Cars have chemicals in them and are frequently serviced with other chemicals. Ever get gasket remover on an un-gloved hand before? Heck, ever spray gasket remover on a latex glove? Now imagine getting some accidentally sprayed near your face or something similar. Not fun.
Or, if you're running Ubuntu, just sudo apt-get install envyng-gtk or, if you're running Kubuntu, sudo apt-get install envyng-qt. You still don't need a web browser to install a driver - it's just a heck of a lot easier to find it that way.
Good news - these guys are already working on an open source rocket. It's still a little buggy and unstable, mind you, but it's dirt cheap and already on version 5! I mean, how can you go wrong?
Chiang Kai-Shek's only virtue was that he wasn't Mao.
Okay, but that isn't exactly a small thing.
Well, no, but he wasn't exactly a freedom-fighter or a lover of civil liberties. He gained power by a military coup and kept it with an iron fist. Look up Taiwan's White Terror sometime. The only real difference between him and Mao was that he was a power hungry conservative that embraced tried-and-true Chinese tradition as his ideological touchstone instead of the murderously destructive interpretation of Communism that Mao adopted. Point being, if China actually chose to create a government that answered to the will of its people, the KMT would be the second-to-last political party that they'd probably call upon to lead them.
The only reason the KMT (and, by association, Taiwan) hasn't revoked its claim to the mainland is because doing so would be interpreted by the PRC as a declaration of independence.
It would also be domestically very controversial in Taiwan.
True, in no small part because doing so would effectively be a declaration of war against a much larger and more powerful opponent that can obliterate it at will, something which the PRC has made very clear for the past 30 years or so. The only thing keeping Taiwan from getting the Hong Kong treatment itself is the US' insistence, backed with a carrier group or two and considerable military assistance to Taiwan, that the PRC and Taiwan maintain the status quo. Under the circumstances, if I were Taiwanese, I'd find any change to the status quo to be controversial, too, if not brazenly suicidal.
Chiang Kai-Shek's only virtue was that he wasn't Mao. Past that, neither he nor the Kuomintang were exemplars of good governance, which is why Mao was able to overrun China in the first place. The only reason the KMT (and, by association, Taiwan) hasn't revoked its claim to the mainland is because doing so would be interpreted by the PRC as a declaration of independence. Past that, the KMT is about as likely to retake the mainland as the Tories are to retake the US.
Samba 4? I know Samba's version of alpha is a bit more robust than most people's versions of alpha (i.e. theirs works), but when the developers of the software are openly saying, "Don't use this in a production environment," I'm generally willing to take them at their word. Besides, if it's a smaller company, Samba 3's NT domain-style support will work just fine. All Alfresco needs for SSO support is something that speaks LDAP to query user accounts from, and, if you're securing communications, something that can either pass along Kerberos tickets or something that speaks NTLM.
That said, whether you go with Alfresco, Lotus, Sharepoint, or , you're going to be in for a world of training, both for yourself and for your users. I looked at Alfresco for document management where I worked because it had CIFS support, which I figured would reduce the learning curve for the rest of the office a bit. However, I'd still have to explain how to check in/out documents and explain what a workflow is in order to do anything remotely useful in the system, and that doesn't even get into Alfresco Share or their (thankfully free) Office plugins. Point being, these solutions will not be trivial for anyone involved and your management needs to understand that.
They're already grappling. The problem here is that MS Office and VBA are moving targets and Microsoft isn't perfect at adhering to its documented implementation. To Microsoft's credit, when you're dealing with something as big as VBA, it's difficult to line up documentation and behavior; that's part of the reason why standards committees take so long nailing down how something is specified and how it should be implemented.
By the sounds of things, that's kind of what they ended up doing. Thing is, when you have a hodgepodge like this, you have to standardize on something, and that's going to affect and change whatever is around that isn't already adhering to that standard (i.e. most everything). The problem that they had, near as I can tell, is they decided on the solution before they determined what the problem was - they decided they'd standardize on their LiMux client, then started filling in the blanks. Granted, with a project this size and given the free-for-all nature of their original IT structure, there's going to be a fair amount of blank-filling anyway; if you try to document every single dependency before you go in on something this size, half of them are going to change and mutate before you get done with the documentation, which means you're going to have to update your documentation, which will then be out of date somewhere else, so you'll have to... you get the idea. Even so, it sounds like they got bit by the things they didn't know they didn't know, which happens quite frequently.
