I am also living in Germany, but the problem is that it's really difficult to do anything against these things.
I tried to be politically active, and even joined a party. But since I have a fulltime job, I don't have as much as time for political activism as I would like to and as others have. There are so many going-to-become-professional-politicians in those parties with really enough time (some of them have fulltime jobs, but in civil service or such, where they have enough time for politics), that you don't really get the slightest chance to get to the upper levels of the party.
You have to invest so much time that it's really nearly impossible to have a fulltime job and become a politician, who has the people's interest in his mind first and foremost.
In order to get to the top, you have to become a "Political Man", a Homo Politicus. You have to brown-nose, become a real a**hole to get there... And I decided that the price is not worth paying for changing a system which most people seem to accept as "well, good enough" and about which most people don't even give a shit...
And provided you reach the top, you have either become one of "them" or you can't really change anything because there are so many particular-interests, you have to keep brown-nosing so much, do horse-trading, tit-for-tat, that you really lose contact with the people...
Sorry for the rant, but saying "change the system" is easy, doing so is not. And as you said: Since most of the people don't care as long as they get something to eat and some entertainment (Panem et Circenses), they are happy and they don't want to change the system.
My suggestion? Try changing your "small world environment", i.e. help your friends, neighbours and relatives in circumventing such censorships, help them express their anger and inacceptance of the system and help them start to think...
What I don't understand is that they put the URL on this list, meaning the BKA knows
So my question is: Why don't they get those sites closed?
There was an article in c't, the German IT magazine. I'm citing from the online version
Vor diesem Hintergrund machte jüngst die Kinderschutzorganisation Carechild ein aufschlussreiches Experiment. Sie verwendete dazu 20 Adressen aus der im Netz aufgetauchten dÃnischen Sperrliste. 17 der Seiten waren in den USA gehostet, jeweils eine in den Niederlanden, Südkorea und England. Carechild schrieb an die Abuse-Mail-Adressen der Hostingprovider und bat um Entfernung der Inhalte. Das Ergebnis: acht US-amerikanische Provider haben die Domains innerhalb der ersten drei Stunden nach Versand der Mitteilung abgeschaltet. Innerhalb eines Tages waren 16 Adressen nicht mehr erreichbar, bei drei Websites teilte der jeweilige Provider laut Carechild glaubhaft mit, dass die Inhalte nach augenscheinlicher Prüfung keine Gesetze verletzen oder der Betreiber für die abgebildeten Personen entsprechende Altersnachweise vorlegen konnte.
Short sumary: The child proteciton organization Carechild did an interesting experiment: They used 20 of the entries from the Danish blocklist. 17 of those URLs were in the US, one each in Netherlands, South Korea, and UK. They contacted the hosters via the abuse-mail adresses and asked them to close down those child porn sites. Eight of the US hosters closed the sites within three hours of contact, 16 of the sites were closed within one day. Three sites were reported (truthfully) by hosters (after checking) to not contain child porn and not against any laws.
My question now is: If Childcare can do it, why not the mighty BKA (FBI of Germany)? I thought closing down might be more effective than trying to block them, which won't work anyway...
Main Server: scrooge (always) Secondary: donald From there on: huey, louie, dewey, daisy My notebooks: hortense, quackmore (Donald's parents) Other servers: swamphole, pothole, SirQuackly,...
Backup-Machines: scrooge-ii, donald-ii, huey-ii, etc... Not used: Gladstone (don't like to have a server working based solely on luck...)
Worst: ASDEBLNXCH01 (AutoScout, Germany, Berlin, Exchange-Server 01) - that was because these were Windows machines (brrr) - while I was working for Scout24-Group...
I think, the right answer is: At any of one of the next Aston Martin dealers - provided, however, that you have enough of the scarce resource called "money".
Joke aside: I was once in one of those shops and the sales person was talking on the phone to a potential client. It seems, an Aston Martin is really a scarce resource as she was telling him that he needed to wait abut 5-6 months for his delivery (or something like that). But I believe, you could speed up delivery by doubling the price if you wanted an Aston Martin by tomorrow...
