HIS best interest? The vast majority of his fortune is or will be going to various charities. It's in OUR best interest to see his company prosper financially, as much as we'd hate to admit it (and I think most of Slashdot becomes nauseous at the idea)
The people laid off should be the ones with the lowest skill-set, regardless of their location. Or does equality only apply domestically?
If companies lay off their best employees (foreign or domestic) because they're the most expensive to keep on board, those companies will suffer in the long-term, which is good for exactly zero people. I'd argue that companies have been forced to do this in order to help the short-term bottom line for idiotic shareholders who refuse to see R&D as a good thing because it doesn't bring in revenue next week, but it's that kind of stupidity that brought us this situation in the first place.
I'd like to think that most companies aren't so short-sighted to think that getting rid of their highest-paid employees is a good idea in the long term, but they've been forced into a position where they have to do so because it makes the shareholders happy. It's the asshole day-traders trying to ride the stock market to immediate infinite riches that are killing your precious American jobs.
Yes, I'm saying that Americans are causing their own replacement by H-1B foreign workers. Blame Wall St., blame the guys with the annoying accents doing your tech support, blame whoever the hell you want. I'm blaming all of the people happy to get rich at anyone else's expense, probably including whoever manages your 401k.
I haven't tried (but will now...), but couldn't you use IETab with Firebug to actually figure out how to fix all of the stupid rendering problems caused by IE (read: screw with the CSS via Firebug until it works)? To the best of my knowledge, there's no good way to do real-time stylesheet editing with IE/the Trident engine, unlike Firefox which has Firebug and Safari/Webkit which has several tools on the Mac such as CSSEdit.
I still pray that someone will use one of IE's security flaws to force an upgrade to ANY standards-compliant browser, even IE8 by the looks of things.
And the gap between IE6 and IE7 was about five years, yet IE is still estimated to have somewhere in the 70-80% range for total browser market-share. Had actual competition not started coming along a couple years into the gap, we'd probably still be waiting.
Children are impressionable. They are (usually) unable to weigh the pros and cons of arguments and instead defer to authority figures. There are some theories which are not legitimately challenged in today's scientific world.
Maybe in grade school - but I don't think I've ever met a high schooler (myself included when I was in HS) so impressionable.
The whole DHMO thing is really an unfair example, as it involves misleading scare tactics (100% of people who consume it die, for example). That's not presenting an opposing idea and letting people come to their own conclusion, but rather intentionally presenting well-known facts in extremely misleading and overcomplicated ways in an attempt to trick them - it's more of a trivia test and social experiment than anything else. While I don't support teaching creationism or intelligent design in schools by any means, they're not really leveraging those tactics in order to make people believe in them (aside from the whole "do as I say lest you burn in hell for all eternity" thing, anyways).
Actually, Adobe's bitchy DRM activation scheme is the biggest turn-off for me. I can get a student edition of PS CS4 for $200 which I can swallow easily enough (at least compared to $700-1000), but a) like hell am I buying a copy for both my laptop and desktop b) I know their system doesn't work any better than WGA, and I've been bitten by that in the past back when I used Windows. Luckily I wouldn't have to worry so much with a weekly activate/deactivate as reformatting every few days isn't necessary on OS X, but I'd probably leave the thing sitting unopened while continuing to use a cracked version.
Have you downloaded something using Apple's servers? I get a solid 1MB/s+ almost all the time, pretty much maxing out my entire connection. It's very rare for me to get anywhere near that on ANY torrent, even very popular ones - plus Apple doesn't ask me to upload the same amount for proper etiquette.
Not that I'd ever use a keygen or anything, but that's definitely only a Windows problem. From what I *cough* hear, most apps are either pre-cracked, have a drag-and-drop crack (how Mac-like), or just need any of a hundred serials floating around with no further mess.
(Actually, I think all of my software is totally legit except for Photoshop, and I plan to buy it eventually)
From TFS, it sounds like you may get long-term cookies from whitehouse.gov (regardless of what youtube.com provides) on pages (or paths I suppose; I don't think you can do page-specific cookies) containing embedded youtube videos. It could use some additional clarification for sure.
