Absolutely - you'll find no argument from me here. All I'm getting at is that it's one thing to criticize, but unless we have a solution to whatever they're trying to fix, they're just going to look at us as an inflexible cost center that will be the first against the wall when the layoff revolution comes.
Wow. I know this is Slashdot, but this is getting ridiculous. IT departments have one job and one job only:
Support the elements of the company that make money.
That's it. That's our job. If the elements of whatever company we're working for wants a "Web 2.0" app, instead of immediately jumping on our pedestals and saying, "Whoa there, mister! That's insecure and NEW! Put that thing away," we should instead be asking ourselves, "Hey, what problem are they trying to solve with this, and can we find a better solution?" When the employees are using Gmail or Facebook for inter-office communication, it means we're not doing our jobs, not because we're not locking down outside communication paths but because the communication paths we're providing are inadequate. When our customers start firing up MSN Messenger without our permission, we should be asking ourselves what we can use that's better, more secure, and easier to manage in an enterprise. When our customers come up to us and say, "We're tired of chasing Word docs everywhere - we're getting a wiki to manage our information", we should be looking at their problems and figuring out if a wiki is the best solution, or if they really just need a document management system.
Get it? WE are at the disposal and discretion of our coworkers, NOT the other way around.
They did a review of Safari 3 back in June. As for comparing against Opera, they probably elected not to due to their opinion of Safari, as noted in the first paragraph:
At the World Wide Developer Conference this week, Apple announced the availability of Safari 3 for the Windows operating system. Today, we put the Safari 3 beta to the test to see how it compares to Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 on Windows. What we found didn't impress us very much. Although Safari offers slightly faster page loading, the beta is extremely unstable and suffers from interface deficiencies that make its value on the Windows platform questionable at best. In other words, they may not think it's worth reviewing, at least on a Windows platform, especially since it's not a Windows-native browser. Think of it as being similar to comparing browsers on Ubuntu and including IE 6 under WINE.
You betcha. Lincoln was against state's rights, and Garfield, well, he, uh... he wouldn't give out posts to God-fearing proper Christian folk. Yeah. Think about it.
The American health system is nowhere near that bad. If you walk into an emergency room, they are required by law to treat you. They'll bill you for it, sure, and, if you're poor, it'll go to collections, but that's the end of it. There are, of course, a few problems with this approach:
1. Emergency rooms are the most expensive places to treat people, short of a specialist. Many hospitals are trying to work around that by subsidizing low-cost clinics. It's cheaper to "outsource" their poorer patients out of the ER.
2. The costs are assumed by the hospitals, which means that costs are assumed by the people that actually pay their bills at the hospital. Put another way, assume treating a person costs $1000. Now, say two people walk into the ER to get treated, and only one can pay their bill. How much is the hospital going to bill the other person? That's right - $2000, and that's precisely how health billing is going these days. That's why insurance rates are going through the roof - we're already indirectly paying for the uninsured.
3. Wrecking the credit of poor people doesn't exactly help them not be poor.
Unfortunately, there are few good ways to solve this. We could...
1. No longer require hospitals to take anyone that walks into the ER. This'll drop rates down for everyone with insurance, but will completely screw everyone else. This is probably (thankfully) not an option.
2. Fully socialize our medicine. This sounds great until you realize that people are inherently cheap when it comes to approving taxes, meaning that we're either going to get really lousy care or we're going to throw the country even further into debt (probably both).
3. Semi-socialize our medicine by having the government make up the slack where the private sector can't (or won't) provide care efficiently. Basically, instead of having the hospitals assume all of the risk, we pass it off to the government and let them run the free/low-cost clinics and all that. Unfortunately, the instant you put into place a "catch-all" and remove risk from a system, people tend to become less risk-averse. In this case, that means that more people might opt to go uninsured since they know the government will take care of them anyways, making a bad problem even worse.
4. Let WalMart or some other low-cost innovator run low-cost health care and see if they can get some efficiencies going there. This actually isn't too far off - WalMart's Sam's Club is starting to push low-cost health insurance for small business, for example, and WalMart has also begun selling cheaper medications in select stores. The problem with this is that most people are (understandably) concerned about letting someone with a penchant for selling shirts that don't last six months take control of people's health decisions.
Unfortunately, there's no good answer here, just a bunch of really lousy ones.
In that case, it might interest you to know that the code was released as open source a few years ago, though the name of the game wasn't. It's now Ur-Quan Masters. That might help your review a little.
Specialization is nice, but it can go to far. I was thinking of the people whose job it is to process food. For them, food production isn't about feeding their families, it's about maximizing profits and producing units, as though they were making clocks or automobiles or shoes. There's an obvious problem with that -- food is so much more important, as all the poisoned-food-from-China-scares in the US as of late have reminded us. If people were at least closer to the food, so to speak, things would be better. Maybe not everyone needs to be a farmer, but maybe everyone *should* know the person who grows his food, and vice versa.
To start with, maximizing profits and maximizing production leads to cheaper and more plentiful food. The key is in making sure you don't lose quality in the process. Knowing your farmer, however, isn't going to change that - if we, China's best customer, are getting poisoned food from China, what is China giving themselves?
The other thing I was thinking is that people are generally less happy than they were before, at least that's what just about every older person (let's say 70+) I talk to tells me. Why? I'd wager it's at least partly because the pendulum has swung so far from the more agrarian society that existed even 50 years ago.