Right - it's about trade-offs. If you can create more wealth than you'd lose by switching to a more efficient product created out of your municipality, everybody wins.
Family Guy's problem wasn't that it was bad. It was that it was repetitive. The first seasons were daring because nobody had done them before. When they brought it back, they gave the fans exactly what they claimed they wanted - more and more of the same. Peter's dumb, Lois is smart but psychotic, Brian is a yuppie douche, Stewie is ambiguously gay and also douchy, Meg's ugly and abused, Chris is dense; now toss in some other characters, lots of references to '80s pop culture, and the occasional inappropriate non sequitur and you have a Family Guy episode. Rinse, lather, repeat.
On the other hand, I take issue with the notion that 14-16 ye^D^D^D^D^D^D^D^D humans are capable of understanding sex. In this country they are demonstrably unprepared to engage in sex in any manner approaching responsible, to which the depressing statistics will attest.
Here's the thing: It's not about who makes better decisions. Not by 16, anyway. Of course I make better decisions than my kids - I damn well better. I'm older, wiser, smarter, stronger, and just better looking than them.;-) However, at some point, if you want them to make better decisions on their own, you have to let them actually make decisions. When they're little, you make all of the decisions for them and use them as teaching lessons so they can learn how to make decisions for themselves; things like, "Wear this shirt with this pair of pants because the colors match," that sort of thing. By the time they're adolescents, though, they should be past that point - they should already know what values you want them to follow, what decisions you would probably make in their position, and be ready to make some decisions on your own. Your job isn't to make those decisions for them, it's to lean on them if they start making decisions that will do serious long-term damage to them (e.g. tons of unprotected sex, drugs, dropping out of school, etc.). Granted, some kids start out making better decisions for others; with some kids, you can basically let them run free reign at 13 and know that they won't screw anything up too seriously, while other kids will never get a clue. Some kids will start one way, then go the other. However, they're the ones that will ultimately suffer the brunt of the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, so they need to be held responsible for them, and it's a little hard to take responsibility for a decision that isn't yours to make.
Having said all that, it's also important to remember that kids aren't computers. They're not finite state machines. No perfect amount or level or technique of "parenting" will produce "bug-free" children. There are certain things you can do as a parent that seem to help (emphasis on education, discipline, and curiosity, among other things), but, ultimately, it's up to them to decide whether your values hold any meaning for them.
Don't forget that most of the countries they have to go through are a bit more lax with environmental regulations and building codes than Western Europe (or the US, for that matter). I'm not saying this to suggest that China's going to go cheap on this; it's far too strategically important for them to cut corners. However, when you're not having to spend a decade on environmental impact studies and archaeological surveys before you lay a single track-equivalent, you can get quite a bit done rather quickly.
It's the same reason FDR could use the WPA to build bridges immediately, while Obama can't.
I doubt anybody is seriously suggesting that everybody should stop performing random acts of friendly charity - in a friendly situation, the friend probably brings something of value to the table that you can pester for in return (help with moving, watching your kid, going on that fishing trip with you, etc.). It's sort of like implicit bartering. As for most of the services you're providing, though, well...
1. Opening a door is low effort and low skill, so I don't expect renumeration for that.
2. Helping you move? Ignoring for a second that there are companies that do exactly that and charge accordingly, I make it a point to at least offer some decent food and drink (generally of the pizza and alcohol variety) when I'm asking my friends to move. Implicit bartering FTW.
3. Pick up a coke? Well, if you're grabbing one from the fridge, that's one thing, but if I'm making you grab one from the store, I should at least be willing to give you a little extra for gas, no?