What about bouncing between Dvorak and QWERTY? I assume that you've had to type on a keyboard other than your own on more than one occasion. I tried to use Dvorak for a short while but gave up because of that more than anything else.
Apple's first big loss to Microsoft was thinking people would pay more for mac quality but the market said Windows wasn't great but good enough. It'll be interesting to see how it goes in the future. The iPods are ridiculously overpriced as mp3 players but those bastards sell like hotcakes. I guess the bit of genius there was equating this to fashion. People will be ruthlessly efficient when it comes to making practical purchases but when it comes to buying impractical things like handbags, shoes, and designer goods, logic and reason go out the fucking window.
Hardly. For 99% of people, iPods are FAR easier to use than any competing product. They sync with a program that manages the music - just plug it in and your music is on the thing. Plenty of geeks like the drag-and-drop folder approach, but they're in a tiny minority - with commodity products, most people just want the damn thing to work without frustration. The iPods do that. OS X now does that, and Apple's gains in market share reflect that (of course, their marketing sure hasn't hurt).
Apple doesn't sell to people on specs, they sell to them on the experience. And when they can tell the guy who just had his drive die and lost a ton of data that there's a no-thinking-involved backup app bundled for free with the computer, it's an easy sale.
Yes (disclaimer!), I'm something of an Apple fanboy, but not the Digg-type that feels the need to convert people. I'm as much interested in their products due to their business practices and sales approaches as I am because their products fulfill my needs with minimal headache. I think MS will make something of a comeback with Windows 7 and Linux continues to improve as well.
Honestly, I find it remarkable that you can lambast Apple for "overpricing" their hardware when you did such a great job explaining how great customer service gets and keeps customers. When I find another company that gives me a 2-week estimate for a repair and gets the serviced product back to me in less than 48 hours (sent back to the house via priority overnight) at no cost to me, I'll start giving them my business, even if their stuff is more expensive than Apple's.
For the most part I agree, but there is always a certain convenience of being able to get something NOW. A couple of blank DVDs, USB stick, whatever. Yes, I could get that cable from Monoprice for eleven cents, but that doesn't help when I need it for my presentation this afternoon. Of course if you try to abuse that (as most big box retailers do), then people will finally learn to plan ahead and buy the stuff online like they should have in the first place. Amazon Prime goes a long way in that regard.
You can also get away with charging high prices if there's a good reason for it. Best Buy can't, but if you carry specialty products with helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly staff, you're no longer competing on price alone.
If you need something ten minutes ago, sure. For anything that's not crazy-urgent, you're more than covered between Amazon and Newegg.
Not that BB is much better, but the last time I was in a CC (at least a year ago) the staff was not only unhelpful but quite rude. I'll probably stop in one last time sometime in the next few days to try and catch a deal on some liquidation sales, and then join the AC in saying "good riddance".
And in precisely how many states is gay marriage legally acknowleged? I may be mistaken, but I believe the answer is one (Mass.), with three or four others allowing Civil Unions couples the same benefits as married couples without calling it a marriage.
It may fail to give Google an advantage over most of the country, but I don't think it really hurts them.
If Apple just want to get big among costumers all they need to do is to start selling the OS and applications for any computer.
No.
You know how OS X is more stable than Windows? It's because Apple controls the hardware and makes sure the drivers work. They don't have to trust some third party with one crappy programmer to write some of the most important software that's going to be running. Take that away and the stability goes with it.
Yes, I'd love to see more options for running OS X on any commodity hardware. And I've done it before, on several different machines - it's not hard. But there's a reason that the hackintoshes tend to have broken sound, wireless, bluetooth, or whatever else.
As for other apps, yeah - there's really not a whole lot of reason they couldn't work on porting them to other systems. But given that Apple has seen nothing but growth for the last several years, maybe we should acknowledge that they're doing something right. After all, what makes a successful business isn't always going to align with what makes slashdot readers happy.
And you can't define them in the law, because to do so would be made illegal by the very law banning them.
Oh recursion, how we love thee. I never thought I'd use it to defend my first amendment rights (not that swearing has anything to do with Free Speech, strictly speaking), but there you go.
While ethics are more a matter of opinion than anything else, I'd certainly consider an undisclosed conflict of interests unethical. Legal, sure, but not ethical.