I'd wager that it's because they're feeling nostalgic and miss when the world made sense to them. Alternatively, it might have less to do with agrarianism and more to do with the fact that we can hear everyone complain more. Think back 50 years ago - how did people learn about each other? They'd have to meet and greet with each other. Nowadays, everyone can be acutely aware of the suffering of children in Darfur, see pictures, and chat with them online. Fifty years ago, the only way you really found out about the horrors of war was if you participated in one. Nowadays, you can find YouTube footage of Chechen rebels shooting Russian helicopters, you get live coverage of air raids from the news... well, you get the idea. Point being, fewer people are living in a self-enclosed Brigadoon-style cocoon, where nothing is wrong in the world, except some stuff that's just really far away.
Now, instead of having time to grow food, we don't even have time to eat healthy food and so we resort to food that is merely convenient.
This actually isn't anything new. Orwell was writing about this in "The Road to Wigan Pier" during the Great Depression. To quote:
When you are unemployed, which is to say
when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to
eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is
always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth
of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and
we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are
at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you
to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than
brown bread-and-dripping and cold water.
In short, it's not even an issue of time - the people Orwell was talking about were unemployed. They had plenty of time. They didn't have much money, though, and they had to keep themselves occupied, so instead of eating nutritious food, they ate cheap food with abysmal quality that tasted better. When you're well off, you don't have to choose between "tastes good" and "good for you" - you can get both pretty easily. The poorer you are, though, the more that choice faces you, and, when faced with that choice, 98% of the world will go for "tastes good" each and every time. The way to fix this is by making good food inexpensive and increasing the standard of living. Now, instead of living out of cans of potted meat food product, it's actually cheaper per weig
One of my personal favorites is Star Control 2 - you start off in a ship, doing... what? You don't know. There's a solar system ahead, but you don't have to stay there. It kind of looks like ours (VGA graphics and all). So, you try to learn the controls. You wiggle an arrow key - it does something. You press the "up" button - it moves your ship forward. Okay, this isn't so hard... let's fly to Earth. See what's going on there. Wait, what's this? There's a red dot coming, and I can't avoid it... slave planet? Huh? Someone's going to come to find out what I'm doing here? This isn't good... Why is Earth red? Fly towards it... I can't do anything. It won't let me land. It's red and glowing. What the hell? Base station...
The amazing part is that, in all of this, you learn the basic mechanics of the game. You learn how to fly your ship. You fight an easily winnable combat mission (though you don't think it's all that easy the first time around). You learn how to harvest resources and learn that planets may have some hazards (Mercury's fire, for example). If you get really creative, you discover that you have no business landing on certain planets (Venus). Best of all, it sets up the plot for you - get rid of the red glowing thing around Earth! If you're curious, you could ask the base commander about various backstory, but you didn't have to, and you definitely didn't have to do it right away.
Alternatively, at least in Nevada, you can just get your car registered in a non-smogging county (i.e. not Clark, Washoe, or Carson City) and not have to deal with getting your car smogged at all.
Dr. Peter Venkman: This thread is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling.
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, Google and Microsoft working together - mass hysteria.
I will freely point out that I didn't research how well my laptop might be supported by Ubuntu when I got it. In fact, it really wasn't a big deal whether Ubuntu worked right or not; I got the laptop to have something I could play with and use on the road, and thought it'd be fun to throw Ubuntu on there instead of relying on XP. I even tried PC-BSD on it, which is how I discovered the hard way that my laptop isn't just unsupported on BSD - it's impossible (or at least more difficult than I'm willing to overcome) to boot due to Compaq's flaky UltraDMA implementation and the laptop's BIOS's complete inability to disable it. At least Ubuntu boots.
That said, the question asked was what I think Linux should focus on. I think supporting hardware would be a great start. If I wanted to be limited in my hardware selections because my OS won't work on anything else, I'd get a Mac; it seems Linux runs best on Intel hardware anyways, so what's the difference? That said, I understand that, realistically, there's no way for Linux to support every single chipset or vendor in the world, especially since there are many vendors that don't want to be supported on Linux, so I'm willing to settle for a nicer way of dealing with unsupported hardware. I'm still happy with Linux, my laptop is still running Ubuntu, and I'm very happy with that... I just think there's room for improvement, that's all.
One feature at least gives Outlook 2003 props over Outlook XP: RPC over HTTP. It's great if you have remote staff that needs full Exchange functionality and you don't want to deal with VPNs or torture them with OWA. Then again, Exchange 2007 actually has a pretty decent OWA package now, so there might be less of a need to deal with that.
An enterprise-level accounting package. Think of any of Sage's or Best's products. Something that the bookkeepers could use that would run on Linux, is scalable past 20 employees (i.e. not QuickBooks), has some real inventory management (i.e. not QuickBooks), and is relatively stable. I already know about GnuCash, and it looks promising. Finish that and I can start pushing Linux for my customers instead of grudgingly throwing Windows boxen at them. Without that single bit of software, most of my customers won't touch Linux with a ten foot pole because they can't do business with it.
PS: I'm writing all of this from my Ubuntu-running laptop and I'm quite happy with it... even though it took me two days to get it working right. Heh.