I remember that NeXTstep had this in the Workspace Manager. ou could click a file and push CMD+3 to see a preview of the content of the file, if preview was supported. Preview worked for many file types (.tif,.snd,...) and where it didn't work, you could write a "preview viewer" for the Workspace Manager as a plug-in.
Obviously, the preview was similar to a screenshot at the last edit stage of the file.
I used 2 LaCies for a while, but they both had a throughput of 10MB/s (the NAS with XP as OS) and 6MB/s (LaCie with Linux).
Then I switched to Synology DS408. Mine has 4x Seagate 1.5TB HDs, RAID 5, so I have around 4TB of space.
The network throughput maxes out at around 60MB/s(!). But this might be due to my not-so-good switch. It's all on a Gbps-Network.
I used it only with Mac OS X (iMac, MBP, MBA, MB) with AFP. I haven't tested performance with SMB or NFS, but should be as fast as AFP (probably even faster).
One thing, which really convinced me of Synology, was their support. Since the Seagate 1.5TB HDs have some problems (make sure you buy those with Firmware >=SD1A), I had a lot of issues at the beginning and thought that it's a problem with the NAS. I even thought I lost data. When I contacted Synology, they offered to log-on on to the NAS and try recovery, local check and everything - for free. And in the end, they found the problem with the Seagate HDs, proposed the solution and I am now even more happy then before.
Yes, indeed (catholic==TRUE) would be more generic. But since I'm a die-hard NEXTSTEP/Mac OS X-developer, where "YES" and "NO" are preferred over "TRUE" and "FALSE", it was more natural for me to write "catholic==YES".
Then again, since we should generalize, you are right, the attribute should be "religion" with values like (christian-roman-catholic|christian-protestant|christian-orthodox|muslim|jewish|buddhist|...|other). This would be more generally applicable to (more or less) any human being.
The question is, of course: Would you be considered, even remotely, as a potential candidate, if you have an attribute with (potential) variable values?
Being wet is not an attribute of water, in fact water makes wet. If I remember correctly from my physics class:
When a matter is covered by a liquid such as water, that matter becomes wet.
Yes, the Pope, on the other hand, does have to have the attribute "catholic==YES", otherwise it won't work (whatever "it" it is).
This already happened a while ago in Germany. Deutsche Telekom trademarked the color/colour "Magenta". Deutsche Telekom is the Microsoft of Telecoms companies in Germany.
They even sued lots of websites which used magenta as their main color...
You know, I started developing in Objective-C back in 1990/91 on NeXTstep (yes, it was lc 'step' at that time...) - Coming from Pascal, C, Forth (and some Basic dialects), I found it a bit weird at the beginning (the first 4-6 months). Then, one day, it made "click" - as we say in German. And from that day on, I couldn't really imagine doing it in a different way than MVC & Objective-C.
In order to fully grasp it, I started experiments with Smalltalk (great), Eiffel (great, but ugly syntax), and some other languages I forgot.
Remember: those times were the times when we wrote our frameworks ourselves (I remember writing objects like "Float", "Integer", "String",... - they didn't exist in NeXTstep those days).
You have to switch from "Calling a Function" or "Calling a Member of an Object" to "Sending a Message to an Object" and get used to the idea that everything is an Object (even classes are instances of the class class and so on) and then you are set.
The syntax may turn you off a bit - that's what happens with Python for me (the indentation is still a psychological issue for me) - but you surely get used to it quickly.
Now, after having developed in Objective-C for such a long time (including having learned Smalltalk and Eiffel), I can't actually look at the "ugly" C++ or Java syntax - and I (more or less) believe the worst thing that could happen to the world in programming languages was C++ (my two EUR 0.01, which, by the way, results in 3.14 UScents by a strange coincidence today).
Anyway, try it out and you'll either hate it or love it.
Also, for me, a good programmer is someone who is personally, privately, and passionately interested in Esoteric Programming Languages - which brings us to the "Indifference to Syntax" - or "Being amazed by Syntax" (some people should probably take this with a grain of salt).
Unfortunately, as funny as it may sound, this is the reality in most big corporations: If you don't dare to make decisions (and to bear the risks involved), you setup a committee or council. In that case, nobody is to blame if the council decisions proves to be wrong in the end.
