a child with her (a common practice in ancient Mesopotamia), which he did. This son was named Ishmael (which means God Hears, in response to God hearing their prayer for a child), and it is from his line that the Muslims come.
Sarah perceived Hagar as becoming arrogant because Abraham's firstborn came from her womb, and so Sarah asked Abraham to send the woman away. Abraham did so, and soon after Sarah became pregnant and gave birth to Isaac (which means laughter or laughing one), from whom the Hebraic line descends.
Muslims from Ishmael, Jews from Isaac. Christians, by the way, aren't a racial or familial group like these two, but follow Jesus who was claimed to be of the line of David, a descendant of Isaac. Of course, most Muslims are converts these days, so it's sort of the same situation.
Also, "semitic" refers to a language type, not a people group. Generally, this term is used synonymously with Jew, but that's not technically accurate unless you're using the term "anti-semitic," which has come to mean "anti-Jew." Otherwise, the word semitic stemming from the name of Shem refers to a grouping of similar languages.
This isn't a direct response to you, but it amuses me greatly how many anti-Christian statements I read on Slashdot when so many people (judging by the comments I read here, especially the ones that attempt to pull out Biblical facts) know so little about Christianity. They might judge Christians negatively due to their personal experiences, but that isn't fair grounds to judge an entire religion or everyone who follows that religion. To say otherwise is to advocate the same thing we fight against when we denounce racism or sexism./religious studies degree
I can, because we'll be doing it soon at the major state university at which I work. TBH, most of the faculty/staff don't know how to use the old Office, so them not knowing how to use the new one isn't that big of a deal.
This isn't just a spiteful jab--I love my customers here at the university. The entire point of Office is that, even in an enterprise environment, they can open Word to type a document and be happy with the WYSIWYG. They don't automate a lot of processes, they don't often build templates, and Header/Footer is one of the more advanced functions they use. Their goal is to type a paper or a memo or something, and a lot of software knowledge isn't needed for that.
The Ribbon highlights some of the better tools and makes them more easily accessible. There isn't a whole lot to unlearn beyond File-->Save and I think it'll be an overall positive experience.
As for the "wasted time" of upgrading, the last time we had to do a major upgrade/conversion, we fixed every little problem with everyone's computer (over 800 machines covered by our division) and had relatively few calls for the next several months, leaving us to get on with the work of producing documentation and training. Personally, I think doing an upgrade process every year or two where we get to see ALL of our customers, answer their questions, and resolve some of the smaller issues definitely increases the productivity of everyone. It's an indirect benefit, but certainly a substantial one.
If we really wanted "professional" documents, we'd force them all to switch to LaTeX. That'd be stupid. Office 07 and the training it will inspire (because it will be necessary) will help the employees be more savvy than they were with the old Office, and its features will help them be more productive than if they'd been truly knowledgeable about the older software.
We probably haven't because the law's already in place. I know, here in Missouri, they card you if you're trying to buy a movie that's rated higher than your age permits.
Admittedly, though, they do the same for games. So why can't we leave well-enough alone and hope parents pay attention?
If you can run FFXI, you can run EVE:-P Just turn some of the settings down. I would dualboot two clients on a 2ghz 64bit AMD processor laptop with a 64mb vidcard and 1gb of RAM and have no problems. If you're lagging, get out of Jita;-)
Bought the game on the 3rd day of my trial and never looked back. That was about a year ago, and I still love it.
Wait, no, this is a FANTASTIC idea! Why don't we just sue the telcos who own the tubes? I mean, they (the telcos) want to start charging end users to access the same content the providers are paying to have uploaded (and who wants net neutrality after all?) on the grounds that they own the lines, which means they own what's going across them, doesn't it?
So it's really the telco's fault that music is shared/pirated/down and uploaded.
No worries, though. I'm going to go patent the idea (since I had the thought, it's my intellectual property, and such things are patentable these days) and sue the pants* off the RIAA when they try it ^_^
*Unfortunately, the pants will probably be on fire.
Slashdot Mirror
Write letters, join or form activist groups, make your voice heard, and if all else fails, run for office.
I refuse to accept that all is hopeless just because the person I vote for loses. Not saying you're advocating that stance, but a lot of people do.
And if you're not from the US and this would cause a burden for you, then write to either your ambassador(s) or your own government so they can lobby the US and point out how this will hurt international business. If you think other countries don't lobby the American congress any less than American corporations, you are incorrect.
I just skimmed the bill linked in the summary... is it just me, or does this 1) not appear to apply to email whatsoever (it's not mentioned anywhere in the bill, though VOIP is) and 2) only applies to business doing $5 million USD or more in business a year.
You are only not represented if you did not vote. If you did not vote, you have no right to complain.
If the person you voted for is doing things you don't want them to, do something about it.
Just FYI, I'm pretty sure the 32bit Flash will work on a 64bit system. Give it a whirl. I know Flash is working on mine (I'm running OpenSUSE 10.2) anyways.
