This idea is a ridiculous folly you noodle-armed nancy-pants. This is the great myth the corps want individuals to believe in.
Actually, you kind of pulled that quote out of context. What I said was that taking on a large corporation over a verbal agreement that you have no proof was ever made is a ridiculous folly. You *do* have to provide proof to win a court case, right? Or will the small claims court just say, "Well, you're a private citizen, and we don't like big companies. Of course you win!"?
I would strongly disagree with this statement. Even companies with legal departments have better things to spend their legal budget on then trying to defend themselves with the legal gymnastics necessary to get out of a written contract.
Fair enough, I understand your point, and it does make sense. If you have the proof, then maybe it is worth going after... but I think it's likely to be a pyrrhic victory, all the same.
Worst case scenario is you could get nothing from them.
No, worst case scenario is that you could get nothing from them, AND waste huge amounts of your precious time & money pursuing a lawsuit for breach of contract with no written evidence of said contract or said breach, and get bogged down in a he-said/she-said situation... and for what? So they'll say, "Fine we'll give you a job?" So they say, "Fine, here's $10k, leave us alone?" If this company is big enough to be offering relocation packages, it probably also is big enough to have a legal department that would make your life hell. While under the law, a verbal agreement may be enforceable as a contract, in practice, a private party taking on a huge corporation over this is a ridiculous folly.
If you don't have it in writing, walk away. They'll simply claim that the manager who "promised" you something had no binding authority to offer any relocation package to you verbally, and then it'll be up to you to claim that he did offer what you say.
If you *DO* have it in writing, and they're still trying to screw you, *walk away*. They're still a company with way more money than you, and they probably have a legal department. The satisfaction you get out of winning a few dollars in a lawsuit are not worth the time & money you'll spend winning it.
Chalk this up to lessons learned in the school of hard knocks. Always get a full accounting of everything they're offering you in writing, signed & dated by someone in HR with the authority to actually say, "Yes, we can give you this." And never, ever, ever quit *before* you've settled all these details. If you did give your notice before leaving, go talk to your boss & try to mend fences. Hopefully you didn't make a stupid / unprofessional "gesture" out of your leaving your present company, and they'll let you back.
At the end of they day, it is not like WalMart censoring music, which does have an effect becuase Wal Mart does strive to be the only retailer across a number of markets and demographics.
Actually, at the end of the day, Wal Mart "censoring" music doesn't make much of a difference either, since there is no legal restriction that prevents you from buying the uncensored versions elsewhere, either. You just don't buy them at Wal Mart -- you buy it online via Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, or any of the other million retailers on the web. Or you go to your local indie, or small music store like Record Town, FYE, Strawberries, Newbury Comics, etc. Last I saw, three of those music-and-movie-only stores were thriving just fine right around the corner from a 24hr/7day super WalMart in the town where I grew up.
What WalMart offers is the "Think Of The Kids!!!!!" solution -- parents buying music at WalMart can assume that it is *probably* sanitized for their children's protection, and anything they buy at WalMart will probably be "Top-40" pop music that their kid will probably like, because it's the same thing everybody else is listening to in their 7th grade history class. WalMart isn't trying to carry every CD ever released, they're trying to carry the ones they can sell huge volumes of and make a good profit on. Think Britney Spears & Justin Timberlake, not "the entire back catalog of this obscure J-Pop group that will sit there gathering dust until the only otaku for 50 miles in any direction comes into the store."
For the people who actually want the curse words, drugs, sex, and violence left in their music, there are plenty of alternatives, even in WalMart-dominated small-town america. WalMart only has the power it is given by consumers -- just like Borders, Tower, and Virgin. If consumers stopped buying CDs at WalMart tomorrow, you can bet that within 2 months, WalMart would either stop selling CDs and use the space to sell other products, or start selling the CDs that consumers want to buy.
So, let me ask you this... let's say, for sake of argument, I am a brilliant speaker, and I happen to enthusiastically, emphatically, support Barack Obama in his bid for the presidency in 2008 (for the record, I'm not, and I don't. But let's spitball this). I send him a videotape of a few speeches I've given to local civic organizations in his support, showing him how great I am at giving persuasive, eloquent speeches to a campaign audience. He decides he'd like to hire me to give speeches, write speeches, press releases, and post occasionally to the Obama2008.com Campaign blog.
Now, by your reasoning, what I'm doing should be regulated, because I'm being paid to express an opinion about a candidate? Why? If it's something I believe, is that okay? And where do you draw the line? Speaking to the public in support of a candidate deserves no special "regulation", paid or unpaid. If you commit libel or slander, then you should *ABSOLUTELY* be held accountable for that, and there are already laws on the books under which you can be prosecuted. So why is there the need for some special statute that affects "bloggers" / "lobbyists" specifically?
Slight correction, before someone else points it out:
with the E-SAPI & Side SAPI plates attached to the Interceptor body armor, the body armor does provide protection from larger-caliber rounds, like an armor-piercing 7.62mm round, which is designed to provide protection from up to 3 7.62x51mm rounds.
If I was a soldier sent to an area with snipers I think I would prefer first to have plenty of Kevlar, this thing would then come second.
I'd agree, if body armor were effective against snipers. But the current body armor system, the Interceptor Body Armor System does not provide any real protection against anything larger than handgun fire, as it doesn't quite earn the "III-A" designation for protectiveness, because it won't stop a.44 Magnum round. Looking at the scale, this means it provides no real protection from Armor-piercing & rifle rounds.
In addition, the Interceptor body armor doesn't provide any face protection, or protection of the limbs, which means there's still a pretty significant exposed surface area for a sniper to fire at that can kill, or effectively cripple even a soldier in a full suit of the body armor.