Back in 1995-97, I was working for a major European media/publishing company. We were one of their (Netscape's) largest customers having bought around 200 Netscape Publishing System Licenses (NPS) for around USD 80k each! - well those were the good ol' days.
The software was very primitive but it was a solid basis for what we needed - in our company I was responsible for the platform so I came up with a solid specification of what we needed and how Netscape should add this to NPS. We had a meeting on a very high level with Netscape management in Mountain View in September 1996(!) to discuss my paper, which I had already discussed in with Netscape Europe and managed to actually get through to Netscape US.
The meeting was a revelation for me. By that time, the term "Intranet" was becoming a hip-term. There we were, three or four people from our company (by that time, I was "Director International Technology Co-operations" - what a title, isn't it?) - and about five or six people from Netscape.
We explained all our needs again and told them, that we would be of course willing to pay for all these enhancements. I specifically had collected input from another ten or fifteen other media companies from Europe to come up with a neat spec for Netscape - i.e. I did all the job, which they should've done in the first place.
After the explanation and discussion of the paper (three hours or so), one top Netscape manager said: "You know, there are only about 20-30 publishers around the world - but hundreds and thousands of companies needing Intranet solutions. So, therefore, we have decided to go for the Intranet market and thus will drop the media/publishing business. I'm sorry, but we can't implement the spec because it's just a too small market!" (not withstanding the fact that there are hundreds and thousands of media companies around the world...)
I was furious - it was like a... no, not slap, a fist? A hit with a 10-ton-fist in the face... I was so furious that I stood up and said: "You know guys, with this attitude I think you'll be dead as a company at latest within two-to-three years." - and immediately left the meeting.
My boss came after me and tried to convince me to come back to the meeting (though not wholeheartedly as I could see he was furious as well). So, I actually left the office, the building and waiting outside of the Netscape building in the sun - waiting for my colleagues to come out.
In the end, we left Netscape, went home and I and a small team have implemented what we needed by ourselves and completely dumped Netscape software, including Netscape Web Server (what was it's name), switching to... I dunno, it was the httpd-server, which was the basis for Apache later on (a-patchy server); we dumped all Netscape software, even including the browser.
That was my experience with Netscape... It was not Microsoft, it was not AOL - it was their arrogant, stupid, high-horsed, customers-don't-count attitude that killed them. It was their f***ed-up management!
I keep thinking that there's probably some Cmd-Option-Shift-Click the Green Dot option... Close, hot, very, very hot: Shift-Click on the Green Dot does the trick - in most cases anyway.
If by customizations, you mean things like non free software and by "odd" hardware you mean hardware with binary blobs, your experience is no different from mine. I have learned two things from your posting:
a) I understand that installing "non-free software" is a problematic customization for you. b) There are such things as "Binary Binary Large Objects" - or what does "Binary BLOB" stand for you?
Now that's a bold statement. A maximum wage has never actually been tried, has it? In fact, it has been. There are two big examples (sorry, a bit off-topic).
1) In Germany, there is an upper limit for practicing physicians for each treatment. They collect so called "points". And there is an upper limit per point. The points are directly related to a treatment type. So, once a physician has (lets say) treated a head-ache the same way 10 times per month, he has to switch to another therapy, otherwise the additional treatments will just cost him and not generate any income.
This is probably one of the most stupid inventions in human history, but it kind-o "works". Physicians complain like hell, patients don't understand it, government complaints - only the central social insurance physicians association ("Kassenärztliche Vereinigungen") are happy because they control more-or-less every payment.
2) Bonus for middle managers and sales people (here in Germany). I will never, ever understand why bonus payments should have a cap. I mean, the idea is that the people generate more revenues and results (managers) or sell more (sales). Why limit their bonus and thus also limit their willingness to invest more time into the task?
I have heard all arguments *for* cap on bonus, but none of them convince me so far, as they are mainly about "... well in such a case, people would retort to 'half-legal' methods to raise their bonus..." - no, they *wouldn't*, because either (a) they already do it and a cap doesn't change much or (b) they won't because the good managers/sales people want to perform.