Things I've had to hit up the command line for and wouldn't put up with from Windows or OS X on my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installation:
Installation - I have a Compaq Presario V6000-series laptop with an AMD chipset. Apparently, it has some BIOS issues that require special flags in the initial boot loader screen on the Ubuntu install CD. To find these flags, I had to hit the Ubuntu forums; there was absolutely no way that I could've known which flags to plug in unless I had prior experience with such issues. Ideally, Ubuntu should have figured out that I might have a troubled AMD chipset and provided the correct flags for me. This could probably fall under "hardware support". Alternatively, a quick GUI that listed what advanced options were available to me would've been helpful, too. Heck, even BSD's boot loader will give you a basic list of commands to muck around with, and it's text-based. That would've been more helpful than Ubuntu's CD. Wireless - I know wireless is a big issue on Linux, especially with Broadcom devices like the one in my laptop. That said, getting wireless working eventually required the use of ndiswrapper, and, if there's a clean GUI for that on Ubuntu (not saying there isn't - didn't look all that hard), I didn't see it recommended. Again, this is probably as much a "hardware support" issue as anything; ideally, the drivers would've already been in Linux and we wouldn't have these problems.
Other wish-list items: Drivers - Look, I get the Linux driver model and why some people find it great. It's wonderful that, when I plug a USB mouse into my laptop, it immediately works and doesn't play the "10-Mississippi" game that Windows XP plays, even on initial login. I understand that's because all of the drivers are pre-compiled and included into the kernel. Great. That said, if I decide to run the most up-to-date video drivers for a Linux-based computer and I don't hit up their respective repositories (something Ubuntu is getting better about, by the way), why must I recompile my drivers each and every time I install a kernel update? I don't mean a technical "why" - I know WHY, technically, and I even get the philosophical WHY, in that I understand it has to do with keeping open-source halfway open. That said, from a practical standpoint, I think that the first distro that comes up with a halfway decent driver API to link against is going to be the first desktop Linux distro that becomes ready for prime-time, because, from that point on, if someone decides they want bleeding-edge drivers, they won't be punished with repeated driver recompilations after every kernel update. GUI - Don't get too carried away on having every single function in the GUI. Microsoft already does that and it's a royal pain in the ass. In fact, though I like some of the functions of Powershell, I think it's another fine example of Microsoft trying to do too much with their widgets. Sometimes less is more. If I have to keep hitting the '?' key to figure out which one of the 8,000+ verb-noun commands I want to use, that product is going to be less powerful than the one with only 500 commands to deal with that I actually have a halfway decent chance of remembering. That said, I'd still like to be able to do basic administration on a Linux machine without hitting up the command line. I'm okay if mastering administration requires shell-scripting skills, but let's keep the basic stuff... basic. Regression Testing - The latest kernel update for Feisty Fawn ruins ACPI, making it where my laptop doesn't know whether it's on battery or not. More than anything, I'd like to throw more resources at preventing these sorts of shenanigans - heck, let's do this for Windows, too. VIM configuration GUI - But only because I'm feeling ironic.:-)
Re:They shouldn't be asking non-tech guys to hire.
on
Network Warrior
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps so, but how do you hire a tech person to weed out the "puke learners" if you don't have one already? Unless your company is a pure tech company, you're looking at a "chicken or the egg" situation, where you need a technical person to hire a technical staff but you don't have a technical person to let you know whether you're looking at real technical people or not. That's where paper comes in - it's a quick shorthand to let a non-tech person know that, "Well, they at least took the time to memorize something technical - that has to be encouraging".
Re:Interview Questions
on
Network Warrior
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Incorrect. A Windows 2003 MCSE does, in fact, require seven exams (six chosen by Microsoft, one elective). You may be confusing it with the MCSA, which "only" requires four exams.
Create a pool of government funded money that goes towards software, and give everyone a vote for which projects they think are important. What if I don't think any of them are important? Do my tax dollars still have to go towards those projects? What if I want to vote, directly, with my own money? Sort of like I do now?
Tally the votes, split the pool of money between the projects, running from the most votes to the least. What about a project like, say, Folding@Home? It's more popular now than it used to be, but it still pales in comparison to SETI@Home. Does that mean that we'd end up spending more money on finding space aliens than curing disease? Probably. Should we? Probably not, unless we can convince those space aliens to cure the diseases for us.
Don't give one share of the resources per vote though... determine an amount that guarantees a decent standard of living for those participants who are receiving support, and each person who gets anything gets that amount until the pool is empty. Right off the bat, we have some big problems here. First, define "decent". If I lived in Iowa, I'd define "decent" as anything in the $50k/year range, which would be more than enough to buy a house, maintain a family, and buy a few toys. In a large urban area (San Francisco, New York), that $50k/year would barely support me living in an apartment in a decent (read: relatively free of crime) neighborhood with five of my closest friends. Furthermore, if I was a single bachelor, living with five of my closest friends in a two bedroom loft might not be too bad. If I was married and had eight kids, I might feel a little differently. But, that's not the most serious problem here. The most serious problem is that, based on your above statement, you're assuming that we'd be paying less in taxes than we could hope to spend to give every developer of every piece of software a "decent wage" (a reasonable assumption). Consequently, some people would end up paying taxes on software they would never use and are not interested in buying. A good way of thinking about why this would be a problem would be if we considered the example of Windows - 90%+ of the world uses it, right? So, if we used your system, it'd probably be pretty popular, no? How would you feel if you were one of the 10% not interested in Windows and were told that your tax dollars were going to pay for it anyways?