While it's true that this robot does not replace body armor's effectiveness against small arms fire, it's not meant to replace body armor any more than the JDAM was intended to replace the Minuteman. They're complementary systems, with different purposes & capabilities.
In a fast retreat (even just a short one) you would probable have to leave these 150K$ slowly moving along slowly on it's own in enemy territory.
Better to leave a $150,000 machine behind than a wounded, dying soldier, who is left out in the open because every time you send someone to try and drag him to safety, the would-be rescuer gets sniped at as well. Given that the Packbot only weighs approximately 24kg (see the manufacturer's site for more info), I'd imagine that once these systems are tested out, it won't be all that hard to mount some sort of similar sensor unit on a patrol's Humvee, Bradley, Stryker, or other vehicle, as well. All those vehicles can, I'm sure, handle the additional load of a few kilograms of extra sensors.
Here's a question... and I mean these in all seriousness. Given that DRM is not a necessity (nobody is forcing these artists to apply FairPlay or PlaysForSure or any other such DRM system to their MP3's), and that computers have worked for years without a TCM/TPM chip installed...
Why hasn't some enterprising Slashdotter started a company that manufactures and/or sells DRM/TPM/TCM-free hardware, with GPL'ed software installed? A system that "just works" out of the box would certainly sell, if it had the capabilities that people are looking for. There's lots of talk of how capable *buntu is these days, so it should be possible in theory... what's the roadblock?
In this day of direct-to-consumer sales over the internet, why aren't more artists selling their music in DRM-less formats? After all, if the DMCA criminalizes breaking copy protection, there shouldn't be any restriction on "fair use" copying of media that is unprotected, right? So why aren't these artists on board, and why are we supporting artists who support / work for companies that support DRM?
Yes, I understand that Microsoft, Apple, RIAA, MPAA, and all these other companies & organizations want you to use their stuff, and buy their products... but you don't *have* to do that. There's clearly a demand for DRM-less / TPM-less media & hardware... so why is nobody filling that demand, and showing people that there's a viable alternative to the DRM-encumbered future that MSFT & the RIAA want?
It seems that it would be far more productive to simply say, "We will not spend our money on you, or your products, so long as you choose to use DRM-encumbered formats & platforms." Saying "DRM is evil," and rushing out to buy that new DVD, or download that new track from iTunes, only serves to tell the companies that you don't consider it "that" evil, and you don't consider it "that" much of an encumbrance.
Does anybody actually put their money where their mouth is, and refuse to buy DRM'ed media, based on principle? I'd really like to see a show of hands, because for all the noise made on Slashdot, it sure seems like iTunes must be selling those 2 billion tracks to *SOMEBODY*...
So a company with 80 employees will save 40.000,- which they can hire another employee with.
Sure, if you assume that salary is the only cost associated with hiring a person. Of course, you'd be wrong to assume that. The 40,000 / year salary is probably about half the total cost to the company of adding a new employee.
Considering the re-education costs of Office->Office2007 is the same as office->OpenOffice.
By which assumption, you dramatically underestimate the lost productivity of switching to a completely different program, with it's own set of terminology, bugs, and quirks. Sorry, but OO.o is NOT a drop-in replacement for Word. The transition from Offfice 2003 to 2007, for the bulk of users, will probably be significantly shorter than the transition from Office to OpenOffice, regardless of "new layout" stuff.
Or use the 40.000,- to learn your sysadmins howto admin linux and windows clients so they can assist in transitioning complete Windows desktops to Linux Desktops whereever possible to save even more money...
Sure, and you can buy completely new hardware to make sure all your desktops are compatible with existing linux drivers... and you can educate all your users about a completely different operating system... and completely new applications... and new formats... and... and... oh wait. That'll cost more than the supposed 40,000, won't it?
And let's not forget that spending 40k on "certification" programs for your sysadmins is probably mostly money wasted. Just because the certification doesn't have "MICROSOFT" in the name doesn't mean it's somehow going to guarantee you'll end up with sysadmins. It takes a lot more than a 3-week cert program to become a competent sys admin on a brand new operating system.
Alright, how do you see producing 1,000 units as failure? Would not that be a sign of some success?
So if I create the world's prettiest snake oil, and produce & sell 1000 units, I can claim success, even if my product does *nothing* but waste money? Moving units != improving the educational outcomes of disadvantaged children around the world.
While the grandparent post is a bit over-the-top in its criticism, I have huge reservations about the OLPC project, because it's millions of dollars being spent by developing nations on what is, at best, a gamble. They're gambling that giving kids laptops will somehow produce smarter, more educated, more accomplished children. There's no data that I've seen that supports this assertion, and there's plenty of data out there showing how those millions might be better spent to produce better educational outcomes for these kids.
So from where I'm sitting, it seems like a bizarre waste of time & money on a program with questionable effectiveness, when there's simple things that the money could be spent on that we *know* have a beneficial effect. (Smaller class sizes, better teacher training, better facilities, health care to keep the kids in school, rather than home sick...)
I hope it does work, don't get me wrong. But wishing really hard doesn't make a program effective.
All that other stuff you said sounds like a fucking lot of money, way more that $100 per child.
It may very well be. But it's a better expenditure of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, because it's an investment in things that are *proven* to increase the quality of education, rather than a gamble that kids will somehow get smarter because you've handed them a laptop.
The average slashdot user probably has no ability or interest in improving water supplies in a random foreign country, but might take more of an interest in helping kids from the third-world if there's a geek angle to it.
The funny thing is, other than a lot of sound & fury, signifying nothing, I don't see too many people here on Slashdot rushing to support the project, either. It's something that sounds good on paper, but there's little to no hard evidence to show that it's actually something that will be beneficial to students on any level. I keep asking someone to show me their evidence for this, and all I'm hearing in response is, "OMG STFU, it's a w1ck3d c001 project, I wish I had one."
