Open source software is the only type of software that is often mostly made by foreigners that the DoD will use. Proprietary software that is owned by a foreign company cannot be used without extraordinary extenuating circumstances. Even if the whole development is done in America, the legal ownership by foreign nationals takes the proprietary software automatically off the approved software lists.
10 year contracts are not common for software projects in the federal government. 10 years of engineering and support is a serious undertaking by a major federal agency. Taking this down will require a similarly serious effort if people are serious about pursuing that.
Microsoft has every right to create a web browser and integrate it into their other products. It is no fundamentally different than Konqueror being the default browser within the KDE environment. If Dell and others feel comfortable distributing **Linux**, what makes you think they wouldn't distribute Opera and Firefox if there were a demand for that? The catch is, there isn't a demand for that because the very people who would use Opera and Firefox instead of IE wouldn't have any problems installing it on their own. The people that Opera is whining about not having access to, are largely the people who think that Internet Explorer is "The Internet."
And it's a real shame. I used to use WordPress, but switched back to Movable Type when version 4.0 came out, and have no intention of switching back. From what I've seen with WordPress, it's gotten better, but Movable Type 4.0 is very, very slick and well-designed. It fully supports several databases, and has a sophisticated API for plugin-in developers that goes well beyond what WordPress offers.
Yet WordPress has been more successful because it is easier to drop it in and get started. Quite frankly, I don't think the open source nature of WordPress has anything to do with the number of quality themes built for it, since Movable Type has been free for personal use for a long time. Rather, I think it has to do with the fact that it is simpler to create a good theme with WordPress than it is with Movable Type.
What will be interesting is to see how WordPress fairs once PHP 5 starts becoming more commonly used.
Is for the richer countries to stop giving them access to easy credit, foreign aid and programs like this. Give them trade opportunities instead. That's the only way you are going to encourage them to create real economies that will alleviate poverty. The obstacles to these people creating wealth and getting themselves out of poverty are a whole hell of a lot more complicated than just access to computers...
This is a feel-good measure, nothing more. Tossing a laptop into a mix of bad teachers, and bad schools is not going to improve anything. There are several major problems, none of them technology related, that have made public education a colossal failure:
1) Most of the people who are teaching subjects, have their primary education in "education." 2) Teacher's unions. 3) School policies that don't allow proper discipline for disruptive students. 4) A legal system that actually listens to parents who sue when schools properly punish their kids for misbehaving. 5) Government monopolies that make it financially impossible for most parents to afford to send their kids to private schools or homeschool them.
But it's ok, technology will save the day. It couldn't do a damn thing for other social problems like pirating copyrighted materials, but it'll be able to take on... entrenched bureaucracies, good ol'boy networks, unions, crufty legal codes and parents who have no ability to hold their kids responsible for their behavior and are willing to shout and sue at the drop of a dime. Go technology, you modern day messiah of secular America.
China proves that Fascism, not Socialism, works. China is a vindication of everything the post-Socialist Fascist movement thought was in need of change in Socialist ideology to make it work. As a result, China has many of the benefits of capitalism, but has the state control of the means of production that Socialism provides. If it's mostly high-ranking aparatchiks and military officers who own most of the corporations in China, it is only semantically different from the corporation, known as the "Communist State" in China, from owning it in its name.
Of course this would be a surprise to the morons who think that Fascism is just a dirty word you throw at someone you disagree with. Most people forget that Fascism was a movement with a clear-cut platform, that was a true hybrid of Socialism and Capitalism. It is "right-wing" in the sense that it is "to the right of Socialism and Communism." It is, in essence, where the "left and right" meet up on the spectrum. If you look at the Fascists' planks, you will see that they had many left-wing tendencies, such as seizing the war profits of the military industrial complex, heavy taxation of income, and strong government **control** of the means of production through counsels of industry and regulations.
Communism is utopian. It is built on 19th century pseudo-science, and it ought to be no more respectable to be a Communist than to be a Phrenologist.
I am not surprised at China doing this. It make perfect sense from the economic nationalism of Fascist policy.