As TFS reads "Ars Technica has discovered" rather than "From change.gov, Ars explains", it doesn't sound as though it's been disclosed (not in any obvious manner, at least). I don't know if I'd call it corruption, but my standards for corruption in the telecommunication industry are much higher (lower?) than anywhere else.
Do you think that it would take more than five minutes for Obama to realize that he wasn't buzzing at the hip and immediately have a remote wipe run? I'm pretty sure the only way anyone unauthorized would be able to get anything off it would be to steal it from inside a Faraday cage.
Very true, though I don't think it really matters what company does it provided the security is set up properly. As TFS mentions, the public record thing is really the main issue. However,
Email to his Chicago friends â" why not? Anything he'd write to them would be necessarily non-secret anyway. Email to the Secretary of Defense? That might be a different matter.
Seems like it would be the other way around to me - I certainly wouldn't want _my_ personal communications becoming part of the public record for the rest of eternity. Of course there's certain issues of practicality of internal secrets going into the public record, but past/. discussions have suggested using some sort of proxy-type person where it would go through someone who would email the president with a "new message from X about Y - would you like to receive it knowing that the communication will become part of the public record" type of message.
Or maybe the laws regarding this kind of stuff are stupid. Seems that personal stuff should remain personal, and that anything @whitehouse.gov would go into the archives, but the president (and related staff) would be legally required to use the appropriate address and that the personal account(s) could be audited during the presidency to ensure that no funny business is taking place.
Dunno. But considering that Obama probably wouldn't have taken the top job were it not for all of the internet-based efforts, it would be Pretty Fucking Stupid to cut him off.
Lucky you. I enjoy programming too, but it's not 112 hours a week enjoyable. I freelance now, but I'd have brought in an uzi if any employer had asked me to work anywhere near that amount of time without some crazy overtime pay.
Slashdot Mirror
HIS best interest? The vast majority of his fortune is or will be going to various charities. It's in OUR best interest to see his company prosper financially, as much as we'd hate to admit it (and I think most of Slashdot becomes nauseous at the idea)
The people laid off should be the ones with the lowest skill-set, regardless of their location. Or does equality only apply domestically?
If companies lay off their best employees (foreign or domestic) because they're the most expensive to keep on board, those companies will suffer in the long-term, which is good for exactly zero people. I'd argue that companies have been forced to do this in order to help the short-term bottom line for idiotic shareholders who refuse to see R&D as a good thing because it doesn't bring in revenue next week, but it's that kind of stupidity that brought us this situation in the first place.
I'd like to think that most companies aren't so short-sighted to think that getting rid of their highest-paid employees is a good idea in the long term, but they've been forced into a position where they have to do so because it makes the shareholders happy. It's the asshole day-traders trying to ride the stock market to immediate infinite riches that are killing your precious American jobs.
Yes, I'm saying that Americans are causing their own replacement by H-1B foreign workers. Blame Wall St., blame the guys with the annoying accents doing your tech support, blame whoever the hell you want. I'm blaming all of the people happy to get rich at anyone else's expense, probably including whoever manages your 401k.
I haven't tried (but will now...), but couldn't you use IETab with Firebug to actually figure out how to fix all of the stupid rendering problems caused by IE (read: screw with the CSS via Firebug until it works)? To the best of my knowledge, there's no good way to do real-time stylesheet editing with IE/the Trident engine, unlike Firefox which has Firebug and Safari/Webkit which has several tools on the Mac such as CSSEdit.
I still pray that someone will use one of IE's security flaws to force an upgrade to ANY standards-compliant browser, even IE8 by the looks of things.
And the gap between IE6 and IE7 was about five years, yet IE is still estimated to have somewhere in the 70-80% range for total browser market-share. Had actual competition not started coming along a couple years into the gap, we'd probably still be waiting.
I know a lot of monkeys that would be tremendously insulted by that statement, if only they knew how to read.
Children are impressionable. They are (usually) unable to weigh the pros and cons of arguments and instead defer to authority figures. There are some theories which are not legitimately challenged in today's scientific world.
Maybe in grade school - but I don't think I've ever met a high schooler (myself included when I was in HS) so impressionable.