4. Jumpstart my car? I have AAA, which is a paid-for service that will do exactly that on the occasion that I'm unable to find someone to attach my jumper cables to.
5. Fix your collar? Erm... I work in IT. What collar?;-)
6. Point out your shoe's untied? This would be another "low effort, low skill" task with minimal renumeration.
Point being, there are many mundane and simple tasks that we can do for people, but many of the ones you listed are neither mundane nor simple. They're time consuming, highly skilled, or both. Tech support falls in this category - I'll do it for free for family and friends because they do or have done things for me for free, but I'm certainly not going to freely donate my time unless its for psychic rewards (i.e. for a cause that I really believe in) because it's a pain in the ass and there are other things I'd rather do with my time than fix some stranger's computer (like, say, technical support for friends and family!).
Considering how Ubuntu comes with Mono now (save your jokes 'til the end, please), along with F-Spot, Banshee, Tomboy, and other Mono-based apps, I'd say sudo apt-get install monocle is just right. That said, if you're on a SUSE box, yes, "yum install monocle" would be more suitable syntax.
That's only one of the myriad options that malware uses. I've seen it modify registry keys so it runs whenever somebody logs in (usually by fiddling with the Userinit key in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon) it automatically starts - that'll hold true even during Safe Mode boots, which makes it impossible to delete it while the operating system is running. Since a lot of tools are starting to catch on to that, many of them will just install themselves as hidden device drivers, which will, of course, also be largely operational during Safe Mode boots. Honestly, the best way to remove a virus from a Windows machine is to just nuke it from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.
The same way Amazon does, I imagine - by doing exactly what you describe. The good news here is that, if you target a few of the bigger players (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE), you probably nail about 90% of the target Linux desktop audience out there. Sure, it won't be comprehensive, but it should still be good enough for most circumstances. The goal would be to pick common enough distributions where the cost and time spent on testing, debugging, and packaging isn't greater than the potential rewards you would receive by releasing and supporting the game for each distribution.
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Cars have chemicals in them and are frequently serviced with other chemicals. Ever get gasket remover on an un-gloved hand before? Heck, ever spray gasket remover on a latex glove? Now imagine getting some accidentally sprayed near your face or something similar. Not fun.
Wait - time out. You mean to tell me that I can program a BSD bootloader in Postscript? Just when I thought it couldn't get any stranger...
Oh, for the love of Stallman...
wget -c http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/195.36.15/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-195.36.15-pkg1.run
Or, if you're running Ubuntu, just sudo apt-get install envyng-gtk or, if you're running Kubuntu, sudo apt-get install envyng-qt. You still don't need a web browser to install a driver - it's just a heck of a lot easier to find it that way.
Good news - these guys are already working on an open source rocket. It's still a little buggy and unstable, mind you, but it's dirt cheap and already on version 5! I mean, how can you go wrong?
The program 'go' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
apt-get install go
Well, no, but he wasn't exactly a freedom-fighter or a lover of civil liberties. He gained power by a military coup and kept it with an iron fist. Look up Taiwan's White Terror sometime. The only real difference between him and Mao was that he was a power hungry conservative that embraced tried-and-true Chinese tradition as his ideological touchstone instead of the murderously destructive interpretation of Communism that Mao adopted. Point being, if China actually chose to create a government that answered to the will of its people, the KMT would be the second-to-last political party that they'd probably call upon to lead them.
True, in no small part because doing so would effectively be a declaration of war against a much larger and more powerful opponent that can obliterate it at will, something which the PRC has made very clear for the past 30 years or so. The only thing keeping Taiwan from getting the Hong Kong treatment itself is the US' insistence, backed with a carrier group or two and considerable military assistance to Taiwan, that the PRC and Taiwan maintain the status quo. Under the circumstances, if I were Taiwanese, I'd find any change to the status quo to be controversial, too, if not brazenly suicidal.
Chiang Kai-Shek's only virtue was that he wasn't Mao. Past that, neither he nor the Kuomintang were exemplars of good governance, which is why Mao was able to overrun China in the first place. The only reason the KMT (and, by association, Taiwan) hasn't revoked its claim to the mainland is because doing so would be interpreted by the PRC as a declaration of independence. Past that, the KMT is about as likely to retake the mainland as the Tories are to retake the US.