Also, there are excellent methods to avoid (a) short-term thinking (something like bonus-banks, etc) and (b) "half-legal" activity. What happens now, in fact, is that sales people (once they reach their bonus-limit during a period) push sales to the next period instead of selling more and more and managers do the same and become mediocre people.
Anyway, sorry for the off-topic thing, but yes, there are lots of jobs where there is cap on wages.
Once I played about 8 roles on an IRC-channel, connecting from various different machines. The funniest part was when the others stopped chatting and watched/commented my flame-wars between myselfs started after about half an hour or so. Was funny (even the others thought it was very funny after I revealed the identities of the 8 different people.
Well, yes, some of them were male, some female, some had very radical conservative opinions, others were rather liberal.
It was also a very interesting experience for me, very hard work to keep up the role/positions represented, but very funny.
What do you mean with "Crappy Pay"?? All the 120-minute-commercials of MI6 (for which we had to actually pay entrance fee to watch) since the 60ies are all but lies? No Martinis, 7-star-hotels, beautiful girls -- and such? All lies??
And why did I prepare myself in years of training for such a career? What am I supposed to do with my life now??
.. but never forget that the Constitution comes first! It's like the three Robotics Laws. The first part of the Oath overrules anything coming thereafter, i.e. if the President gives you an order which would seem like against the Constitution, you *have the right* to refuse such an order on the grounds that it's against US Constitution.
Do not forget, though, that that might get you court-martialed...
Free and independent media is one of the most important requirements for a democracy to work. Without that there will be no democracy at all. It just doesn't work.
The root of democracy is not so much the fact that people have the right to vote but that people are informed - via free and independtend sources, independent of any government, political party, and such.
The right to vote comes after that. If you have fully functioning independent media, you will have the means to make your government accountable. The means for changing a governemnt not fitting your requirements is then the universal suffrage - elections! (well, as you know, it's not that easy, but you get the picture).
Don't forget that Government means "Representants of the People" - nothing more, nothing less. They're supposed to represent *us* and not themselfes.
In Soviet Russia (and in Zsarist Russia of 2007), You represent the Government!
The only "small" difference being that you don't get shot on the street, polonimized, or otherwise rm -rf'd in the US for writing something anti-government or anti-establishment.
Guy, get a sense for reality! I am also doing business in Russia and China and to be honest, on a pure-personal level, I prefer doing business in China especially because I don't get shot down on the street publishing government-critical info - in China they just invalidate your business/media license or block you otherwise, but don't really kill you. Of course, you have the same other problems as well (no rule of law, being cheated, etc) - but you *know* this and these things are not life threatening.
Man, you really should get a sense of reality - maybe you should leave your safe country and visit those other countries and do a reality-check (or, if you are Russian, what I assume, you should leave for a while and check-out what freedemom of speech really means e.g. in US, UK, Switzerland, etc.)
And with respect to the links you posted: They are fully government-controlled/censored, don't tell bullshit here just because people can't check it out because they can't read russian/cyrillic. Licensed by Ministry of Press is Newspeak for "fully controlled and censored my MoP".
I have to second that, I am right now in China and I can't access Wikipedia, BBC and lots of other websites. Wikipedia being really a big problem since I am doing some analysis and would like to get some definitions - at least my EB subscription works.
Turkey usually has no filter/Great Firewall. The issue with YouTube was that it was blocked on the IP-Level, the Great Firewall here filters and analyzes the content. That's a big difference.
The issues in Turkey are: Insulting Turkishness (whatever that means;-), Ataturk (which is a bit understandable) and the Army (which is not understandable). This has to been seen on historical grounds (check out Turkish History @ Wikipedia). Still, it is not what unlimited free speech should be. The issue regarding Genozid on Armenians is an ongoing discussion in Turkey and I believe Turkey *will* come clean in about 5-10 years time on that - late but not too late?
In Germany (where I live), it is also forbidden to deny Holocaust. Not that I would, but this is also limit on Free Speech. The same in France.
You guys living in US should really value your freedom of speech and finally understand how free a country you have - even compared to Western Europe!