At the very most, you could argue instead of buying all the laptops at once you could by a few thousand for a random selection of schools as a test (though there's probably something about the fact that by 'flooding the market' with them there would be no resale or trade in the laptops).
And if you've read anything I've written so far on the topic, that's exactly what I am arguing. The effectiveness of the program needs to be demonstrated before it's decided that we need to roll it out to hundreds of millions of kids everywhere, at a cost of billions of dollars. Until there's some hard evidence that shows the kids with laptops have better educational outcomes than those without, it's just as likely to turn into a "THINK OF THE KIDS!" waste of time & money.
I'm not against the concept of giving kids laptops if it makes sense. So far, I've seen no evidence that it makes sense. If you have some evidence to share, I'd be happy to take it into consideration.
No, it's not. 50 million dollars is very cheap for a government program.
Oh, sure... governments routinely spend hundred of billions of dollars, so 50 million is no big deal. However, just because a government program is *relatively* cheap, that does not make it valuable, effective, or a good use of the money.
Allow me to throw some facts at you about Thailand, all taken from the CIA World Factbook entry on Thailand, which I think we can agree is a reasonably accurate source.
Population of Thailand, ages 0 - 14: 14,242,700, 2006 est.
Budget of the government of Thailand: $30.64 billion in revenues, 2005 est.
Let's crunch these numbers for a few seconds. Assume an even distribution of children across the entire 0 - 14 age range, and furthermore, assume the government decides it will begin giving laptops only to those students whose age is greater than or equal to 6 years, and less than 11 years -- age range 6 - 10. That's ~5,000,000 laptops.
Total cost to Thailand at US$100 per laptop: $500,000,000.00
This means that that spending ~$500 million on OLPC means that 1.5 to 2% of of all government revenues are being spent on the gamble that giving each student a laptop will mean that they somehow get a better education. And it's just that -- a gamble. There's no evidence that it will have the intended results.
Almost all governemnts on the world can afford to gamble that, even more on something with the potential of OLPC.
And this fuzzy thinking is exactly my problem with OLPC. What, exactly, is the "potential of OLPC" that you're touting? I see lots of potential for abuse, waste, and fraud -- when your average per-capita yearly income is $8,600, an extra $100 from the sale of a laptop sure could go a long way. I frankly see very little upside that can't be had by spending the same money on training more qualified teachers, hiring more qualified teachers to reduce class sizes (both of these are proven techniques that do have large amounts of data to support their effectiveness, especially in poor school systems), and putting a few internet-connected computer terminals in the school's library for community use.
How is giving a laptop to every school-aged child in Thailand -- at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars -- going to result in better-educated kids? Nobody seems to be able to answer that. And if it were such a benefit, why haven't far richer countries all around the world already implemented a program like this for their own children? In the US and most other "First World" countries, a $100 "educational laptop" would, barely be a blip on the radar of most family's incomes & most school districts' budgets.
You seem to be making the mistake that (every/the) receiving country is totally in a deplorable state and has needs lower in maslov's pyramid.
Actually, no, no I'm not. The OLPC site specifically says that children from the "poorest" and "most remote" places would stand to benefit. "poorest" and "most remote" does not mean "urban, modernized, and reasonably well developed." But, even if I concede your point that it's only geared towards students in fairly developed countries, that still doesn't answer the fundamental question here: regardless of what country the children live in, is there any data that supports the assertion that simply "having a laptop" makes for a better educational system? If there's no good data, then this is simply a solution in search of a problem.
By all means, show me where you derive your expectation that the OLPC project "makes sense", in the sense that it will result in a substantial, quantifiable improvement in the educational outcomes for these students. I'm perfectly willing to hear the argument, but I've yet to see it made.
The problem is in the actual curriculum. Where are the books/texts these kids need to read on them. Who is going to write those? What is this going to do the rest of the local market for educational books?
All good questions. All questions which the OLPC project does not address. Where are the books & texts? "Give them a computer!" Who's going to write them? "Give them a computer!" What will it do to the rest of the local market? "Give them a computer!" There seems to be this bizarre expectation that children will log onto the web and magically be transformed into Richard Stallman or Bill Gates.
Take, for example, the children who speak Tagalog. If there are no textbooks written in the language, where is the "wealth" of online information they'll find, written in Tagalog? Do we point them to the couple thousand articles on Wikipedia and say, "have fun!"? This money is better spent on one of two things: Translating textbooks to local languages, or teaching the kids to speak English (or some other, widely spoken language in which good textbooks are printed -- French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, what have you), and then hiring & training qualified teachers to teach.
I'll use OLPC's argument against them: In their FAQ, they compare having a laptop to having a pencil. Did you become magically smarter when your teacher handed you your first pencil? Right -- it's a tool. Not an outcome. It's a means, not an end.
How do you know the OLPC program is a failure? What criteria were set for it to be a success that it hasn't met yet?
More to the point, what criteria were set at all for the program? All I see, looking at the laptop.org web site, are a bunch of fuzzy "Think of the kids!" generalities that talk about how wonderful it would be for the world's poorest kids in the remotest regions to have laptops. Not because there's hard evidence to show that having a laptop will substantially improve the quality of education for these kids, but because it'll make them feel good, and give them a sense of responsibility.
Don't believe it? Go look for yourself. The OLPC FAQ page brings us such disarmingly trite generalities as:
Why do children in developing nations need laptops?
Laptops are both a window and a tool: a window into the world and a tool with which to think. They are a wonderful way for all children to learn learning through independent interaction and exploration.