Samba 4? I know Samba's version of alpha is a bit more robust than most people's versions of alpha (i.e. theirs works), but when the developers of the software are openly saying, "Don't use this in a production environment," I'm generally willing to take them at their word. Besides, if it's a smaller company, Samba 3's NT domain-style support will work just fine. All Alfresco needs for SSO support is something that speaks LDAP to query user accounts from, and, if you're securing communications, something that can either pass along Kerberos tickets or something that speaks NTLM.
That said, whether you go with Alfresco, Lotus, Sharepoint, or , you're going to be in for a world of training, both for yourself and for your users. I looked at Alfresco for document management where I worked because it had CIFS support, which I figured would reduce the learning curve for the rest of the office a bit. However, I'd still have to explain how to check in/out documents and explain what a workflow is in order to do anything remotely useful in the system, and that doesn't even get into Alfresco Share or their (thankfully free) Office plugins. Point being, these solutions will not be trivial for anyone involved and your management needs to understand that.
They're already grappling. The problem here is that MS Office and VBA are moving targets and Microsoft isn't perfect at adhering to its documented implementation. To Microsoft's credit, when you're dealing with something as big as VBA, it's difficult to line up documentation and behavior; that's part of the reason why standards committees take so long nailing down how something is specified and how it should be implemented.
By the sounds of things, that's kind of what they ended up doing. Thing is, when you have a hodgepodge like this, you have to standardize on something, and that's going to affect and change whatever is around that isn't already adhering to that standard (i.e. most everything). The problem that they had, near as I can tell, is they decided on the solution before they determined what the problem was - they decided they'd standardize on their LiMux client, then started filling in the blanks. Granted, with a project this size and given the free-for-all nature of their original IT structure, there's going to be a fair amount of blank-filling anyway; if you try to document every single dependency before you go in on something this size, half of them are going to change and mutate before you get done with the documentation, which means you're going to have to update your documentation, which will then be out of date somewhere else, so you'll have to... you get the idea. Even so, it sounds like they got bit by the things they didn't know they didn't know, which happens quite frequently.
Pabst Blue Screen.
Right - it's about trade-offs. If you can create more wealth than you'd lose by switching to a more efficient product created out of your municipality, everybody wins.
Family Guy's problem wasn't that it was bad. It was that it was repetitive. The first seasons were daring because nobody had done them before. When they brought it back, they gave the fans exactly what they claimed they wanted - more and more of the same. Peter's dumb, Lois is smart but psychotic, Brian is a yuppie douche, Stewie is ambiguously gay and also douchy, Meg's ugly and abused, Chris is dense; now toss in some other characters, lots of references to '80s pop culture, and the occasional inappropriate non sequitur and you have a Family Guy episode. Rinse, lather, repeat.
I blame the manatees.
I prefer Soylent Clear. Same great taste, less people!
There, fixed that for you.
Brainfuck. Duh.
Perhaps so, but I am.
;-) However, at some point, if you want them to make better decisions on their own, you have to let them actually make decisions. When they're little, you make all of the decisions for them and use them as teaching lessons so they can learn how to make decisions for themselves; things like, "Wear this shirt with this pair of pants because the colors match," that sort of thing. By the time they're adolescents, though, they should be past that point - they should already know what values you want them to follow, what decisions you would probably make in their position, and be ready to make some decisions on your own. Your job isn't to make those decisions for them, it's to lean on them if they start making decisions that will do serious long-term damage to them (e.g. tons of unprotected sex, drugs, dropping out of school, etc.). Granted, some kids start out making better decisions for others; with some kids, you can basically let them run free reign at 13 and know that they won't screw anything up too seriously, while other kids will never get a clue. Some kids will start one way, then go the other. However, they're the ones that will ultimately suffer the brunt of the consequences of their actions, whatever they might be, so they need to be held responsible for them, and it's a little hard to take responsibility for a decision that isn't yours to make.