Provide access to common technological infrastructure in a way that supports those whose work is deemed important by their peers first, then let the public at large use up any left over access for their pet projects. So, instead of making software that the customer wants, we're going to make software that fellow software makers find useful. Good idea - worked great for BSD and just about every Linux GUI project out there.
Honestly, I could go on like this all day, but I'll stop with this:
I do not want other people deciding what software I want or should be allowed to pay for. If I feel like coughing up a few grand on Exchange Server, that's my right. If I'd rather save my money and run Sendmail, that's also my right. Our current system allows both to exist simultaneously, which is perfectly fine by me. Any system that begins to dictate what software I or anyone else will spend money on is a system that I will fight vociferously against, because I should be free to choose whether I want free software or not. That's what freedom means - it means having the right to make a choice, even if it's the wrong one.
Apple is a hardware company, not a software company. Apple made its OS to differentiate its hardware from other vendors. Licensing Mac OS to others would've diluted that in much the same way that PC clones have (in the long term) led to IBM selling their PC business to Lenovo. Trouble is, up until very recently, personal computers were Apple's only business, so sacrificing that for market share wouldn't have done much good; unlike IBM, PCs weren't just another product in the Enterprise stack for Apple to push along with Big Iron, specialty processors, and the like.
Fifteen years ago... that would be 1995. Power Computers and Umax were making Mac clones at the time, with the end result being the same market share that Mac OS had before and lowered profits from Apple only getting profit out of the software instead of the entire software/hardware stack. Considering how Apple is currently the only PC builder to actually experience some decent margin on their PCs, I'd say they're on the right track now.
Sure we accept this in cars. That's why there are recalls and TSBs. Heck, there are already recalls for 2007 Toyotas. Anytime you have a complicated system that's supposed to run continuously, you're going to have some bugs unless you either:
1. Create a truckload of redundant systems and have them check against each other.
2. Spend a lot of time and money on the problem, with the idea that you'd rather have reliability than state-of-the-art. Note that I said time AND money - money is no substitute for time here.
Fair enough - I could see VoIP being useful in that situation. I will point out, though, that most plans these days (at least in the US) for residential use include unlimited night and weekend minutes, i.e. the times you would presumably be at home talking to another person. Granted, night tends to start rather late (9-ish?).
As I said before, the biggest problem with VoIP on an iPhone is the complexity of it - in order to have it on the phone, Apple has to be willing to explain to people how it works and explain to AT&T/Cingular why it's a good idea to let people have a phone with that capability built into it. Getting AT&T's signature is easier when you're established in that market (Apple isn't... at least not yet). Getting people to understand why VoIP in general is "cool" will become a lot easier when it becomes, well, a lot easier. Personally, I suspect you'll see an Apple-supported Asterisk install on an Xserve ("Macsterisk"?) before you'll see an iPhone with VoIP support. Interestingly, Roughly Drafted actually mentioned just that in an article last year.
iPhones have Safari. I imagine that any plugin that would work on Safari would work on iPhone Safari, seeing as it's the same browser and the same OS. So, that should take care of Adobe Flash, though I'm not 100% certain on this. Considering how the iPhone is being advertised as YouTube-compatible, though, that seems encouraging.
* MS Office Document reader
Okay, granted, that would be nice. Then again, you have a browser - Google Docs to the rescue? I'll grant this isn't as nice as it could be, but it is possible.
* Barcode reader
Uhh... how many people need this? This being Slashdot, I anticipate seeing about 15 replies here all saying, "Yeah, I need a barcode reader! How could you not?" Outside of Slashdot, however, I've yet to meet a single person that has said to me, "Man, this phone would be perfect if only I could scan merchandise and perform store inventories with it." Yes, I know the plural for "anecdote" is not "data", and I know you can't prove a negative, but, even so, this one seems AWFULLY specialized.
* PDF/E-book reader
You know what comes with OS X? A little application called "Preview". It opens PDFs. It's nifty. Oh, and you can print PDF, too, though I don't imagine that'll be an oft-used feature on a phone.
* Voice recorder
Voice mail? I know, not the same thing. Yeah, that would be nice.
* VOIP
See, now we're just being silly. Let's keep in mind that Apple needs to be able to sell this in the US and had a rather heinous time convincing our wonderful cellular providers that selling phones that can get music from *outside the cellular provider's network* is not *evil*. That's why the ROKR happened - that was Apple's way of saying, "Okay, we'll play it your way - it'll suck, but we'll do it," so that way they could come up to the providers later and say, "See, it's not just our snazzy logo that sells stuff; if we're going to play, we need to play by OUR rules, not yours." Having Apple support a technology that would allow someone to purchase a phone that would subvert the primary business of a cellular provider just isn't happening at this point. Cellular providers barely want to do business with Apple in the first place, especially after watching what Apple's done to the recording industry and their DRM schemes.
Aside: Yes, I know that Apple has a DRM scheme, too, and I know nobody likes it here because, well, it's DRM, which means it's evil. However, before you start saying that Apple has done nothing about DRM, keep in mind that Microsoft did precisely what the content providers wanted with DRM and compare that with FairPlay - given a choice between the two, which would you choose? Outside of Microsoft, ever try getting an MP3 to transfer to a MiniDisc player? At least Apple plays nicely with non-DRM music and, in fact, is actually selling it now, without legal trouble. Plus, I see a lot more support for iPods on Linux than I do the PlaysForSure SanDisk Sanza that work gave me.