Just quickly, the specs I found for the Hitachi Drive:
- 5 discs, two heads each, rotating at 7200 RPM - 1070Mbps transfer rate - 8,7ms avg seek time - 4,17ms avg latency - around 9 watts power consumption while in "inactive-mode" (NOT reading or writing)
Slashdot Mirror
You're right.
I am also living in Germany, but the problem is that it's really difficult to do anything against these things.
I tried to be politically active, and even joined a party. But since I have a fulltime job, I don't have as much as time for political activism as I would like to and as others have. There are so many going-to-become-professional-politicians in those parties with really enough time (some of them have fulltime jobs, but in civil service or such, where they have enough time for politics), that you don't really get the slightest chance to get to the upper levels of the party.
You have to invest so much time that it's really nearly impossible to have a fulltime job and become a politician, who has the people's interest in his mind first and foremost.
In order to get to the top, you have to become a "Political Man", a Homo Politicus. You have to brown-nose, become a real a**hole to get there... And I decided that the price is not worth paying for changing a system which most people seem to accept as "well, good enough" and about which most people don't even give a shit...
And provided you reach the top, you have either become one of "them" or you can't really change anything because there are so many particular-interests, you have to keep brown-nosing so much, do horse-trading, tit-for-tat, that you really lose contact with the people...
Sorry for the rant, but saying "change the system" is easy, doing so is not. And as you said: Since most of the people don't care as long as they get something to eat and some entertainment (Panem et Circenses), they are happy and they don't want to change the system.
My suggestion? Try changing your "small world environment", i.e. help your friends, neighbours and relatives in circumventing such censorships, help them express their anger and inacceptance of the system and help them start to think...
So my question is: Why don't they get those sites closed?
There was an article in c't, the German IT magazine. I'm citing from the online version
Short sumary: The child proteciton organization Carechild did an interesting experiment: They used 20 of the entries from the Danish blocklist. 17 of those URLs were in the US, one each in Netherlands, South Korea, and UK. They contacted the hosters via the abuse-mail adresses and asked them to close down those child porn sites. Eight of the US hosters closed the sites within three hours of contact, 16 of the sites were closed within one day. Three sites were reported (truthfully) by hosters (after checking) to not contain child porn and not against any laws.
My question now is: If Childcare can do it, why not the mighty BKA (FBI of Germany)? I thought closing down might be more effective than trying to block them, which won't work anyway...
*sigh* - politicians really drive me crazy...
Main Server: scrooge (always) ...
Secondary: donald
From there on: huey, louie, dewey, daisy
My notebooks: hortense, quackmore (Donald's parents)
Other servers: swamphole, pothole, SirQuackly,
Backup-Machines: scrooge-ii, donald-ii, huey-ii, etc...
Not used: Gladstone (don't like to have a server working based solely on luck...)
Worst:
ASDEBLNXCH01 (AutoScout, Germany, Berlin, Exchange-Server 01) - that was because these were Windows machines (brrr) - while I was working for Scout24-Group...
I think, the right answer is: At any of one of the next Aston Martin dealers - provided, however, that you have enough of the scarce resource called "money".
Joke aside: I was once in one of those shops and the sales person was talking on the phone to a potential client. It seems, an Aston Martin is really a scarce resource as she was telling him that he needed to wait abut 5-6 months for his delivery (or something like that). But I believe, you could speed up delivery by doubling the price if you wanted an Aston Martin by tomorrow...
I remember that NeXTstep had this in the Workspace Manager. ou could click a file and push CMD+3 to see a preview of the content of the file, if preview was supported. Preview worked for many file types (.tif, .snd, ...) and where it didn't work, you could write a "preview viewer" for the Workspace Manager as a plug-in.
Obviously, the preview was similar to a screenshot at the last edit stage of the file.
I used 2 LaCies for a while, but they both had a throughput of 10MB/s (the NAS with XP as OS) and 6MB/s (LaCie with Linux).
Then I switched to Synology DS408. Mine has 4x Seagate 1.5TB HDs, RAID 5, so I have around 4TB of space.
The network throughput maxes out at around 60MB/s(!). But this might be due to my not-so-good switch. It's all on a Gbps-Network.