That's right! Little Juan, Choudary, and Byung-Sun need a "tool" with which to think -- and I thought it was called a "brain". No, they need a window into the world, and a way to learn learning through independent interaction and exploration! Never mind that all of that can be accomplished *without* a $100 laptop in the hands of each child. Want a window into the world? Get them a good library with a few current events publications, and a computer lab with a few internet connected computers. You can build a heck of a good public school library (or 2 or 3) for $50 million dollars
Why is it important for each child to have a computer? What's wrong with community-access centers?
One does not think of community pencils--kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful. Furthermore, there are many reasons it is important for a child to own something--like a football, doll, or book--not the least of which being that these belongings will be well-maintained through love and care.
Where to begin?? To compare a $100 dollar laptop with a pencil that literally costs pennies is ridiculous. And the final argument, that warm-fuzzy-hot-chocolate-lump-in-your-throat claim... "It's important that the kids OWN something to maintain through love... and care." Awwwww.... how can we say NO to that?! Once again, footballs, dolls, and books don't cost $100 per child.
Your final claim:
The OLPC may fail, but it hasn't failed yet and it is silly to describe it as having failed before it's even been tried.
Makes my mind boggle. By this same logic, anything that hasn't been tried, no matter how stupid, far-fetched, or wrong-headed, should be tried. After all, if it hasn't been tried, it's silly to predict that it will fail, right? Might as well just spend the 50 million dollars and see what happens!
50 million dollars (500,000 laptops * $100) is a LOT of money to gamble with in a developing nation. I'd much rather see them spend that money on projects that have been shown to have a significant positive impact on educational quality -- smaller class sizes; basic health care so that kids don't miss weeks of school; upgrading school facilities with good lights, good water, and a reasonable amount of climate control -- good roofs to keep the rain out, ventilation to keep things cooler in summer, heaters to keep things cooler in winter. Save the OLPC project until it's actually shown that a laptop in the hands of each child will benefit them, rather than wasting money, wasting time, and putting yet another cement block around the neck of developing countries.
I agree. The developer are mostly focusing on Firefox 3.0 anyway, because of the major improvements it will have. The 2.0 was just a small upgrade in the middle, mostly because of the PR. Because the changes in 3.0 require a lot of development and a lot of testing, they didn't want to hurry it. So I wouldn't judge Firefox because of the 2.0. Better wait for 3.0.
If somebody made THAT argument in public, they'd be strung up. But because it's Firefox, it's okay? Come on. 2.0 is a MAJOR release. If it was a temporary / bugfix release, it should have continued as 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, and so on... and the "3.0" version should have been labeled 2.0.
Clearly, Mozilla felt this release was "the second MAJOR release of Firefox," with all that that statement implies. And the generally sluggish performance & horrendous memory footprint of the 2.0 version of Firefox is the main reason I switched *back* to using Safari for home use, and IE6 at work.
Dude, easy rule of thumb: Post before hitting the pipe.
If enough people voted NONE OF THE ABOVE, then none of the lesser evils would be elected and we can try again with different candidates.
And in what possible reality would George Bush not vote for George Bush, and John Kerry not vote for John Kerry? In your proposed scenario, each race ends, decided not by the people being represented, but by which candidate has a bigger family, while everybody else sits on their hands and says, "Well I don't like either guy" and hopes for a run-off. Would you really want to see a *national* election, affecting the lives & fates of 300 million Americans & billions of other people around the world, decided 2 votes to 1?
What I have been doing instead of voting is turning up and spoiling a ballot paper, usually by writing something asking for a better choice of candidates.
And I'm sure that the machines that scan the ballots feel sympathy for you, and are going to get right on that as soon as they, you know, become sentient.
Amen to Yagu's statements. I think for Linux to gain any measure of "mainstream" acceptance outside of business use, the best way to approach it is similar to what Apple does: choose a distro, choose a small subset of the available hardware, and make sure that distro "just works" with that hardware.
My impression of the Linux community is that they tend to favor breadth of support ("I can install and run Linux on my toaster oven!") over depth of usable support. I guess there's more geek cred in getting Linux running on a toaster oven than in trying to really squash all of the bugs that prevent that webcam from working when (and *only* when) it's connected via a USB hub. (Yes, that is an actual bug I ran into with Fedora Core 4 on my home system. My logitech webcam worked great if plugged into one of the ports tied directly to the motherboard... plugged in through a Hub, it would be detected, but unusable.)
You can't reasonably expect a mainstream user ("dear old mom & pop") to spend the 2 weeks I spent getting everything finally working on my FC4 system. The solution is simple -- you either try to convert them after they've spent a ton of money at Dell.com buying a new set of hardware that may-or-may-not work right with Linux, or you sell them a complete package, like Dell (or Apple, to cite a case of a non-Windows vendor doing this) does, where they get hardware that "just works" with the operating system installed. Linux would be the best of both worlds in this model -- nothing prevents you from installing on whatever hardware you want to mess around with, but if you *want* to run Linux, but don't want the hassle of tweaking and fiddling for weeks after you buy everything, then you can simply buy a piece of hardware with a distro that's certified on that hardware, and choose from a selection of reasonably-priced peripherals that also work properly with that hardware & os.
Of course, all of this gives rise to this question: I know there are some small vendors out there doing just this (selling Linux preinstalled on desktops & laptops) -- so why aren't they being flooded with orders from people? (And please, *think* before giving the standard/. knee-jerk response of "convicted monopolist!" or "anticompetitive measures." The fact that these companies & Apple still exist & operate is certainly a counterpoint to any claim that they're not getting business because they're being unethically & illegally "run out of business." They're not out of business... so why aren't they having a greater impact on the mainstream user community?)
If MS was making no money from regular people, they would not bother with all this nonsense copy protection.
It's a good thing I never made that claim, then! What I did say was that the core of MSFT's business -- enterprise customers -- will be unaffected because they have standardized hardware configurations that are deployed everywhere.