That said, even if the providers allowed it, Apple still wouldn't include VOIP support. Not directly. Why? Because it's complicated. You have to go to a WiFi spot so you have Internet access, at which point you punch up your VoIP application (probably Skype, I'm assuming), and then you can talk... until you walk, what, 70 meters, best case, in an 802.11n environment? How often are you going to be by an 802.11n network, anyways? Not very, at least in public - you're probably going to be in a mixed B/G environment, which is good for 35 meters, and, I don't know about you, but I've never been able to get anywhere near that in real life. I've been able to get consistently... 10, maybe 20 meters? So, as long as I don't plan on leaving my hous
By only resizing in the lower right hand corner, you always know which corner you need to go to in order to resize your window. This avoids confusion - you'll never go to the upper right hand corner, which could close your application, to resize if you know you can only do it in the lower right hand corner, right? It's the same logic behind the one-button mouse; why have two buttons when you only need one to open programs, launch System Preferences, or go to the various contextual menus on the top bar to do things like examine permissions and the like? Two just doubles the confusion. *grin*
By the way, in 1984, having a window that you could only resize from the lower right corner was the least of your concerns on a Mac. The bigger problem was finding a way to launch a program that didn't make you swap disks 15 times before it'd finish loading. Oh, good times...
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely - you'll find no argument from me here. All I'm getting at is that it's one thing to criticize, but unless we have a solution to whatever they're trying to fix, they're just going to look at us as an inflexible cost center that will be the first against the wall when the layoff revolution comes.
Wow. I know this is Slashdot, but this is getting ridiculous. IT departments have one job and one job only:
Support the elements of the company that make money.
That's it. That's our job. If the elements of whatever company we're working for wants a "Web 2.0" app, instead of immediately jumping on our pedestals and saying, "Whoa there, mister! That's insecure and NEW! Put that thing away," we should instead be asking ourselves, "Hey, what problem are they trying to solve with this, and can we find a better solution?" When the employees are using Gmail or Facebook for inter-office communication, it means we're not doing our jobs, not because we're not locking down outside communication paths but because the communication paths we're providing are inadequate. When our customers start firing up MSN Messenger without our permission, we should be asking ourselves what we can use that's better, more secure, and easier to manage in an enterprise. When our customers come up to us and say, "We're tired of chasing Word docs everywhere - we're getting a wiki to manage our information", we should be looking at their problems and figuring out if a wiki is the best solution, or if they really just need a document management system.
Get it? WE are at the disposal and discretion of our coworkers, NOT the other way around.
You betcha. Lincoln was against state's rights, and Garfield, well, he, uh... he wouldn't give out posts to God-fearing proper Christian folk. Yeah. Think about it.
To say nothing of See, Fourth, Jabba, or a variety of other malapropalyptic programming languages.
The American health system is nowhere near that bad. If you walk into an emergency room, they are required by law to treat you. They'll bill you for it, sure, and, if you're poor, it'll go to collections, but that's the end of it. There are, of course, a few problems with this approach:
1. Emergency rooms are the most expensive places to treat people, short of a specialist. Many hospitals are trying to work around that by subsidizing low-cost clinics. It's cheaper to "outsource" their poorer patients out of the ER.
2. The costs are assumed by the hospitals, which means that costs are assumed by the people that actually pay their bills at the hospital. Put another way, assume treating a person costs $1000. Now, say two people walk into the ER to get treated, and only one can pay their bill. How much is the hospital going to bill the other person? That's right - $2000, and that's precisely how health billing is going these days. That's why insurance rates are going through the roof - we're already indirectly paying for the uninsured.
3. Wrecking the credit of poor people doesn't exactly help them not be poor.
Unfortunately, there are few good ways to solve this. We could...
1. No longer require hospitals to take anyone that walks into the ER. This'll drop rates down for everyone with insurance, but will completely screw everyone else. This is probably (thankfully) not an option.
2. Fully socialize our medicine. This sounds great until you realize that people are inherently cheap when it comes to approving taxes, meaning that we're either going to get really lousy care or we're going to throw the country even further into debt (probably both).
3. Semi-socialize our medicine by having the government make up the slack where the private sector can't (or won't) provide care efficiently. Basically, instead of having the hospitals assume all of the risk, we pass it off to the government and let them run the free/low-cost clinics and all that. Unfortunately, the instant you put into place a "catch-all" and remove risk from a system, people tend to become less risk-averse. In this case, that means that more people might opt to go uninsured since they know the government will take care of them anyways, making a bad problem even worse.
4. Let WalMart or some other low-cost innovator run low-cost health care and see if they can get some efficiencies going there. This actually isn't too far off - WalMart's Sam's Club is starting to push low-cost health insurance for small business, for example, and WalMart has also begun selling cheaper medications in select stores. The problem with this is that most people are (understandably) concerned about letting someone with a penchant for selling shirts that don't last six months take control of people's health decisions.
Unfortunately, there's no good answer here, just a bunch of really lousy ones.
In that case, it might interest you to know that the code was released as open source a few years ago, though the name of the game wasn't. It's now Ur-Quan Masters. That might help your review a little.
Specialization is nice, but it can go to far. I was thinking of the people whose job it is to process food. For them, food production isn't about feeding their families, it's about maximizing profits and producing units, as though they were making clocks or automobiles or shoes. There's an obvious problem with that -- food is so much more important, as all the poisoned-food-from-China-scares in the US as of late have reminded us. If people were at least closer to the food, so to speak, things would be better. Maybe not everyone needs to be a farmer, but maybe everyone *should* know the person who grows his food, and vice versa.