There are unsolved violent crimes against people and property. Why are law enforcement resources being used to stop something that is a vice that most people who are into it can walk away from without any harm whatsoever? Gambling is only a problem for a minority of gamblers.
People do hurt themselves over gambling. I knew a guy who killed himself over it. The real reason he did that, though, was that he had the sort of personality that couldn't tolerate failure. It wasn't even like he was "addicted." He was addicted not to gambling, but to the idea that **HE** was a winner in the game of life.
Gambling is not like drugs or alcohol. Don't give me that excuse that they're pooooowr widdle addicts who can't control themselves.
I got a Razr because it was cheap, and a good phone. A lot of phones are similar in quality. They cannot hold a candle to the iPhone when it comes to the software interface. I am not an Apple fan boy, and I would GLADLY give up my Razr right now if the iPhone were available to Verizon customers. Do you know clunky its software is, compared to Apple's? If you think the iPhone sucks because it has a few missing features, then that's fine, but you clearly haven't paid attention to how bad a lot of the alternatives are.
There is a video professor ad where a woman laughs that her four year old is often more comfortable with a computer than she is. A lot of older people just don't realize that **comfort** is not a particularly big deal. Yes, most middle and upper class people in Gen Y are "comfortable with a computer" and other gadgets. So what? When I was in college two years ago, it didn't stop many of them from making many of the same mistakes that their equally **computer illiterate** parents made like not updating their software and trusting everything that came into their inbox that didn't look automatically like spam.
So you can plug your iPod in and sync up your media collection with it. How is that a practical use of your computer, the sort of thing that drives the economy?
I have to wonder... were there ever articles like this talking about basic skills like driving? "Younger generation more comfortable with horseless carriage?" Being able to use a computer? BFD. Who cares. Being able to write software, integrate components and mess with hardware are the skills that stand out.
The defenders of the theory of evolution often get as hot under the collar at any challenge to it, as your stereotype fundamentalist gets at having his or her religion challenged. People instinctively see that as more of a sign of **religious** faith in evolution than pure rational, empirical faith in evolution.
Mod me down for calling it as I see it if you want, but don't even try to deny that many of the advocates of evolution aren't as faithfully passionate about it as their creationist counterparts. I know the excuse, that "science is under attack in America." If it is under attack, it is under attack by many things, not just religion. Just take a serious look at how Watson is being treated over his comments about race and genetics. Even most scientists are unwilling to consider the possibility that *gasp* if evolution be true, not all races are created equal, and that some might be statistically inferior to others. We don't live in a perfectly rational world, live with it.
Does it really add anything to call someone a G-D fucking moron instead of just calling them a worthless moron when they are wrecking havoc on you and your team? Personally, I don't think so. In fact, I think it can show a great deal of control over yourself that will make others look up to you at least a little as a leader in a tough environment when you aren't cussing, but others (especially managers) are cussing like sailors. I've had a manager like that before, where we'd be discussing a product or an initiative casually, and his end would be filled with profanity. Personally, it made me feel uncomfortable to have a manager who felt so free in a business environment to let it all hang out because it made me wonder how seriously things in general. I say that as someone who doesn't feel it's his place to stop others from cussing, preferring to just set a different example.
Top Secret intelligence is defined as intelligence that if released would cause grave harm to the United States, its allies, their interests, and/or its operations abroad. They are not going to trust a machine to go through information and determine what is and what isn't TS material. All it takes is for the AI to screw up a few times in one report for the risk that someone will get hurt or killed to increase to unacceptable levels.
I just don't see the real sensitive environments touching this with a ten foot pole. Hiring analysts by the dozens to work on this stuff is a lot cheaper to these agencies than having to answer to Congress why dozens of informants in Al Qaeda were assassinated because the AI didn't block their names.
I was pretty amazed with the beta of Ubuntu 7.10. I even installed it on my system, but after about 30min-1 hour of use, trackerd was consistently keeping my CPU usage up at least 30%. That's not the fault of the Ubuntu team, as they did not write trackerd, but they really do need to be careful about the daemons that they allow to run in the background on a default installation. I don't know what it is there for, but according to this description, it doesn't sound like it is something that a vanilla, desktop installation would want on there. The approach to background processes should be the KISS. On a vanilla desktop installation, only the barest set of such thing should be on there.