It's called a "Straw Man Argument." The abstract is attributing the inability to change ISPs to having email through Gmail, though that doesn't seem to be a likely outcome to me. From the all-knowing Wiki:
A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "set up a straw man" or "set up a straw-man argument" is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent. A straw-man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it is in fact a misleading fallacy, because the opponent's actual argument has not been refuted.
But yet I see racks of these things at grocery stores. Who is buying these things? Middle management who want to keep up to date with the computer world?
Yep. One of my 5 bosses has a subscription for our department and the magazines land on a table in the call center. They're a fun alternative to gouging ones eyes out.
It is? How?
;-)
BTW, magical thing called email which notifies me when people reply. Allows me to not have to spam refresh the page constantly to see if people are paying attention to me
If you want to be condescending, do it elsewhere.
This comment will probably get lost in the general hubub of Slashdot, but I find it somewhat amusing that I've spent my day trying to get Beryl to work in a VM of OpenSUSE (my first time working with Beryl at all) and then come to Slashdot on a mini-break and find myself faced with it again. Is Slashdot reading my mind like Google, or is Beryl taking over the universe?
Yeah. Because the ability to have people send you more unwanted advertising is a feature everyone looks for when buying a new phone.
What if the phone was free?
Because, as we all know, it takes a theocracy for it to be corrupt.
Personally, with the tight budgeting we have, I'm not about to recommend we throw money at a group to try and accomplish a goal we don't know they could do. Could someone make an open source product that works with Exchange? If they did, would Microsoft sue us afterwards? Both of those questions need to be answered before any sane company would or should invest.
And the first won't be answered until someone does it. Don't expect to get paid before you do the work. Very little in our world works that way, and it's silly to expect otherwise.
Now, if private investors see that there's a profit to be made, sure, they might kick in to compete with Microsoft... but seriously, if a company is running Exchange already, they're probably running Outlook and don't need an open source equivalent. If they wanted to go open source, they'd probably just ditch Exchange altogether. Beyond that, I certainly don't expect anyone to provide any real competition to Microsoft, and I'm not going to invest in a small, independent, untested and untried group who can't show me a finished and working product in advance.
Welcome to capitalism.
That's why you run the applications on virtual machines. Then you don't have to worry about conflicts.
The issue is, like you started to say, bandwidth/networking needs. For a smaller company, sure, this is definitely the best solution. Roaming profiles, everything through a terminal... cuts costs, there's massive redundancy, higher security, less maintenance and tech support needed. But when you've got 20,000+ people with over 2-3,000 computers (like our university has--I've never gotten an exact count on how many compys we have), trying to do everything over the network just isn't feasible.
Departments aren't going to pay for servers. It's much cheaper to buy individual machines with good warranties.
I work at a state university in the US that has a number of "legacy" privately developed apps that won't work under Vista. Of course, Vista's key management has been such a pain and Microsoft's responses have been so unhelpful that we're not actually planning to move to Vista any time soon. Nevertheless, we'll have to eventually, and so are having to spend millions now to update all of the apps our various departments use. Gotta love it.
Aren't volunteers, in some ways, inherently altruistic? That's sort of the impression I get... what we really need are 3 distinct test groups: people who volunteered, people getting paid, and people we drugged, clubbed, and strapped into a lab.
Real yoghurt (and real cheese) are available in the U.S., but typically only at high-priced cheese shops, specialty stores, or similar venues that escape notice from regulators. IIRC, it's illegal (as much so as Cuban cigars), but the market for the stuff is alive and well (again, pun intended)
I think I'm just not understanding something, so I was wondering if you could comment back and clarify for me... I know you can't be saying that real yoghurt and cheese is illegal, right? Please tell me dairy products haven't been put on the terrorist list...
If they are, wow. Learn something new every day.
Because those countries aren't, by and large, contributing to the environmental problem? They have nothing to contribute one way or the other (no offense to Tonga Tonga). And what does it matter what other countries do? There's a problem, we're a leading contributor to that problem, we're a leading nation in the world, and instead we decide that our economy is more important. Ironically, countries that have agreed to better environmental practices, particularly concerning the auto industry, are stomping American corporations on efficiency, productivity, and value.
And yeah, Bush broke a treaty Clinton had established with NK when he came into office. We were giving them food/medicine and light water nuclear reactors for energy so long as NK stopped its nuclear program (which they did). Bush decided not to and set up a blockade instead, prompting them to begin their nuclear program once again.
The op wasn't advocating isolationism, he/she was advocating diplomacy and multilateralism. If you'll remember, the months following 9/11 Bush stated that we would move unilaterally, regardless of what the UN thought "because they don't run this country," and that we'd pretty much do what we damn well please.
Also, nixxing the ABM Treaty and giving an emphatic middle finger to the Kyoto Treaty pretty much pissed off everyone, harming our relations further and scaring the hell out of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The US being less of a dick would help things a lot, but you don't do that by locking yourself in your room, you do it by working together with other countries towards common goals and through diplomatic channels.