MS seems to be finally digging its own grave, I just don't understand how it is that nobody there seems to realize hopw much they are bothering their costumers(not me, I stopped using their wares long time ago).
So you don't use MSFT products, but you're absolutely white with terror about how some new licensing scheme in Vista is going to affect Microsoft & their business? How very touching, I'm sure your concern will just warm the cockles of Steve Ballmer's heart.
The point remains that very few people will actually be affected by this, for the reasons I stated:
This new policy is *less* restrictive than WinXP's.
The only "enthusiasts" who are constantly upgrading and still running Windows today are almost surely gamers, as that's the only reason an "enthusiast" wouldn't have switched over to some other OS for the freedom Linux and *BSD afford.
The core of MSFT's business, enterprise customers, won't be affected by this in the least.
There's absolutely no reason here for MSFT to worry that this "1-major-upgrade" policy will affect their business. There's lots of reasons & things that MSFT should worry about... but this really isn't one of them.
The PC enthusiasts may have helped Microsoft along, but let's be honest -- Microsoft's bread & butter today is businesses, the companies that buy copies of Office & Windows by the dozens, hundreds, or thousands, not the guy with three computers in his basement who enjoys tinkering. As somebody pointed out already, the enthusiasts are probably already using something other than Windows.
For a business, given that most large businesses with a rolling upgrade/replacement plan, they will buy a PC, run it on someone's desktop for about 3 - 5 years unchanged, and then decommission it, this "1 major upgrade" is overkill. The enthusiasts still running MSFT products due to gaming may be a vocal minority, but:
This policy is *more* lenient than the current XP policy.
It's not that hard to get it reactivated.
I don't see this hurting that many people, or giving rise to any "more" of a gray market than already exists.
Comparing a.0 release to an established release, and to Internet Explorer, is just pretty laughable where I am sitting.
And where exactly is it that you're sitting? Apparently, it's a place where you can't access any tech news site in the world -- you know, the same tech news sites that have been breathlessly hailing Firefox as the David that will slay the IE Goliath? Like it or not, if you want to compete with IE for the hearts & minds of browser users, you had better get used to being compared to IE, and not always comparing favorably. Dismissing concerns out of hand as "laughable" because it's a ".0" release is silly, and breeds complacency, which breeds IE 6.0
I'm using FF 2.0, and I haven't seen any new issues -- it's still a memory hog (~350 MB consumed right now, with only 1 tab open, been running since early this morning, only default extensions & themes installed.), and it still does hang or crash occasionally on my PPC Mac system. Overall, I see very little reason to rush to upgrade, because I really don't see much in the way of compelling new features -- I'll agree with your comment that 1.5 is "good enough". I use a browser to browse the web, I don't care if it can also integrate with ITunes, Google Desktop, AIM, GTalk, Skype, and thirty seven other applications I'm running; I only upgraded because I was curious to see what all the enhancements were, and whether or not some of the memory leaking would be resolved.
The original question was kind of dumb, anyway. It assumes he has some special insight into what a broad segment of the market would choose with no knowledge of any browser, and no browser pre-installed. What would happen is very common sense, and looks like this:
The users familiar with & sold on Firefox, or Opera, would choose their preferred browser.
The users unfamiliar with what a "browser" is would choose the default.
It's a Microsoft Platform. While/. would howl "monopolist!" over it, does ANYBODY think that they're going to actually recommend anything other than IE as the default? And more to the point, is there anybody here who really believes it would be right to force them to NOT recommend their own products? (And if so, I'm really curious -- on what grounds would it be "okay" to do this?)
Not to mention that I can't just go and throw code into the Linux Kernel if I wake up with the burning desire to do so. I'd say that most successful open source programs are less anarchy than they are meritocracy -- you prove your value to a project by contributing, and you earn responsibilities & expanded rights as a result.
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If you don't have it in writing, walk away. They'll simply claim that the manager who "promised" you something had no binding authority to offer any relocation package to you verbally, and then it'll be up to you to claim that he did offer what you say.
If you *DO* have it in writing, and they're still trying to screw you, *walk away*. They're still a company with way more money than you, and they probably have a legal department. The satisfaction you get out of winning a few dollars in a lawsuit are not worth the time & money you'll spend winning it.
Chalk this up to lessons learned in the school of hard knocks. Always get a full accounting of everything they're offering you in writing, signed & dated by someone in HR with the authority to actually say, "Yes, we can give you this." And never, ever, ever quit *before* you've settled all these details. If you did give your notice before leaving, go talk to your boss & try to mend fences. Hopefully you didn't make a stupid / unprofessional "gesture" out of your leaving your present company, and they'll let you back.
What WalMart offers is the "Think Of The Kids!!!!!" solution -- parents buying music at WalMart can assume that it is *probably* sanitized for their children's protection, and anything they buy at WalMart will probably be "Top-40" pop music that their kid will probably like, because it's the same thing everybody else is listening to in their 7th grade history class. WalMart isn't trying to carry every CD ever released, they're trying to carry the ones they can sell huge volumes of and make a good profit on. Think Britney Spears & Justin Timberlake, not "the entire back catalog of this obscure J-Pop group that will sit there gathering dust until the only otaku for 50 miles in any direction comes into the store."
For the people who actually want the curse words, drugs, sex, and violence left in their music, there are plenty of alternatives, even in WalMart-dominated small-town america. WalMart only has the power it is given by consumers -- just like Borders, Tower, and Virgin. If consumers stopped buying CDs at WalMart tomorrow, you can bet that within 2 months, WalMart would either stop selling CDs and use the space to sell other products, or start selling the CDs that consumers want to buy.