The NIV was translated by people who generally knew Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic better than those responsible for the KJV. That said, the KJV is plenty accurate enough. It is harder to read, and less accurate, than the NIV for modern English speakers, but it is a perfectly acceptable means of conveying the gospel message.
I never said that the Christians who adhere to it are less than those who don't. Those are your words and assumption, not mine.
Disclaimer: I am a believer in nearly an absolute right of freedom of association, so I support the right to fire employees for stupid reasons including racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, failure to keep kosher/halal, etc.
At 54 he may be a real asset to the company in other areas of the company that aren't bleeding edge. He may be the sort of guy you want working on some very difficult, but not sexy, problems like getting better performance out of their products. Just because his ideas aren't new, doesn't mean that he is useless. To the contrary, his experience may be worth several times the vision of a young employee.
The IT industry deserves its problems. It deserves to have to deal with labor shortages if it is young to be a cult of youth. No other industry treats its senior engineers with as much contempt as much of IT. No mechanical engineering outfit in their right mind would trade a person with 30 years of solid experience for a whipper snapper or two with vision, but no experience. It would be product suicide.
So, do we now add this to the growing list of how Google is becoming evil? I don't see how you can avoid it.
Use regular DVDs to subsidize the cost of selling Blu-Ray disks at the same cost as a regular DVD. In this newest format war, the first company to do this may end up setting the standard because they would have the cheaper movies. Right now, every next-gen DVD I've seen costs about $30 new. If all new Blu-Ray suddenly hit $20 through subsidies from regular DVDs, HD would probably be up shit creek...
Since the Wii version uses the motion-sensitive controllers, it literally gives players the hands of a killer.
Literally? Literally implies that playing this game will cause you to commit murder, or spontaneously replace your own hands with those of a convicted murderer. Technically speaking, USA Today has knowingly defamed Take Two with malicious intent to cause damage to their business and reputation... the definition of libel...
Halo 3 is a really, really fun game. The visuals are not breathtakingly beautiful, but so what? Which would you rather have, a game that is an embodiment of HDR aesthetics, but often struggles to be smooth, or a game that has good graphics, and can easily handle anything the game throws at it? I'll take the latter. The last thing I want is a slow game.
People complain too much about stuff like this. What do you want, a fun game, or one where 90% of the resources were put into the graphics? In my experience, the games that try to be real time works of art suck.
How hard would it be for Microsoft to delay Windows XP Service Pack 3, bolt on the new Vista GUI, and call it Windows 6? Seriously, the only thing about Windows Vista that is a major improvement is the new user interface. I don't know how others have fared with it, but I found RC1's user interface to be faster and more responsive on my laptop than XP.
The rest of Vista? Thus throw that trash onto the heap where it belongs. It brings **zero** value to the average user.
Source. The FBI is an agency that desperately needs to have a president come in and clean house, firing managers, devolving authority back to field agents and other measures that would help to clean out the bureaucratic nightmare.
If he felt this way from the beginning, he should have been clearer. He should have made it clear that he thought SCO was little more than a sophisticated shakedown artist--the Jesse Jackson of software companies if you will. I remember there being a distinct gloating tone to the articles when I read them back then. He seemed happy that OSS developers were going to possibly get their comeuppance. He struck me as one of those stereotype dumb businessmen who cannot tell the difference between the professionals who make real OSS work like the people behind the Apache projects, and the rabid zealots, most of whom are inconsequential morons.
No one except SCO should have been rooting for SCO, or even saying nice things about them. They are a parasite on capitalism. Regardless of his feelings about OSS development, he should have been honest about SCO, and admitted that they were just trying to extort their way into profitability.
