Look, I know you guys are having fun floppin' it out and having a good ol' measure, but I can see the point that you don't need a whole lot of money to make something that kind of works. I can actually see how for around $1000 it would be possible to build a plane that could be launched and flown manually to around 300m AGL, carry 400g of explosive and another 600g of misc nails and bolts and glide autonomously to 10m above a preprogrammed spot before exploding above a market, for example, or barracks.
It wouldn't have to be military spec. If it crashes along the way, hey just set it up to explode anyway - this obviously is not a precision type project.
I think the summary is a bit confusing in that you have clearly interpreted "build you own version of" as "build something of the same quality as".
BTW, for the record, I would never condone building a device such as mentioned above and people who do are evil shits, no matter what the motive. I am however interested in the subject of automonous aircraft and in particular thoroughly enjoyed reading a link posted to an earlier story on/. which I share now for your enjoyment and my own karma whoring.
Don't know about Amtrak, but in Australia while all the state owned railways where selling to private companies, Queensland Rail (owned by the state of Queensland) was buying up rolling stock. Quensland Rail now runs major freight lines all over the country at a profit while all of the private operators are struggling to stay viable. A state run transport entity turning a profit reduces the tax burden and provides an excellent social service.
Here in Melbourne on the other hand, Connex has completely fucking destroyed what was once one of the best public transport networks in the world. Some things are best run in the interest of the people, rather than a company.
Pretty much a perfect example of what's wrong with the GFDL; although arguably your quote from Wikipedia above was fair use, other legitimate reuses of it might not be. The GFDL was designed for books, where quoting the entire license is no problem; it wasn't designed for Slashdot comments, or newspaper articles, or any of a huge number of other possible situations.
Fair use in your country? Not saying mine is different, just highlighting that wikipedia which is mostly available in most/all cuntries [sic] should have a license that works in all relevant jurisdictions. Exceptions must be explicitly granted for censorship. CoUNTrieS!.
Hear hear. Now that this decision has been made, how long until the full transition occurs? It certainly looks like a much better choice. From the *wikipedia page on the Creative Commons licenses:
"Some within the copyleft movement argue that only the Attribution-ShareAlike license is actually a true copyleft license [24] and that there is no standard of freedom between Creative Commons licenses (as there is, for example, within the free software and open source movements). [25] An effort within the movement to define a standard of freedom has resulted in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.[26] In February 2008, Creative Commons recognized the definition and added an "Approved for Free Cultural Works" badge to its two Creative Commons licenses which comply -- Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. "
So Attribution-ShareAlike is a true copyleft license, but how long until we can reuse bits of wiki without having to include a full license?
------
*The quoted material from wikipedia is reposted under the GNU Free Documentaion License. A full copy of the license is included below to comply with the licensing requirements.
GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.3, 3 November 2008
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
0. PREAMBLE The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.
This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software.
We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. But this License is not limited to software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS This License applies to any manual or other work, in any medium, that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this License. Such a notice grants a world-wide, royalty-free license, unlimited in duration, to use that work under the conditions stated herein. The "Document", below, refers to any such manual or work. Any member of the public is a licensee, and is addressed as "you". You accept the license if you copy, modify or distribute the work in a way requiring permission under copyright law.
A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work containing the Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into another language.
A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (Thus, if the Document is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them.
The "Invariant Sections" are certain Secondary Section
Re:It's called DOS, and it was done a long time ag
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 1
I have wanted that for years, but not just for basic tasks, I want everything from/boot/bin and/sbin at the least, and possibly/etc,/usr/lib,/usr/bin or paths under those. Give it a physical lock to switch between read only and read/write.
I have fond memories of the acorn archemides machines at school that booted in seconds and ran some pretty cool full 3D graphics stuff in 1991. Even todays latest greatest PCs seem like a step backwards in some ways. They take longer to get to a state that's usable and use a crap load more power to do the same tasks.
They are also vulnerable to exploits that require minimal user involvement, whereas having to physically replace or flash a chip or flick a switch makes the purely technical exploit nearly impossible. With that kind of setup, pretty much all exploits become social.
Some of the design choices of the eighties, born from technical limitations, far outdo anything we use toady. I say bring it back.