You know, I'm pretty sure the British government received a copy of it... look around, maybe you still have it. :)
So, let me ask you this... let's say, for sake of argument, I am a brilliant speaker, and I happen to enthusiastically, emphatically, support Barack Obama in his bid for the presidency in 2008 (for the record, I'm not, and I don't. But let's spitball this). I send him a videotape of a few speeches I've given to local civic organizations in his support, showing him how great I am at giving persuasive, eloquent speeches to a campaign audience. He decides he'd like to hire me to give speeches, write speeches, press releases, and post occasionally to the Obama2008.com Campaign blog.
Now, by your reasoning, what I'm doing should be regulated, because I'm being paid to express an opinion about a candidate? Why? If it's something I believe, is that okay? And where do you draw the line? Speaking to the public in support of a candidate deserves no special "regulation", paid or unpaid. If you commit libel or slander, then you should *ABSOLUTELY* be held accountable for that, and there are already laws on the books under which you can be prosecuted. So why is there the need for some special statute that affects "bloggers" / "lobbyists" specifically?
Slight correction, before someone else points it out:
with the E-SAPI & Side SAPI plates attached to the Interceptor body armor, the body armor does provide protection from larger-caliber rounds, like an armor-piercing 7.62mm round, which is designed to provide protection from up to 3 7.62x51mm rounds.
In addition, the Interceptor body armor doesn't provide any face protection, or protection of the limbs, which means there's still a pretty significant exposed surface area for a sniper to fire at that can kill, or effectively cripple even a soldier in a full suit of the body armor.
While it's true that this robot does not replace body armor's effectiveness against small arms fire, it's not meant to replace body armor any more than the JDAM was intended to replace the Minuteman. They're complementary systems, with different purposes & capabilities.
Better to leave a $150,000 machine behind than a wounded, dying soldier, who is left out in the open because every time you send someone to try and drag him to safety, the would-be rescuer gets sniped at as well. Given that the Packbot only weighs approximately 24kg (see the manufacturer's site for more info), I'd imagine that once these systems are tested out, it won't be all that hard to mount some sort of similar sensor unit on a patrol's Humvee, Bradley, Stryker, or other vehicle, as well. All those vehicles can, I'm sure, handle the additional load of a few kilograms of extra sensors.
Here's a question... and I mean these in all seriousness. Given that DRM is not a necessity (nobody is forcing these artists to apply FairPlay or PlaysForSure or any other such DRM system to their MP3's), and that computers have worked for years without a TCM/TPM chip installed...
Why hasn't some enterprising Slashdotter started a company that manufactures and/or sells DRM/TPM/TCM-free hardware, with GPL'ed software installed? A system that "just works" out of the box would certainly sell, if it had the capabilities that people are looking for. There's lots of talk of how capable *buntu is these days, so it should be possible in theory... what's the roadblock?
In this day of direct-to-consumer sales over the internet, why aren't more artists selling their music in DRM-less formats? After all, if the DMCA criminalizes breaking copy protection, there shouldn't be any restriction on "fair use" copying of media that is unprotected, right? So why aren't these artists on board, and why are we supporting artists who support / work for companies that support DRM?
Yes, I understand that Microsoft, Apple, RIAA, MPAA, and all these other companies & organizations want you to use their stuff, and buy their products... but you don't *have* to do that. There's clearly a demand for DRM-less / TPM-less media & hardware... so why is nobody filling that demand, and showing people that there's a viable alternative to the DRM-encumbered future that MSFT & the RIAA want?
It seems that it would be far more productive to simply say, "We will not spend our money on you, or your products, so long as you choose to use DRM-encumbered formats & platforms." Saying "DRM is evil," and rushing out to buy that new DVD, or download that new track from iTunes, only serves to tell the companies that you don't consider it "that" evil, and you don't consider it "that" much of an encumbrance.
Does anybody actually put their money where their mouth is, and refuse to buy DRM'ed media, based on principle? I'd really like to see a show of hands, because for all the noise made on Slashdot, it sure seems like iTunes must be selling those 2 billion tracks to *SOMEBODY*...
Sure, if you assume that salary is the only cost associated with hiring a person. Of course, you'd be wrong to assume that. The 40,000 / year salary is probably about half the total cost to the company of adding a new employee.
By which assumption, you dramatically underestimate the lost productivity of switching to a completely different program, with it's own set of terminology, bugs, and quirks. Sorry, but OO.o is NOT a drop-in replacement for Word. The transition from Offfice 2003 to 2007, for the bulk of users, will probably be significantly shorter than the transition from Office to OpenOffice, regardless of "new layout" stuff.
Sure, and you can buy completely new hardware to make sure all your desktops are compatible with existing linux drivers... and you can educate all your users about a completely different operating system... and completely new applications... and new formats... and... and... oh wait. That'll cost more than the supposed 40,000, won't it?
And let's not forget that spending 40k on "certification" programs for your sysadmins is probably mostly money wasted. Just because the certification doesn't have "MICROSOFT" in the name doesn't mean it's somehow going to guarantee you'll end up with sysadmins. It takes a lot more than a 3-week cert program to become a competent sys admin on a brand new operating system.
So if I create the world's prettiest snake oil, and produce & sell 1000 units, I can claim success, even if my product does *nothing* but waste money? Moving units != improving the educational outcomes of disadvantaged children around the world.
While the grandparent post is a bit over-the-top in its criticism, I have huge reservations about the OLPC project, because it's millions of dollars being spent by developing nations on what is, at best, a gamble. They're gambling that giving kids laptops will somehow produce smarter, more educated, more accomplished children. There's no data that I've seen that supports this assertion, and there's plenty of data out there showing how those millions might be better spent to produce better educational outcomes for these kids.