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Open source software is the only type of software that is often mostly made by foreigners that the DoD will use. Proprietary software that is owned by a foreign company cannot be used without extraordinary extenuating circumstances. Even if the whole development is done in America, the legal ownership by foreign nationals takes the proprietary software automatically off the approved software lists.
10 year contracts are not common for software projects in the federal government. 10 years of engineering and support is a serious undertaking by a major federal agency. Taking this down will require a similarly serious effort if people are serious about pursuing that.
Microsoft has every right to create a web browser and integrate it into their other products. It is no fundamentally different than Konqueror being the default browser within the KDE environment. If Dell and others feel comfortable distributing **Linux**, what makes you think they wouldn't distribute Opera and Firefox if there were a demand for that? The catch is, there isn't a demand for that because the very people who would use Opera and Firefox instead of IE wouldn't have any problems installing it on their own. The people that Opera is whining about not having access to, are largely the people who think that Internet Explorer is "The Internet."
And it's a real shame. I used to use WordPress, but switched back to Movable Type when version 4.0 came out, and have no intention of switching back. From what I've seen with WordPress, it's gotten better, but Movable Type 4.0 is very, very slick and well-designed. It fully supports several databases, and has a sophisticated API for plugin-in developers that goes well beyond what WordPress offers.
Yet WordPress has been more successful because it is easier to drop it in and get started. Quite frankly, I don't think the open source nature of WordPress has anything to do with the number of quality themes built for it, since Movable Type has been free for personal use for a long time. Rather, I think it has to do with the fact that it is simpler to create a good theme with WordPress than it is with Movable Type.
What will be interesting is to see how WordPress fairs once PHP 5 starts becoming more commonly used.
Is for the richer countries to stop giving them access to easy credit, foreign aid and programs like this. Give them trade opportunities instead. That's the only way you are going to encourage them to create real economies that will alleviate poverty. The obstacles to these people creating wealth and getting themselves out of poverty are a whole hell of a lot more complicated than just access to computers...
The gene that controls the impulse to tell others what to do, when it isn't necessary to tell them what to do. The 'busybody' gene.
This is a feel-good measure, nothing more. Tossing a laptop into a mix of bad teachers, and bad schools is not going to improve anything. There are several major problems, none of them technology related, that have made public education a colossal failure:
1) Most of the people who are teaching subjects, have their primary education in "education."
2) Teacher's unions.
3) School policies that don't allow proper discipline for disruptive students.
4) A legal system that actually listens to parents who sue when schools properly punish their kids for misbehaving.
5) Government monopolies that make it financially impossible for most parents to afford to send their kids to private schools or homeschool them.
But it's ok, technology will save the day. It couldn't do a damn thing for other social problems like pirating copyrighted materials, but it'll be able to take on... entrenched bureaucracies, good ol'boy networks, unions, crufty legal codes and parents who have no ability to hold their kids responsible for their behavior and are willing to shout and sue at the drop of a dime. Go technology, you modern day messiah of secular America.
China proves that Fascism, not Socialism, works. China is a vindication of everything the post-Socialist Fascist movement thought was in need of change in Socialist ideology to make it work. As a result, China has many of the benefits of capitalism, but has the state control of the means of production that Socialism provides. If it's mostly high-ranking aparatchiks and military officers who own most of the corporations in China, it is only semantically different from the corporation, known as the "Communist State" in China, from owning it in its name.
Of course this would be a surprise to the morons who think that Fascism is just a dirty word you throw at someone you disagree with. Most people forget that Fascism was a movement with a clear-cut platform, that was a true hybrid of Socialism and Capitalism. It is "right-wing" in the sense that it is "to the right of Socialism and Communism." It is, in essence, where the "left and right" meet up on the spectrum. If you look at the Fascists' planks, you will see that they had many left-wing tendencies, such as seizing the war profits of the military industrial complex, heavy taxation of income, and strong government **control** of the means of production through counsels of industry and regulations.
Communism is utopian. It is built on 19th century pseudo-science, and it ought to be no more respectable to be a Communist than to be a Phrenologist.
I am not surprised at China doing this. It make perfect sense from the economic nationalism of Fascist policy.