I used it only with Mac OS X (iMac, MBP, MBA, MB) with AFP. I haven't tested performance with SMB or NFS, but should be as fast as AFP (probably even faster).
One thing, which really convinced me of Synology, was their support. Since the Seagate 1.5TB HDs have some problems (make sure you buy those with Firmware >=SD1A), I had a lot of issues at the beginning and thought that it's a problem with the NAS. I even thought I lost data. When I contacted Synology, they offered to log-on on to the NAS and try recovery, local check and everything - for free. And in the end, they found the problem with the Seagate HDs, proposed the solution and I am now even more happy then before.
And no, I'm not working at Synology...
Yes, indeed (catholic==TRUE) would be more generic. But since I'm a die-hard NEXTSTEP/Mac OS X-developer, where "YES" and "NO" are preferred over "TRUE" and "FALSE", it was more natural for me to write "catholic==YES".
Then again, since we should generalize, you are right, the attribute should be "religion" with values like (christian-roman-catholic|christian-protestant|christian-orthodox|muslim|jewish|buddhist|...|other). This would be more generally applicable to (more or less) any human being.
The question is, of course: Would you be considered, even remotely, as a potential candidate, if you have an attribute with (potential) variable values?
Yup, that evaluates to TRUE. (I thought, in my previous post, that you don't need irony-tags at /., but well, you live and you learn)
Being wet is not an attribute of water, in fact water makes wet. If I remember correctly from my physics class:
When a matter is covered by a liquid such as water, that matter becomes wet.
Yes, the Pope, on the other hand, does have to have the attribute "catholic==YES", otherwise it won't work (whatever "it" it is).
This already happened a while ago in Germany. Deutsche Telekom trademarked the color/colour "Magenta". Deutsche Telekom is the Microsoft of Telecoms companies in Germany.
They even sued lots of websites which used magenta as their main color...
You know, I started developing in Objective-C back in 1990/91 on NeXTstep (yes, it was lc 'step' at that time...) - Coming from Pascal, C, Forth (and some Basic dialects), I found it a bit weird at the beginning (the first 4-6 months). Then, one day, it made "click" - as we say in German. And from that day on, I couldn't really imagine doing it in a different way than MVC & Objective-C.
... - they didn't exist in NeXTstep those days).
In order to fully grasp it, I started experiments with Smalltalk (great), Eiffel (great, but ugly syntax), and some other languages I forgot.
Remember: those times were the times when we wrote our frameworks ourselves (I remember writing objects like "Float", "Integer", "String",
You have to switch from "Calling a Function" or "Calling a Member of an Object" to "Sending a Message to an Object" and get used to the idea that everything is an Object (even classes are instances of the class class and so on) and then you are set.
The syntax may turn you off a bit - that's what happens with Python for me (the indentation is still a psychological issue for me) - but you surely get used to it quickly.
Now, after having developed in Objective-C for such a long time (including having learned Smalltalk and Eiffel), I can't actually look at the "ugly" C++ or Java syntax - and I (more or less) believe the worst thing that could happen to the world in programming languages was C++ (my two EUR 0.01, which, by the way, results in 3.14 UScents by a strange coincidence today).
Anyway, try it out and you'll either hate it or love it.
Also, for me, a good programmer is someone who is personally, privately, and passionately interested in Esoteric Programming Languages - which brings us to the "Indifference to Syntax" - or "Being amazed by Syntax" (some people should probably take this with a grain of salt).
Unfortunately, as funny as it may sound, this is the reality in most big corporations: If you don't dare to make decisions (and to bear the risks involved), you setup a committee or council. In that case, nobody is to blame if the council decisions proves to be wrong in the end.
I know what I am talking about...
And used-car salesmen, domain grabbers, and spammers. Not to forget idiotic, pointy-haired managers.
Back in 1995-97, I was working for a major European media/publishing company. We were one of their (Netscape's) largest customers having bought around 200 Netscape Publishing System Licenses (NPS) for around USD 80k each! - well those were the good ol' days.
... no, not slap, a fist? A hit with a 10-ton-fist in the face... I was so furious that I stood up and said: "You know guys, with this attitude I think you'll be dead as a company at latest within two-to-three years." - and immediately left the meeting.