Here's the thing: It's not about who makes better decisions. Not by 16, anyway. Of course I make better decisions than my kids - I damn well better. I'm older, wiser, smarter, stronger, and just better looking than them.
Having said all that, it's also important to remember that kids aren't computers. They're not finite state machines. No perfect amount or level or technique of "parenting" will produce "bug-free" children. There are certain things you can do as a parent that seem to help (emphasis on education, discipline, and curiosity, among other things), but, ultimately, it's up to them to decide whether your values hold any meaning for them.
Don't forget that most of the countries they have to go through are a bit more lax with environmental regulations and building codes than Western Europe (or the US, for that matter). I'm not saying this to suggest that China's going to go cheap on this; it's far too strategically important for them to cut corners. However, when you're not having to spend a decade on environmental impact studies and archaeological surveys before you lay a single track-equivalent, you can get quite a bit done rather quickly.
It's the same reason FDR could use the WPA to build bridges immediately, while Obama can't.
Ah - so it'll still be ubiquitous a decade from now, even after Microsoft stops supporting it out of shame? Neat!
I doubt anybody is seriously suggesting that everybody should stop performing random acts of friendly charity - in a friendly situation, the friend probably brings something of value to the table that you can pester for in return (help with moving, watching your kid, going on that fishing trip with you, etc.). It's sort of like implicit bartering. As for most of the services you're providing, though, well...
;-)
1. Opening a door is low effort and low skill, so I don't expect renumeration for that.
2. Helping you move? Ignoring for a second that there are companies that do exactly that and charge accordingly, I make it a point to at least offer some decent food and drink (generally of the pizza and alcohol variety) when I'm asking my friends to move. Implicit bartering FTW.
3. Pick up a coke? Well, if you're grabbing one from the fridge, that's one thing, but if I'm making you grab one from the store, I should at least be willing to give you a little extra for gas, no?
4. Jumpstart my car? I have AAA, which is a paid-for service that will do exactly that on the occasion that I'm unable to find someone to attach my jumper cables to.
5. Fix your collar? Erm... I work in IT. What collar?
6. Point out your shoe's untied? This would be another "low effort, low skill" task with minimal renumeration.
Point being, there are many mundane and simple tasks that we can do for people, but many of the ones you listed are neither mundane nor simple. They're time consuming, highly skilled, or both. Tech support falls in this category - I'll do it for free for family and friends because they do or have done things for me for free, but I'm certainly not going to freely donate my time unless its for psychic rewards (i.e. for a cause that I really believe in) because it's a pain in the ass and there are other things I'd rather do with my time than fix some stranger's computer (like, say, technical support for friends and family!).
And by "yum install monocle", I of course meant "yast2 -install monocle"... bloody hell...
Considering how Ubuntu comes with Mono now (save your jokes 'til the end, please), along with F-Spot, Banshee, Tomboy, and other Mono-based apps, I'd say sudo apt-get install monocle is just right. That said, if you're on a SUSE box, yes, "yum install monocle" would be more suitable syntax.
That's only one of the myriad options that malware uses. I've seen it modify registry keys so it runs whenever somebody logs in (usually by fiddling with the Userinit key in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon) it automatically starts - that'll hold true even during Safe Mode boots, which makes it impossible to delete it while the operating system is running. Since a lot of tools are starting to catch on to that, many of them will just install themselves as hidden device drivers, which will, of course, also be largely operational during Safe Mode boots. Honestly, the best way to remove a virus from a Windows machine is to just nuke it from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.
The same way Amazon does, I imagine - by doing exactly what you describe. The good news here is that, if you target a few of the bigger players (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE), you probably nail about 90% of the target Linux desktop audience out there. Sure, it won't be comprehensive, but it should still be good enough for most circumstances. The goal would be to pick common enough distributions where the cost and time spent on testing, debugging, and packaging isn't greater than the potential rewards you would receive by releasing and supporting the game for each distribution.
No, but it does run Command & Conquer and its descendants. Curiously, you're only allowed to play as Nod.