So from where I'm sitting, it seems like a bizarre waste of time & money on a program with questionable effectiveness, when there's simple things that the money could be spent on that we *know* have a beneficial effect. (Smaller class sizes, better teacher training, better facilities, health care to keep the kids in school, rather than home sick...)
I hope it does work, don't get me wrong. But wishing really hard doesn't make a program effective.
The funny thing is, other than a lot of sound & fury, signifying nothing, I don't see too many people here on Slashdot rushing to support the project, either. It's something that sounds good on paper, but there's little to no hard evidence to show that it's actually something that will be beneficial to students on any level. I keep asking someone to show me their evidence for this, and all I'm hearing in response is, "OMG STFU, it's a w1ck3d c001 project, I wish I had one."
And if you've read anything I've written so far on the topic, that's exactly what I am arguing. The effectiveness of the program needs to be demonstrated before it's decided that we need to roll it out to hundreds of millions of kids everywhere, at a cost of billions of dollars. Until there's some hard evidence that shows the kids with laptops have better educational outcomes than those without, it's just as likely to turn into a "THINK OF THE KIDS!" waste of time & money.
I'm not against the concept of giving kids laptops if it makes sense. So far, I've seen no evidence that it makes sense. If you have some evidence to share, I'd be happy to take it into consideration.
Allow me to throw some facts at you about Thailand, all taken from the CIA World Factbook entry on Thailand, which I think we can agree is a reasonably accurate source.
- Population of Thailand, ages 0 - 14: 14,242,700, 2006 est.
- Budget of the government of Thailand: $30.64 billion in revenues, 2005 est.
Let's crunch these numbers for a few seconds. Assume an even distribution of children across the entire 0 - 14 age range, and furthermore, assume the government decides it will begin giving laptops only to those students whose age is greater than or equal to 6 years, and less than 11 years -- age range 6 - 10. That's ~5,000,000 laptops.Total cost to Thailand at US$100 per laptop: $500,000,000.00
This means that that spending ~$500 million on OLPC means that 1.5 to 2% of of all government revenues are being spent on the gamble that giving each student a laptop will mean that they somehow get a better education. And it's just that -- a gamble. There's no evidence that it will have the intended results.
And this fuzzy thinking is exactly my problem with OLPC. What, exactly, is the "potential of OLPC" that you're touting? I see lots of potential for abuse, waste, and fraud -- when your average per-capita yearly income is $8,600, an extra $100 from the sale of a laptop sure could go a long way. I frankly see very little upside that can't be had by spending the same money on training more qualified teachers, hiring more qualified teachers to reduce class sizes (both of these are proven techniques that do have large amounts of data to support their effectiveness, especially in poor school systems), and putting a few internet-connected computer terminals in the school's library for community use.
How is giving a laptop to every school-aged child in Thailand -- at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars -- going to result in better-educated kids? Nobody seems to be able to answer that. And if it were such a benefit, why haven't far richer countries all around the world already implemented a program like this for their own children? In the US and most other "First World" countries, a $100 "educational laptop" would, barely be a blip on the radar of most family's incomes & most school districts' budgets.
By all means, show me where you derive your expectation that the OLPC project "makes sense", in the sense that it will result in a substantial, quantifiable improvement in the educational outcomes for these students. I'm perfectly willing to hear the argument, but I've yet to see it made.
All good questions. All questions which the OLPC project does not address. Where are the books & texts? "Give them a computer!" Who's going to write them? "Give them a computer!" What will it do to the rest of the local market? "Give them a computer!" There seems to be this bizarre expectation that children will log onto the web and magically be transformed into Richard Stallman or Bill Gates.
Take, for example, the children who speak Tagalog. If there are no textbooks written in the language, where is the "wealth" of online information they'll find, written in Tagalog? Do we point them to the couple thousand articles on Wikipedia and say, "have fun!"? This money is better spent on one of two things: Translating textbooks to local languages, or teaching the kids to speak English (or some other, widely spoken language in which good textbooks are printed -- French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, what have you), and then hiring & training qualified teachers to teach.
I'll use OLPC's argument against them: In their FAQ, they compare having a laptop to having a pencil. Did you become magically smarter when your teacher handed you your first pencil? Right -- it's a tool. Not an outcome . It's a means, not an end.
Don't believe it? Go look for yourself. The OLPC FAQ page brings us such disarmingly trite generalities as:
That's right! Little Juan, Choudary, and Byung-Sun need a "tool" with which to think -- and I thought it was called a "brain". No, they need a window into the world, and a way to learn learning through independent interaction and exploration! Never mind that all of that can be accomplished *without* a $100 laptop in the hands of each child. Want a window into the world? Get them a good library with a few current events publications, and a computer lab with a few internet connected computers. You can build a heck of a good public school library (or 2 or 3) for $50 million dollars
But wait -- there's more in the FAQ!
Where to begin?? To compare a $100 dollar laptop with a pencil that literally costs pennies is ridiculous. And the final argument, that warm-fuzzy-hot-chocolate-lump-in-your-throat claim... "It's important that the kids OWN something to maintain through love... and care." Awwwww.... how can we say NO to that?! Once again, footballs, dolls, and books don't cost $100 per child.
Your final claim: Makes my mind boggle. By this same logic, anything that hasn't been tried, no matter how stupid, far-fetched, or wrong-headed, should be tried. After all, if it hasn't been tried, it's silly to predict that it will fail, right? Might as well just spend the 50 million dollars and see what happens!