... I dunno, it was the httpd-server, which was the basis for Apache later on (a-patchy server); we dumped all Netscape software, even including the browser.
The software was very primitive but it was a solid basis for what we needed - in our company I was responsible for the platform so I came up with a solid specification of what we needed and how Netscape should add this to NPS. We had a meeting on a very high level with Netscape management in Mountain View in September 1996(!) to discuss my paper, which I had already discussed in with Netscape Europe and managed to actually get through to Netscape US.
The meeting was a revelation for me. By that time, the term "Intranet" was becoming a hip-term. There we were, three or four people from our company (by that time, I was "Director International Technology Co-operations" - what a title, isn't it?) - and about five or six people from Netscape.
We explained all our needs again and told them, that we would be of course willing to pay for all these enhancements. I specifically had collected input from another ten or fifteen other media companies from Europe to come up with a neat spec for Netscape - i.e. I did all the job, which they should've done in the first place.
After the explanation and discussion of the paper (three hours or so), one top Netscape manager said: "You know, there are only about 20-30 publishers around the world - but hundreds and thousands of companies needing Intranet solutions. So, therefore, we have decided to go for the Intranet market and thus will drop the media/publishing business. I'm sorry, but we can't implement the spec because it's just a too small market!" (not withstanding the fact that there are hundreds and thousands of media companies around the world...)
I was furious - it was like a
My boss came after me and tried to convince me to come back to the meeting (though not wholeheartedly as I could see he was furious as well). So, I actually left the office, the building and waiting outside of the Netscape building in the sun - waiting for my colleagues to come out.
In the end, we left Netscape, went home and I and a small team have implemented what we needed by ourselves and completely dumped Netscape software, including Netscape Web Server (what was it's name), switching to
That was my experience with Netscape... It was not Microsoft, it was not AOL - it was their arrogant, stupid, high-horsed, customers-don't-count attitude that killed them. It was their f***ed-up management!
a) I understand that installing "non-free software" is a problematic customization for you.
b) There are such things as "Binary Binary Large Objects" - or what does "Binary BLOB" stand for you?
1) In Germany, there is an upper limit for practicing physicians for each treatment. They collect so called "points". And there is an upper limit per point. The points are directly related to a treatment type. So, once a physician has (lets say) treated a head-ache the same way 10 times per month, he has to switch to another therapy, otherwise the additional treatments will just cost him and not generate any income.
This is probably one of the most stupid inventions in human history, but it kind-o "works". Physicians complain like hell, patients don't understand it, government complaints - only the central social insurance physicians association ("Kassenärztliche Vereinigungen") are happy because they control more-or-less every payment.
2) Bonus for middle managers and sales people (here in Germany). I will never, ever understand why bonus payments should have a cap. I mean, the idea is that the people generate more revenues and results (managers) or sell more (sales). Why limit their bonus and thus also limit their willingness to invest more time into the task?
I have heard all arguments *for* cap on bonus, but none of them convince me so far, as they are mainly about "... well in such a case, people would retort to 'half-legal' methods to raise their bonus..." - no, they *wouldn't*, because either (a) they already do it and a cap doesn't change much or (b) they won't because the good managers/sales people want to perform.
Also, there are excellent methods to avoid (a) short-term thinking (something like bonus-banks, etc) and (b) "half-legal" activity. What happens now, in fact, is that sales people (once they reach their bonus-limit during a period) push sales to the next period instead of selling more and more and managers do the same and become mediocre people.
Anyway, sorry for the off-topic thing, but yes, there are lots of jobs where there is cap on wages.
Once I played about 8 roles on an IRC-channel, connecting from various different machines. The funniest part was when the others stopped chatting and watched/commented my flame-wars between myselfs started after about half an hour or so. Was funny (even the others thought it was very funny after I revealed the identities of the 8 different people.
Well, yes, some of them were male, some female, some had very radical conservative opinions, others were rather liberal.
It was also a very interesting experience for me, very hard work to keep up the role/positions represented, but very funny.