The whole DHMO thing is really an unfair example, as it involves misleading scare tactics (100% of people who consume it die, for example). That's not presenting an opposing idea and letting people come to their own conclusion, but rather intentionally presenting well-known facts in extremely misleading and overcomplicated ways in an attempt to trick them - it's more of a trivia test and social experiment than anything else. While I don't support teaching creationism or intelligent design in schools by any means, they're not really leveraging those tactics in order to make people believe in them (aside from the whole "do as I say lest you burn in hell for all eternity" thing, anyways).
Well then, I guess we just need to start testing evolution in school too.
Actually, Adobe's bitchy DRM activation scheme is the biggest turn-off for me. I can get a student edition of PS CS4 for $200 which I can swallow easily enough (at least compared to $700-1000), but a) like hell am I buying a copy for both my laptop and desktop b) I know their system doesn't work any better than WGA, and I've been bitten by that in the past back when I used Windows. Luckily I wouldn't have to worry so much with a weekly activate/deactivate as reformatting every few days isn't necessary on OS X, but I'd probably leave the thing sitting unopened while continuing to use a cracked version.
Have you downloaded something using Apple's servers? I get a solid 1MB/s+ almost all the time, pretty much maxing out my entire connection. It's very rare for me to get anywhere near that on ANY torrent, even very popular ones - plus Apple doesn't ask me to upload the same amount for proper etiquette.
Not that I'd ever use a keygen or anything, but that's definitely only a Windows problem. From what I *cough* hear, most apps are either pre-cracked, have a drag-and-drop crack (how Mac-like), or just need any of a hundred serials floating around with no further mess.
(Actually, I think all of my software is totally legit except for Photoshop, and I plan to buy it eventually)
From TFS, it sounds like you may get long-term cookies from whitehouse.gov (regardless of what youtube.com provides) on pages (or paths I suppose; I don't think you can do page-specific cookies) containing embedded youtube videos. It could use some additional clarification for sure.
Naturally, I didn't read TFA either.
What about bouncing between Dvorak and QWERTY? I assume that you've had to type on a keyboard other than your own on more than one occasion. I tried to use Dvorak for a short while but gave up because of that more than anything else.
Damn, I'm seriously lacking a +1, Valid "OVER 9000!" mod option.
Apple's first big loss to Microsoft was thinking people would pay more for mac quality but the market said Windows wasn't great but good enough. It'll be interesting to see how it goes in the future. The iPods are ridiculously overpriced as mp3 players but those bastards sell like hotcakes. I guess the bit of genius there was equating this to fashion. People will be ruthlessly efficient when it comes to making practical purchases but when it comes to buying impractical things like handbags, shoes, and designer goods, logic and reason go out the fucking window.
Hardly. For 99% of people, iPods are FAR easier to use than any competing product. They sync with a program that manages the music - just plug it in and your music is on the thing. Plenty of geeks like the drag-and-drop folder approach, but they're in a tiny minority - with commodity products, most people just want the damn thing to work without frustration. The iPods do that. OS X now does that, and Apple's gains in market share reflect that (of course, their marketing sure hasn't hurt).
Apple doesn't sell to people on specs, they sell to them on the experience. And when they can tell the guy who just had his drive die and lost a ton of data that there's a no-thinking-involved backup app bundled for free with the computer, it's an easy sale.
Yes (disclaimer!), I'm something of an Apple fanboy, but not the Digg-type that feels the need to convert people. I'm as much interested in their products due to their business practices and sales approaches as I am because their products fulfill my needs with minimal headache. I think MS will make something of a comeback with Windows 7 and Linux continues to improve as well.
Honestly, I find it remarkable that you can lambast Apple for "overpricing" their hardware when you did such a great job explaining how great customer service gets and keeps customers. When I find another company that gives me a 2-week estimate for a repair and gets the serviced product back to me in less than 48 hours (sent back to the house via priority overnight) at no cost to me, I'll start giving them my business, even if their stuff is more expensive than Apple's.