To start with, maximizing profits and maximizing production leads to cheaper and more plentiful food. The key is in making sure you don't lose quality in the process. Knowing your farmer, however, isn't going to change that - if we, China's best customer, are getting poisoned food from China, what is China giving themselves?
The other thing I was thinking is that people are generally less happy than they were before, at least that's what just about every older person (let's say 70+) I talk to tells me. Why? I'd wager it's at least partly because the pendulum has swung so far from the more agrarian society that existed even 50 years ago.
I'd wager that it's because they're feeling nostalgic and miss when the world made sense to them. Alternatively, it might have less to do with agrarianism and more to do with the fact that we can hear everyone complain more. Think back 50 years ago - how did people learn about each other? They'd have to meet and greet with each other. Nowadays, everyone can be acutely aware of the suffering of children in Darfur, see pictures, and chat with them online. Fifty years ago, the only way you really found out about the horrors of war was if you participated in one. Nowadays, you can find YouTube footage of Chechen rebels shooting Russian helicopters, you get live coverage of air raids from the news... well, you get the idea. Point being, fewer people are living in a self-enclosed Brigadoon-style cocoon, where nothing is wrong in the world, except some stuff that's just really far away.
Now, instead of having time to grow food, we don't even have time to eat healthy food and so we resort to food that is merely convenient.
This actually isn't anything new. Orwell was writing about this in "The Road to Wigan Pier" during the Great Depression. To quote:
When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water.
In short, it's not even an issue of time - the people Orwell was talking about were unemployed. They had plenty of time. They didn't have much money, though, and they had to keep themselves occupied, so instead of eating nutritious food, they ate cheap food with abysmal quality that tasted better. When you're well off, you don't have to choose between "tastes good" and "good for you" - you can get both pretty easily. The poorer you are, though, the more that choice faces you, and, when faced with that choice, 98% of the world will go for "tastes good" each and every time. The way to fix this is by making good food inexpensive and increasing the standard of living. Now, instead of living out of cans of potted meat food product, it's actually cheaper per weig
One of my personal favorites is Star Control 2 - you start off in a ship, doing... what? You don't know. There's a solar system ahead, but you don't have to stay there. It kind of looks like ours (VGA graphics and all). So, you try to learn the controls. You wiggle an arrow key - it does something. You press the "up" button - it moves your ship forward. Okay, this isn't so hard... let's fly to Earth. See what's going on there. Wait, what's this? There's a red dot coming, and I can't avoid it... slave planet? Huh? Someone's going to come to find out what I'm doing here? This isn't good... Why is Earth red? Fly towards it... I can't do anything. It won't let me land. It's red and glowing. What the hell? Base station...
The amazing part is that, in all of this, you learn the basic mechanics of the game. You learn how to fly your ship. You fight an easily winnable combat mission (though you don't think it's all that easy the first time around). You learn how to harvest resources and learn that planets may have some hazards (Mercury's fire, for example). If you get really creative, you discover that you have no business landing on certain planets (Venus). Best of all, it sets up the plot for you - get rid of the red glowing thing around Earth! If you're curious, you could ask the base commander about various backstory, but you didn't have to, and you definitely didn't have to do it right away.
Now, if only more games were like that...
Alternatively, at least in Nevada, you can just get your car registered in a non-smogging county (i.e. not Clark, Washoe, or Carson City) and not have to deal with getting your car smogged at all.
Dr. Peter Venkman: This thread is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling.
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, Google and Microsoft working together - mass hysteria.
Not that it matters, but since you asked...
Photoshop -> GIMP
Avid -> LIVES - Note: I am not a video editor and have no idea if this program is any good.
Quicken -> GNUCash, among others.
I guess what I'm saying is that, based on your definition of "silly", there's quite a bit of silliness going on in the world today. *grin*
If you're using Outlook 2003 or newer, the limitation has been increased to 20 GB. You can find more information here.
I will freely point out that I didn't research how well my laptop might be supported by Ubuntu when I got it. In fact, it really wasn't a big deal whether Ubuntu worked right or not; I got the laptop to have something I could play with and use on the road, and thought it'd be fun to throw Ubuntu on there instead of relying on XP. I even tried PC-BSD on it, which is how I discovered the hard way that my laptop isn't just unsupported on BSD - it's impossible (or at least more difficult than I'm willing to overcome) to boot due to Compaq's flaky UltraDMA implementation and the laptop's BIOS's complete inability to disable it. At least Ubuntu boots.
That said, the question asked was what I think Linux should focus on. I think supporting hardware would be a great start. If I wanted to be limited in my hardware selections because my OS won't work on anything else, I'd get a Mac; it seems Linux runs best on Intel hardware anyways, so what's the difference? That said, I understand that, realistically, there's no way for Linux to support every single chipset or vendor in the world, especially since there are many vendors that don't want to be supported on Linux, so I'm willing to settle for a nicer way of dealing with unsupported hardware. I'm still happy with Linux, my laptop is still running Ubuntu, and I'm very happy with that... I just think there's room for improvement, that's all.
One feature at least gives Outlook 2003 props over Outlook XP: RPC over HTTP. It's great if you have remote staff that needs full Exchange functionality and you don't want to deal with VPNs or torture them with OWA. Then again, Exchange 2007 actually has a pretty decent OWA package now, so there might be less of a need to deal with that.