What do you mean with "Crappy Pay"?? All the 120-minute-commercials of MI6 (for which we had to actually pay entrance fee to watch) since the 60ies are all but lies? No Martinis, 7-star-hotels, beautiful girls -- and such? All lies??
And why did I prepare myself in years of training for such a career? What am I supposed to do with my life now??
.. but never forget that the Constitution comes first! It's like the three Robotics Laws. The first part of the Oath overrules anything coming thereafter, i.e. if the President gives you an order which would seem like against the Constitution, you *have the right* to refuse such an order on the grounds that it's against US Constitution.
Do not forget, though, that that might get you court-martialed...
Free and independent media is one of the most important requirements for a democracy to work. Without that there will be no democracy at all. It just doesn't work.
The root of democracy is not so much the fact that people have the right to vote but that people are informed - via free and independtend sources, independent of any government, political party, and such.
The right to vote comes after that. If you have fully functioning independent media, you will have the means to make your government accountable. The means for changing a governemnt not fitting your requirements is then the universal suffrage - elections! (well, as you know, it's not that easy, but you get the picture).
Don't forget that Government means "Representants of the People" - nothing more, nothing less. They're supposed to represent *us* and not themselfes.
In Soviet Russia (and in Zsarist Russia of 2007), You represent the Government!
The only "small" difference being that you don't get shot on the street, polonimized, or otherwise rm -rf'd in the US for writing something anti-government or anti-establishment.
Guy, get a sense for reality! I am also doing business in Russia and China and to be honest, on a pure-personal level, I prefer doing business in China especially because I don't get shot down on the street publishing government-critical info - in China they just invalidate your business/media license or block you otherwise, but don't really kill you. Of course, you have the same other problems as well (no rule of law, being cheated, etc) - but you *know* this and these things are not life threatening.
Man, you really should get a sense of reality - maybe you should leave your safe country and visit those other countries and do a reality-check (or, if you are Russian, what I assume, you should leave for a while and check-out what freedemom of speech really means e.g. in US, UK, Switzerland, etc.)
And with respect to the links you posted: They are fully government-controlled/censored, don't tell bullshit here just because people can't check it out because they can't read russian/cyrillic. Licensed by Ministry of Press is Newspeak for "fully controlled and censored my MoP".
I have to second that, I am right now in China and I can't access Wikipedia, BBC and lots of other websites. Wikipedia being really a big problem since I am doing some analysis and would like to get some definitions - at least my EB subscription works.
u rl2html-690http://www.leman.com.tr/index.php?kapak >, Penguen http://www.penguen.com/, Girgir - these being satirical magazines), newspapers, and TV stations.
;-), Ataturk (which is a bit understandable) and the Army (which is not understandable). This has to been seen on historical grounds (check out Turkish History @ Wikipedia). Still, it is not what unlimited free speech should be. The issue regarding Genozid on Armenians is an ongoing discussion in Turkey and I believe Turkey *will* come clean in about 5-10 years time on that - late but not too late?
Turkey usually has no filter/Great Firewall. The issue with YouTube was that it was blocked on the IP-Level, the Great Firewall here filters and analyzes the content. That's a big difference.
And in Turkey, there is a mass of government critical websites, magazines (checkout Leman, ahref=http://www.leman.com.tr/index.php?kapakrel=
The issues in Turkey are: Insulting Turkishness (whatever that means
In Germany (where I live), it is also forbidden to deny Holocaust. Not that I would, but this is also limit on Free Speech. The same in France.
You guys living in US should really value your freedom of speech and finally understand how free a country you have - even compared to Western Europe!
Funny how things happen. GWB looked into his eyes ... and Gerhard Schroeder, our (Germany) former Chancellor, was (and still is) convinced that Vladimir is a "... flawless democrat... " see http://www.focus.de/politik/ausland/putin_nid_4084 7.html (german) and http://politicsandpress.com/2007/vlad-the-great-st rides-west/ (english)
Just quickly, the specs I found for the Hitachi Drive:
- 5 discs, two heads each, rotating at 7200 RPM
- 1070Mbps transfer rate
- 8,7ms avg seek time
- 4,17ms avg latency
- around 9 watts power consumption while in "inactive-mode" (NOT reading or writing)
Hope this helps