For the most part I agree, but there is always a certain convenience of being able to get something NOW. A couple of blank DVDs, USB stick, whatever. Yes, I could get that cable from Monoprice for eleven cents, but that doesn't help when I need it for my presentation this afternoon. Of course if you try to abuse that (as most big box retailers do), then people will finally learn to plan ahead and buy the stuff online like they should have in the first place. Amazon Prime goes a long way in that regard.
You can also get away with charging high prices if there's a good reason for it. Best Buy can't, but if you carry specialty products with helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly staff, you're no longer competing on price alone.
If you need something ten minutes ago, sure. For anything that's not crazy-urgent, you're more than covered between Amazon and Newegg.
Not that BB is much better, but the last time I was in a CC (at least a year ago) the staff was not only unhelpful but quite rude. I'll probably stop in one last time sometime in the next few days to try and catch a deal on some liquidation sales, and then join the AC in saying "good riddance".
And in precisely how many states is gay marriage legally acknowleged? I may be mistaken, but I believe the answer is one (Mass.), with three or four others allowing Civil Unions couples the same benefits as married couples without calling it a marriage.
It may fail to give Google an advantage over most of the country, but I don't think it really hurts them.
No.
You know how OS X is more stable than Windows? It's because Apple controls the hardware and makes sure the drivers work. They don't have to trust some third party with one crappy programmer to write some of the most important software that's going to be running. Take that away and the stability goes with it.
Yes, I'd love to see more options for running OS X on any commodity hardware. And I've done it before, on several different machines - it's not hard. But there's a reason that the hackintoshes tend to have broken sound, wireless, bluetooth, or whatever else.
As for other apps, yeah - there's really not a whole lot of reason they couldn't work on porting them to other systems. But given that Apple has seen nothing but growth for the last several years, maybe we should acknowledge that they're doing something right. After all, what makes a successful business isn't always going to align with what makes slashdot readers happy.
Well, Steve named Tim Cook as his acting replacement until he comes back in June, so that would probably be a good place to start looking.
And it's not like Jobs is the only Apple enthusiast at the company.
And you can't define them in the law, because to do so would be made illegal by the very law banning them.
Oh recursion, how we love thee. I never thought I'd use it to defend my first amendment rights (not that swearing has anything to do with Free Speech, strictly speaking), but there you go.
Corruption != politics as usual?
Huh, you learn something new every day.
While ethics are more a matter of opinion than anything else, I'd certainly consider an undisclosed conflict of interests unethical. Legal, sure, but not ethical.
As TFS reads "Ars Technica has discovered" rather than "From change.gov, Ars explains", it doesn't sound as though it's been disclosed (not in any obvious manner, at least). I don't know if I'd call it corruption, but my standards for corruption in the telecommunication industry are much higher (lower?) than anywhere else.
Do you think that it would take more than five minutes for Obama to realize that he wasn't buzzing at the hip and immediately have a remote wipe run? I'm pretty sure the only way anyone unauthorized would be able to get anything off it would be to steal it from inside a Faraday cage.
Very true, though I don't think it really matters what company does it provided the security is set up properly. As TFS mentions, the public record thing is really the main issue. However,
Email to his Chicago friends â" why not? Anything he'd write to them would be necessarily non-secret anyway. Email to the Secretary of Defense? That might be a different matter.
Seems like it would be the other way around to me - I certainly wouldn't want _my_ personal communications becoming part of the public record for the rest of eternity. Of course there's certain issues of practicality of internal secrets going into the public record, but past /. discussions have suggested using some sort of proxy-type person where it would go through someone who would email the president with a "new message from X about Y - would you like to receive it knowing that the communication will become part of the public record" type of message.
Or maybe the laws regarding this kind of stuff are stupid. Seems that personal stuff should remain personal, and that anything @whitehouse.gov would go into the archives, but the president (and related staff) would be legally required to use the appropriate address and that the personal account(s) could be audited during the presidency to ensure that no funny business is taking place.
Dunno. But considering that Obama probably wouldn't have taken the top job were it not for all of the internet-based efforts, it would be Pretty Fucking Stupid to cut him off.
Lucky you. I enjoy programming too, but it's not 112 hours a week enjoyable. I freelance now, but I'd have brought in an uzi if any employer had asked me to work anywhere near that amount of time without some crazy overtime pay.