Yeah I know, intel has been really good to OS development of late - really good. And the free market blah blah blah and stuff and whatever rant.
But this sends a clear message. It says they don't just go for MS, they target all businesses that behave in this way. See I live in, and glean my cultural background from, Australia and here we have a strong understanding of the tall poppy syndrome. While tall poppy syndrome sounds like a disease, and probably is, it can be beneficial on a societal level in that it helps to maintain diversity, which makes us all more adaptable. Nature naturally culls anything that gets too strong in one area and technology improves with diversity.
The old 8086 legacy sucks and licks and covets huge anus [citation needed]. Compare now when PCs are either x86 or.... x86 to the situation in the 80's or 90's. Then I remember "compatible" was the word - "is this compatible with that?", etc etc. Now we have open protocols and formats, everything is nearly compatible, but hardware is still stuck in that one model that was successful for the same reason MS is successful. We can improve, and I welcome this fine judgement and hope it is followed with more.
Of course being in Australia I can welcome another 15 years of government mandating that all CPUs must be intel based. PHBs are a little more backwards over here. Dell still doesn't offer linux except RHEL on servers..... wtf!?!? Even my luddite media friends know what linux is and want it - keeps me busy.
I only looked at the comments here for this. I likes a good tinfoil hat!
while it's a bit screwy using brain scans, if they can eliminate false positives, it ain't so bad. We just need to make sure enough "good people" are descion makers in the new paradigm. We are all human.
without wanting to sound like a bad 80s rapper or 60s tripper... peace.
don't think of this as me repying again, try to see it as an extra endorsement
Actually - thanx again. That's exactly the kind of comment that kept me reading/, since '98. If the mods where sane and unlimited you would be (+maxint)Informative
I just went to my local manchoir and my battery didn't leave 100% while I needed a pitch pipe. Sweet.
whoever in these comments mentioned the dream is f%&ked for/. Is right though. /. Is too heavy these days. I want an "old school" button. We need a web campaign - because they always work.
posted from my dream while the new school/. takes its toll on the battery... especially the index.
T-Mobile has the cheapest unlimited 3G service for handsets in the US and you're complaining?
Did you read the part of my post about having an HTC dream? That's right! I am not in the US, never have been and don't really mind if I never go. So whatever T1 has is irrelevant to me. My entire house is covered by wifi, as are the houses of plenty of people I know, the office and the coffee shop downstairs. Occasionally I'm out and about and I want something that involves data, I use my providers connection, which is pretty cheap by Australian standards. I have rooted my phone so I can use it as an access point for my laptop. I like the smart phone features and I like it to quickly check my emails without having to use heaps of power on a laptop or desktop machine.
I do object to it syncing email when I don't want it too and making me pay for it when I can just wait and do it for free on wifi. It's configurable but out of the box that's not clear and I find that extremely rude. I also don't like the way they have made voip impossible (it appears). It's all geared toward making telcos happy, not owners. Even copying music to it over the air from my laptop using the hardware I own outright involves ftp because there is no bluetooth and wifi tethering requires root access and unsupported builds of the OS.
So far, what it does well is awesome, but there are so many unpleasant surprises that at this stage the whole thing is a little sour. Why on earth would anyone want a smart phone that uses a data service based on what the data service provider wants rather than on own their needs and lifestyle? Gotta root these things and keep hacking to get them really smart.
I own an HTC Dream (called TMobile G1 in the US). My first phone bill after I bought the phone was $200 more than usual. It is now dropped because I changed my plan to allow for more mobile data, but buying the phone to start with, I had no idea that when I first turned it on it would start downloading a crap load of my gmail. It took me a little bit to figure out how to get the data usage down.
I really like the phone, but I wish there was clearer pre-sales on how much data it was going to use and how to make it cheaper to operate. I also would like a "turn data off - just be a phone" mode. Also the fact that it's advertised as having bluetooth but still - even with cupcake - can't do bluetooth file transfer is just stupid.
If Linux netbooks aren't ready to go out of the box, the vendors are doing a poor job.
Yep. And they are doing a piss poor job.