Sorry, thought of one more thing...
An enterprise-level accounting package. Think of any of Sage's or Best's products. Something that the bookkeepers could use that would run on Linux, is scalable past 20 employees (i.e. not QuickBooks), has some real inventory management (i.e. not QuickBooks), and is relatively stable. I already know about GnuCash, and it looks promising. Finish that and I can start pushing Linux for my customers instead of grudgingly throwing Windows boxen at them. Without that single bit of software, most of my customers won't touch Linux with a ten foot pole because they can't do business with it.
PS: I'm writing all of this from my Ubuntu-running laptop and I'm quite happy with it... even though it took me two days to get it working right. Heh.
Things I've had to hit up the command line for and wouldn't put up with from Windows or OS X on my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installation:
:-)
Installation - I have a Compaq Presario V6000-series laptop with an AMD chipset. Apparently, it has some BIOS issues that require special flags in the initial boot loader screen on the Ubuntu install CD. To find these flags, I had to hit the Ubuntu forums; there was absolutely no way that I could've known which flags to plug in unless I had prior experience with such issues. Ideally, Ubuntu should have figured out that I might have a troubled AMD chipset and provided the correct flags for me. This could probably fall under "hardware support". Alternatively, a quick GUI that listed what advanced options were available to me would've been helpful, too. Heck, even BSD's boot loader will give you a basic list of commands to muck around with, and it's text-based. That would've been more helpful than Ubuntu's CD.
Wireless - I know wireless is a big issue on Linux, especially with Broadcom devices like the one in my laptop. That said, getting wireless working eventually required the use of ndiswrapper, and, if there's a clean GUI for that on Ubuntu (not saying there isn't - didn't look all that hard), I didn't see it recommended. Again, this is probably as much a "hardware support" issue as anything; ideally, the drivers would've already been in Linux and we wouldn't have these problems.
Other wish-list items:
Drivers - Look, I get the Linux driver model and why some people find it great. It's wonderful that, when I plug a USB mouse into my laptop, it immediately works and doesn't play the "10-Mississippi" game that Windows XP plays, even on initial login. I understand that's because all of the drivers are pre-compiled and included into the kernel. Great. That said, if I decide to run the most up-to-date video drivers for a Linux-based computer and I don't hit up their respective repositories (something Ubuntu is getting better about, by the way), why must I recompile my drivers each and every time I install a kernel update? I don't mean a technical "why" - I know WHY, technically, and I even get the philosophical WHY, in that I understand it has to do with keeping open-source halfway open. That said, from a practical standpoint, I think that the first distro that comes up with a halfway decent driver API to link against is going to be the first desktop Linux distro that becomes ready for prime-time, because, from that point on, if someone decides they want bleeding-edge drivers, they won't be punished with repeated driver recompilations after every kernel update.
GUI - Don't get too carried away on having every single function in the GUI. Microsoft already does that and it's a royal pain in the ass. In fact, though I like some of the functions of Powershell, I think it's another fine example of Microsoft trying to do too much with their widgets. Sometimes less is more. If I have to keep hitting the '?' key to figure out which one of the 8,000+ verb-noun commands I want to use, that product is going to be less powerful than the one with only 500 commands to deal with that I actually have a halfway decent chance of remembering. That said, I'd still like to be able to do basic administration on a Linux machine without hitting up the command line. I'm okay if mastering administration requires shell-scripting skills, but let's keep the basic stuff... basic.
Regression Testing - The latest kernel update for Feisty Fawn ruins ACPI, making it where my laptop doesn't know whether it's on battery or not. More than anything, I'd like to throw more resources at preventing these sorts of shenanigans - heck, let's do this for Windows, too.
VIM configuration GUI - But only because I'm feeling ironic.
Perhaps so, but how do you hire a tech person to weed out the "puke learners" if you don't have one already? Unless your company is a pure tech company, you're looking at a "chicken or the egg" situation, where you need a technical person to hire a technical staff but you don't have a technical person to let you know whether you're looking at real technical people or not. That's where paper comes in - it's a quick shorthand to let a non-tech person know that, "Well, they at least took the time to memorize something technical - that has to be encouraging".
Incorrect. A Windows 2003 MCSE does, in fact, require seven exams (six chosen by Microsoft, one elective). You may be confusing it with the MCSA, which "only" requires four exams.
Honestly, I could go on like this all day, but I'll stop with this:
I do not want other people deciding what software I want or should be allowed to pay for. If I feel like coughing up a few grand on Exchange Server, that's my right. If I'd rather save my money and run Sendmail, that's also my right. Our current system allows both to exist simultaneously, which is perfectly fine by me. Any system that begins to dictate what software I or anyone else will spend money on is a system that I will fight vociferously against, because I should be free to choose whether I want free software or not. That's what freedom means - it means having the right to make a choice, even if it's the wrong one.
Apple is a hardware company, not a software company. Apple made its OS to differentiate its hardware from other vendors. Licensing Mac OS to others would've diluted that in much the same way that PC clones have (in the long term) led to IBM selling their PC business to Lenovo. Trouble is, up until very recently, personal computers were Apple's only business, so sacrificing that for market share wouldn't have done much good; unlike IBM, PCs weren't just another product in the Enterprise stack for Apple to push along with Big Iron, specialty processors, and the like.