There are unsolved violent crimes against people and property. Why are law enforcement resources being used to stop something that is a vice that most people who are into it can walk away from without any harm whatsoever? Gambling is only a problem for a minority of gamblers.
People do hurt themselves over gambling. I knew a guy who killed himself over it. The real reason he did that, though, was that he had the sort of personality that couldn't tolerate failure. It wasn't even like he was "addicted." He was addicted not to gambling, but to the idea that **HE** was a winner in the game of life.
Gambling is not like drugs or alcohol. Don't give me that excuse that they're pooooowr widdle addicts who can't control themselves.
I got a Razr because it was cheap, and a good phone. A lot of phones are similar in quality. They cannot hold a candle to the iPhone when it comes to the software interface. I am not an Apple fan boy, and I would GLADLY give up my Razr right now if the iPhone were available to Verizon customers. Do you know clunky its software is, compared to Apple's? If you think the iPhone sucks because it has a few missing features, then that's fine, but you clearly haven't paid attention to how bad a lot of the alternatives are.
There is a video professor ad where a woman laughs that her four year old is often more comfortable with a computer than she is. A lot of older people just don't realize that **comfort** is not a particularly big deal. Yes, most middle and upper class people in Gen Y are "comfortable with a computer" and other gadgets. So what? When I was in college two years ago, it didn't stop many of them from making many of the same mistakes that their equally **computer illiterate** parents made like not updating their software and trusting everything that came into their inbox that didn't look automatically like spam.
So you can plug your iPod in and sync up your media collection with it. How is that a practical use of your computer, the sort of thing that drives the economy?
I have to wonder... were there ever articles like this talking about basic skills like driving? "Younger generation more comfortable with horseless carriage?" Being able to use a computer? BFD. Who cares. Being able to write software, integrate components and mess with hardware are the skills that stand out.
The defenders of the theory of evolution often get as hot under the collar at any challenge to it, as your stereotype fundamentalist gets at having his or her religion challenged. People instinctively see that as more of a sign of **religious** faith in evolution than pure rational, empirical faith in evolution.
Mod me down for calling it as I see it if you want, but don't even try to deny that many of the advocates of evolution aren't as faithfully passionate about it as their creationist counterparts. I know the excuse, that "science is under attack in America." If it is under attack, it is under attack by many things, not just religion. Just take a serious look at how Watson is being treated over his comments about race and genetics. Even most scientists are unwilling to consider the possibility that *gasp* if evolution be true, not all races are created equal, and that some might be statistically inferior to others. We don't live in a perfectly rational world, live with it.
Does it really add anything to call someone a G-D fucking moron instead of just calling them a worthless moron when they are wrecking havoc on you and your team? Personally, I don't think so. In fact, I think it can show a great deal of control over yourself that will make others look up to you at least a little as a leader in a tough environment when you aren't cussing, but others (especially managers) are cussing like sailors. I've had a manager like that before, where we'd be discussing a product or an initiative casually, and his end would be filled with profanity. Personally, it made me feel uncomfortable to have a manager who felt so free in a business environment to let it all hang out because it made me wonder how seriously things in general. I say that as someone who doesn't feel it's his place to stop others from cussing, preferring to just set a different example.
Top Secret intelligence is defined as intelligence that if released would cause grave harm to the United States, its allies, their interests, and/or its operations abroad. They are not going to trust a machine to go through information and determine what is and what isn't TS material. All it takes is for the AI to screw up a few times in one report for the risk that someone will get hurt or killed to increase to unacceptable levels.
I just don't see the real sensitive environments touching this with a ten foot pole. Hiring analysts by the dozens to work on this stuff is a lot cheaper to these agencies than having to answer to Congress why dozens of informants in Al Qaeda were assassinated because the AI didn't block their names.
I was pretty amazed with the beta of Ubuntu 7.10. I even installed it on my system, but after about 30min-1 hour of use, trackerd was consistently keeping my CPU usage up at least 30%. That's not the fault of the Ubuntu team, as they did not write trackerd, but they really do need to be careful about the daemons that they allow to run in the background on a default installation. I don't know what it is there for, but according to this description, it doesn't sound like it is something that a vanilla, desktop installation would want on there. The approach to background processes should be the KISS. On a vanilla desktop installation, only the barest set of such thing should be on there.