The difference is, OS X from 10.0 to 10.1 (faster) to 10.2 (smoother looking) to 10.3 (expose) to 10.4 (dashboard, spotlight) has had lots of improvements, and each previous release was only a year or so apart, and 10.4 came out over a year ago, while Vista took the largest software company in the world 5 years to come up, stripping features the whole time, which is is just coming out now.
To be honest, I'd still rather buy a release every 5 years for substantial changes than every year for minimal changes. We might bitch and moan about the cost of Microsoft products, but it's nothing compared to Apple's continual program of holding back and releasing something every 6 months to a year so slav^H^H^H^Hcustomers can buy yet another just-a-bit-better copy of what they already have (how many iPods are there these days, anyways?).
"Maybe you need to go back to school...."
/religious studies degree
Ditto. After Abraham was told he would father a people greater in number than the grains of sand, he and Sarah worried that this would not happen because they were old and Sarah was past her mothering years. Therefore, Sarah gave her servant Hagar to Abraham so he could have a child with her (a common practice in ancient Mesopotamia), which he did. This son was named Ishmael (which means God Hears, in response to God hearing their prayer for a child), and it is from his line that the Muslims come.
Sarah perceived Hagar as becoming arrogant because Abraham's firstborn came from her womb, and so Sarah asked Abraham to send the woman away. Abraham did so, and soon after Sarah became pregnant and gave birth to Isaac (which means laughter or laughing one), from whom the Hebraic line descends.
Muslims from Ishmael, Jews from Isaac. Christians, by the way, aren't a racial or familial group like these two, but follow Jesus who was claimed to be of the line of David, a descendant of Isaac. Of course, most Muslims are converts these days, so it's sort of the same situation.
Also, "semitic" refers to a language type, not a people group. Generally, this term is used synonymously with Jew, but that's not technically accurate unless you're using the term "anti-semitic," which has come to mean "anti-Jew." Otherwise, the word semitic stemming from the name of Shem refers to a grouping of similar languages.
This isn't a direct response to you, but it amuses me greatly how many anti-Christian statements I read on Slashdot when so many people (judging by the comments I read here, especially the ones that attempt to pull out Biblical facts) know so little about Christianity. They might judge Christians negatively due to their personal experiences, but that isn't fair grounds to judge an entire religion or everyone who follows that religion. To say otherwise is to advocate the same thing we fight against when we denounce racism or sexism.
I can, because we'll be doing it soon at the major state university at which I work. TBH, most of the faculty/staff don't know how to use the old Office, so them not knowing how to use the new one isn't that big of a deal.
This isn't just a spiteful jab--I love my customers here at the university. The entire point of Office is that, even in an enterprise environment, they can open Word to type a document and be happy with the WYSIWYG. They don't automate a lot of processes, they don't often build templates, and Header/Footer is one of the more advanced functions they use. Their goal is to type a paper or a memo or something, and a lot of software knowledge isn't needed for that.
The Ribbon highlights some of the better tools and makes them more easily accessible. There isn't a whole lot to unlearn beyond File-->Save and I think it'll be an overall positive experience.
As for the "wasted time" of upgrading, the last time we had to do a major upgrade/conversion, we fixed every little problem with everyone's computer (over 800 machines covered by our division) and had relatively few calls for the next several months, leaving us to get on with the work of producing documentation and training. Personally, I think doing an upgrade process every year or two where we get to see ALL of our customers, answer their questions, and resolve some of the smaller issues definitely increases the productivity of everyone. It's an indirect benefit, but certainly a substantial one.
If we really wanted "professional" documents, we'd force them all to switch to LaTeX. That'd be stupid. Office 07 and the training it will inspire (because it will be necessary) will help the employees be more savvy than they were with the old Office, and its features will help them be more productive than if they'd been truly knowledgeable about the older software.
We probably haven't because the law's already in place. I know, here in Missouri, they card you if you're trying to buy a movie that's rated higher than your age permits.
Admittedly, though, they do the same for games. So why can't we leave well-enough alone and hope parents pay attention?
If you can run FFXI, you can run EVE :-P Just turn some of the settings down. I would dualboot two clients on a 2ghz 64bit AMD processor laptop with a 64mb vidcard and 1gb of RAM and have no problems. If you're lagging, get out of Jita ;-)
Bought the game on the 3rd day of my trial and never looked back. That was about a year ago, and I still love it.
I played through Ocarina on the N64 in 3 days.
No, I did not sleep ^_^
Wait, no, this is a FANTASTIC idea! Why don't we just sue the telcos who own the tubes? I mean, they (the telcos) want to start charging end users to access the same content the providers are paying to have uploaded (and who wants net neutrality after all?) on the grounds that they own the lines, which means they own what's going across them, doesn't it?
So it's really the telco's fault that music is shared/pirated/down and uploaded.
No worries, though. I'm going to go patent the idea (since I had the thought, it's my intellectual property, and such things are patentable these days) and sue the pants* off the RIAA when they try it ^_^
*Unfortunately, the pants will probably be on fire.
Unfortunately, the company's name actually appears to be NTP :-P