Fifteen years ago... that would be 1995. Power Computers and Umax were making Mac clones at the time, with the end result being the same market share that Mac OS had before and lowered profits from Apple only getting profit out of the software instead of the entire software/hardware stack. Considering how Apple is currently the only PC builder to actually experience some decent margin on their PCs, I'd say they're on the right track now.
Sure we accept this in cars. That's why there are recalls and TSBs. Heck, there are already recalls for 2007 Toyotas. Anytime you have a complicated system that's supposed to run continuously, you're going to have some bugs unless you either:
1. Create a truckload of redundant systems and have them check against each other.
2. Spend a lot of time and money on the problem, with the idea that you'd rather have reliability than state-of-the-art. Note that I said time AND money - money is no substitute for time here.
Fair enough - I could see VoIP being useful in that situation. I will point out, though, that most plans these days (at least in the US) for residential use include unlimited night and weekend minutes, i.e. the times you would presumably be at home talking to another person. Granted, night tends to start rather late (9-ish?).
As I said before, the biggest problem with VoIP on an iPhone is the complexity of it - in order to have it on the phone, Apple has to be willing to explain to people how it works and explain to AT&T/Cingular why it's a good idea to let people have a phone with that capability built into it. Getting AT&T's signature is easier when you're established in that market (Apple isn't... at least not yet). Getting people to understand why VoIP in general is "cool" will become a lot easier when it becomes, well, a lot easier. Personally, I suspect you'll see an Apple-supported Asterisk install on an Xserve ("Macsterisk"?) before you'll see an iPhone with VoIP support. Interestingly, Roughly Drafted actually mentioned just that in an article last year.
* Adobe Flash plugin
iPhones have Safari. I imagine that any plugin that would work on Safari would work on iPhone Safari, seeing as it's the same browser and the same OS. So, that should take care of Adobe Flash, though I'm not 100% certain on this. Considering how the iPhone is being advertised as YouTube-compatible, though, that seems encouraging.
* MS Office Document reader
Okay, granted, that would be nice. Then again, you have a browser - Google Docs to the rescue? I'll grant this isn't as nice as it could be, but it is possible.
* Barcode reader
Uhh... how many people need this? This being Slashdot, I anticipate seeing about 15 replies here all saying, "Yeah, I need a barcode reader! How could you not?" Outside of Slashdot, however, I've yet to meet a single person that has said to me, "Man, this phone would be perfect if only I could scan merchandise and perform store inventories with it." Yes, I know the plural for "anecdote" is not "data", and I know you can't prove a negative, but, even so, this one seems AWFULLY specialized.
* PDF/E-book reader
You know what comes with OS X? A little application called "Preview". It opens PDFs. It's nifty. Oh, and you can print PDF, too, though I don't imagine that'll be an oft-used feature on a phone.
* Voice recorder
Voice mail? I know, not the same thing. Yeah, that would be nice.
* VOIP
See, now we're just being silly. Let's keep in mind that Apple needs to be able to sell this in the US and had a rather heinous time convincing our wonderful cellular providers that selling phones that can get music from *outside the cellular provider's network* is not *evil*. That's why the ROKR happened - that was Apple's way of saying, "Okay, we'll play it your way - it'll suck, but we'll do it," so that way they could come up to the providers later and say, "See, it's not just our snazzy logo that sells stuff; if we're going to play, we need to play by OUR rules, not yours." Having Apple support a technology that would allow someone to purchase a phone that would subvert the primary business of a cellular provider just isn't happening at this point. Cellular providers barely want to do business with Apple in the first place, especially after watching what Apple's done to the recording industry and their DRM schemes.
Aside: Yes, I know that Apple has a DRM scheme, too, and I know nobody likes it here because, well, it's DRM, which means it's evil. However, before you start saying that Apple has done nothing about DRM, keep in mind that Microsoft did precisely what the content providers wanted with DRM and compare that with FairPlay - given a choice between the two, which would you choose? Outside of Microsoft, ever try getting an MP3 to transfer to a MiniDisc player? At least Apple plays nicely with non-DRM music and, in fact, is actually selling it now, without legal trouble. Plus, I see a lot more support for iPods on Linux than I do the PlaysForSure SanDisk Sanza that work gave me.
That said, even if the providers allowed it, Apple still wouldn't include VOIP support. Not directly. Why? Because it's complicated. You have to go to a WiFi spot so you have Internet access, at which point you punch up your VoIP application (probably Skype, I'm assuming), and then you can talk... until you walk, what, 70 meters, best case, in an 802.11n environment? How often are you going to be by an 802.11n network, anyways? Not very, at least in public - you're probably going to be in a mixed B/G environment, which is good for 35 meters, and, I don't know about you, but I've never been able to get anywhere near that in real life. I've been able to get consistently... 10, maybe 20 meters? So, as long as I don't plan on leaving my hous
Twisted excuse in 3... 2... 1...
By only resizing in the lower right hand corner, you always know which corner you need to go to in order to resize your window. This avoids confusion - you'll never go to the upper right hand corner, which could close your application, to resize if you know you can only do it in the lower right hand corner, right? It's the same logic behind the one-button mouse; why have two buttons when you only need one to open programs, launch System Preferences, or go to the various contextual menus on the top bar to do things like examine permissions and the like? Two just doubles the confusion. *grin*
By the way, in 1984, having a window that you could only resize from the lower right corner was the least of your concerns on a Mac. The bigger problem was finding a way to launch a program that didn't make you swap disks 15 times before it'd finish loading. Oh, good times...