50 million dollars (500,000 laptops * $100) is a LOT of money to gamble with in a developing nation. I'd much rather see them spend that money on projects that have been shown to have a significant positive impact on educational quality -- smaller class sizes; basic health care so that kids don't miss weeks of school; upgrading school facilities with good lights, good water, and a reasonable amount of climate control -- good roofs to keep the rain out, ventilation to keep things cooler in summer, heaters to keep things cooler in winter. Save the OLPC project until it's actually shown that a laptop in the hands of each child will benefit them, rather than wasting money, wasting time, and putting yet another cement block around the neck of developing countries.
s/Firefox/Internet Explorer/g
s/3.0/7.0/g
s/2.0/6.0/g
If somebody made THAT argument in public, they'd be strung up. But because it's Firefox, it's okay? Come on. 2.0 is a MAJOR release. If it was a temporary / bugfix release, it should have continued as 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, and so on... and the "3.0" version should have been labeled 2.0.
Clearly, Mozilla felt this release was "the second MAJOR release of Firefox," with all that that statement implies. And the generally sluggish performance & horrendous memory footprint of the 2.0 version of Firefox is the main reason I switched *back* to using Safari for home use, and IE6 at work.
Yeah, or somebody equally neutral, like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity!
AIR AMERICA? OMFG, YMBFJ.
And in what possible reality would George Bush not vote for George Bush, and John Kerry not vote for John Kerry? In your proposed scenario, each race ends, decided not by the people being represented, but by which candidate has a bigger family, while everybody else sits on their hands and says, "Well I don't like either guy" and hopes for a run-off. Would you really want to see a *national* election, affecting the lives & fates of 300 million Americans & billions of other people around the world, decided 2 votes to 1?
And I'm sure that the machines that scan the ballots feel sympathy for you, and are going to get right on that as soon as they, you know, become sentient.
Amen to Yagu's statements. I think for Linux to gain any measure of "mainstream" acceptance outside of business use, the best way to approach it is similar to what Apple does: choose a distro, choose a small subset of the available hardware, and make sure that distro "just works" with that hardware.
/. knee-jerk response of "convicted monopolist!" or "anticompetitive measures." The fact that these companies & Apple still exist & operate is certainly a counterpoint to any claim that they're not getting business because they're being unethically & illegally "run out of business." They're not out of business... so why aren't they having a greater impact on the mainstream user community?)
My impression of the Linux community is that they tend to favor breadth of support ("I can install and run Linux on my toaster oven!") over depth of usable support. I guess there's more geek cred in getting Linux running on a toaster oven than in trying to really squash all of the bugs that prevent that webcam from working when (and *only* when) it's connected via a USB hub. (Yes, that is an actual bug I ran into with Fedora Core 4 on my home system. My logitech webcam worked great if plugged into one of the ports tied directly to the motherboard... plugged in through a Hub, it would be detected, but unusable.)
You can't reasonably expect a mainstream user ("dear old mom & pop") to spend the 2 weeks I spent getting everything finally working on my FC4 system. The solution is simple -- you either try to convert them after they've spent a ton of money at Dell.com buying a new set of hardware that may-or-may-not work right with Linux, or you sell them a complete package, like Dell (or Apple, to cite a case of a non-Windows vendor doing this) does, where they get hardware that "just works" with the operating system installed. Linux would be the best of both worlds in this model -- nothing prevents you from installing on whatever hardware you want to mess around with, but if you *want* to run Linux, but don't want the hassle of tweaking and fiddling for weeks after you buy everything, then you can simply buy a piece of hardware with a distro that's certified on that hardware, and choose from a selection of reasonably-priced peripherals that also work properly with that hardware & os.
Of course, all of this gives rise to this question: I know there are some small vendors out there doing just this (selling Linux preinstalled on desktops & laptops) -- so why aren't they being flooded with orders from people? (And please, *think* before giving the standard
It's a good thing I never made that claim, then! What I did say was that the core of MSFT's business -- enterprise customers -- will be unaffected because they have standardized hardware configurations that are deployed everywhere.
So you don't use MSFT products, but you're absolutely white with terror about how some new licensing scheme in Vista is going to affect Microsoft & their business? How very touching, I'm sure your concern will just warm the cockles of Steve Ballmer's heart.
The point remains that very few people will actually be affected by this, for the reasons I stated:
- This new policy is *less* restrictive than WinXP's.
- The only "enthusiasts" who are constantly upgrading and still running Windows today are almost surely gamers, as that's the only reason an "enthusiast" wouldn't have switched over to some other OS for the freedom Linux and *BSD afford.
- The core of MSFT's business, enterprise customers, won't be affected by this in the least.
There's absolutely no reason here for MSFT to worry that this "1-major-upgrade" policy will affect their business. There's lots of reasons & things that MSFT should worry about... but this really isn't one of them.For a business, given that most large businesses with a rolling upgrade/replacement plan, they will buy a PC, run it on someone's desktop for about 3 - 5 years unchanged, and then decommission it, this "1 major upgrade" is overkill. The enthusiasts still running MSFT products due to gaming may be a vocal minority, but:
I don't see this hurting that many people, or giving rise to any "more" of a gray market than already exists.
I'm using FF 2.0, and I haven't seen any new issues -- it's still a memory hog (~350 MB consumed right now, with only 1 tab open, been running since early this morning, only default extensions & themes installed.), and it still does hang or crash occasionally on my PPC Mac system. Overall, I see very little reason to rush to upgrade, because I really don't see much in the way of compelling new features -- I'll agree with your comment that 1.5 is "good enough". I use a browser to browse the web, I don't care if it can also integrate with ITunes, Google Desktop, AIM, GTalk, Skype, and thirty seven other applications I'm running; I only upgraded because I was curious to see what all the enhancements were, and whether or not some of the memory leaking would be resolved.
Not to mention that I can't just go and throw code into the Linux Kernel if I wake up with the burning desire to do so. I'd say that most successful open source programs are less anarchy than they are meritocracy -- you prove your value to a project by contributing, and you earn responsibilities & expanded rights as a result.