The NIV was translated by people who generally knew Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic better than those responsible for the KJV. That said, the KJV is plenty accurate enough. It is harder to read, and less accurate, than the NIV for modern English speakers, but it is a perfectly acceptable means of conveying the gospel message.
I never said that the Christians who adhere to it are less than those who don't. Those are your words and assumption, not mine.
It is not "thou shalt not kill," it is "you shall not murder." Read the NIV, which is a superior translation to the KJV.
Disclaimer: I am a believer in nearly an absolute right of freedom of association, so I support the right to fire employees for stupid reasons including racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, failure to keep kosher/halal, etc.
At 54 he may be a real asset to the company in other areas of the company that aren't bleeding edge. He may be the sort of guy you want working on some very difficult, but not sexy, problems like getting better performance out of their products. Just because his ideas aren't new, doesn't mean that he is useless. To the contrary, his experience may be worth several times the vision of a young employee.
The IT industry deserves its problems. It deserves to have to deal with labor shortages if it is young to be a cult of youth. No other industry treats its senior engineers with as much contempt as much of IT. No mechanical engineering outfit in their right mind would trade a person with 30 years of solid experience for a whipper snapper or two with vision, but no experience. It would be product suicide.
So, do we now add this to the growing list of how Google is becoming evil? I don't see how you can avoid it.
Use regular DVDs to subsidize the cost of selling Blu-Ray disks at the same cost as a regular DVD. In this newest format war, the first company to do this may end up setting the standard because they would have the cheaper movies. Right now, every next-gen DVD I've seen costs about $30 new. If all new Blu-Ray suddenly hit $20 through subsidies from regular DVDs, HD would probably be up shit creek...
Literally? Literally implies that playing this game will cause you to commit murder, or spontaneously replace your own hands with those of a convicted murderer. Technically speaking, USA Today has knowingly defamed Take Two with malicious intent to cause damage to their business and reputation... the definition of libel...
Halo 3 is a really, really fun game. The visuals are not breathtakingly beautiful, but so what? Which would you rather have, a game that is an embodiment of HDR aesthetics, but often struggles to be smooth, or a game that has good graphics, and can easily handle anything the game throws at it? I'll take the latter. The last thing I want is a slow game.
People complain too much about stuff like this. What do you want, a fun game, or one where 90% of the resources were put into the graphics? In my experience, the games that try to be real time works of art suck.
How hard would it be for Microsoft to delay Windows XP Service Pack 3, bolt on the new Vista GUI, and call it Windows 6? Seriously, the only thing about Windows Vista that is a major improvement is the new user interface. I don't know how others have fared with it, but I found RC1's user interface to be faster and more responsive on my laptop than XP.
The rest of Vista? Thus throw that trash onto the heap where it belongs. It brings **zero** value to the average user.
Just say that it promotes racism by having human beings mercilessly kill aliens. If that is not a **race** war, I don't know what is.
Hey, this shit works for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, right?
Source. The FBI is an agency that desperately needs to have a president come in and clean house, firing managers, devolving authority back to field agents and other measures that would help to clean out the bureaucratic nightmare.
If he felt this way from the beginning, he should have been clearer. He should have made it clear that he thought SCO was little more than a sophisticated shakedown artist--the Jesse Jackson of software companies if you will. I remember there being a distinct gloating tone to the articles when I read them back then. He seemed happy that OSS developers were going to possibly get their comeuppance. He struck me as one of those stereotype dumb businessmen who cannot tell the difference between the professionals who make real OSS work like the people behind the Apache projects, and the rabid zealots, most of whom are inconsequential morons.
No one except SCO should have been rooting for SCO, or even saying nice things about them. They are a parasite on capitalism. Regardless of his feelings about OSS development, he should have been honest about SCO, and admitted that they were just trying to extort their way into profitability.