I was in a shop the other day and had a good look at whatever the latest Linux EeePC thing is. I use Linux exclusively for my personal computing and I found the desktop really confusing. And it looks so bland - as if they have spent several years and multiple design cycles iteratively increasing it's blandness until it makes a plain brown paper bag look absolutely fascinating in comparison. "Hey, that browser icon looks a little interesting, I'd better file a bug report."
What do Windows users do with one of these? They stuff around, find they can't figure out how to use it (I could barely figure it out) and take it back. What do Linux users do? Most put Ubuntu on it rather than the crap it comes with.
I wonder how long it will be before a manufacturer to realise that if they stop sabotaging Linux user interfaces and start using distros that everyone is using, e.g. Ubuntu for the EeePC, then they will actually have a market. I reckon they are deliberately screwing with the user experience to make windows look more favourable, and I think they are being stupid in doing that.
Re:Someone forgot about the Cradlepoint!
on
Mobile Wi-Fi Hot Spot
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Not necessarily. I think it's far more likely that cradlepoint isn't mentioned because the entire thing is an ad. An ad for something that/. readership outside the US probably can't use, and/. readership within the US who know what they are doing wouldn't bother using.
Thanks kdawson, your amazing editorial skills astound me once again.
No explanation in comments, documentation or the bug report. He was specifically asked for an explainaintion and he effectively said "I couldn't be bothered, fuck off". When he did finally implement a fix, having ignored valid patches provided, he didn't mark the ticket as fixed, he just pretended the ticket didn't exist and there was never a bug. He even insisted he be paid to fix it.
There is absolutely nothing correct about this action as a maintainer of an important library. He deserves every piece of shit that is thrown at him, and then some. Someone with this attitude has no place as a maintainer - this case clearly illustrates the difference between a benevolent dictator like Linus Torvalds and an incompetent loon like Robert Mugabe.
should I s/he/you/g on this post? You seem to be jumping to his defence throughout the comments here by making assertions and not bothering to back them up. Are you in fact him?
ALWAYS add the party and state affiliation to any US politicians name, and ideally do the same for politicians from other lands as well.
I'm sure you would find this information meaningless, as do I, and I am from another land. In fact, if stories did include political affiliations, you would get confused because in Australia the liberal party is not "liberal" in your sense of the world. They are more of a fascist party, much like your republicans.
Just why do people from the United States assume that the whole world is either democrat or republican? Is it anything to do with the way you have a "world series" in which only americans compete?
Can you point to a real world example backing that claim?
Not specifically, but I know that MacDonalds is the fast food chain pushing hardest to run tuck shops (cafeterias) around the world and always jump at the opportunity to have their brand plastered over anything that might be of interest to kids. I also know of large communities where no one gives a shit enough to care whether all their kids eat is that shit.
And maybe you're just being bought off by the organic food industry?
Who mentioned the organic food industry? The only thing I mentioned is a way of feeding oneself without having to pay as much. Use whatever pesticides you want in your own backyard, just don't be surprised if the neighbours complain about runoff.
If nothing else, we should let the government schools compete against privately run schools. If the government schools are as good as you claim, they'll beat the pants off of the private schools and we'll be no worse off than we are now, right?
Yeah, the government is always going to have some level of corruption. At least the motivation of a government is primarily abouty getting elected. A private company is motivated entirely by money which is why, to my mind, they have no place running schools. The government is the lesser of two evils.
I think you're right about the status quo, the fact that there are government schools that perform well, at least in my country, means that the private schools are forced to maintain high standards. Otherwise, why would you pay the extra?
If the government is going to have anything to do with education (which it shouldn't) there should be a voucher system where the government pays for schooling, but the actual schooling is provided by privately run schools.
Yeah, but then you get big housing estates full of fat slobs who think that food comes from MacDonalds and processed cheese an essential nutrient, because that's all they learn at school, because MacDonalds owns the only company prepared to offer a school in the area.
I know someone that works in a state funded school here that teaches kids who have grown up on junk food in suburban wastelands how to grow their own food. Private companies have little incentive to teach students to buy less and a lot of parents don't give a shit. Apparently a fair percentage of them really love and find the variety of vegetables delicious.
Government intervention can actually be a good thing, as long as their aren't too many union or business lobbiests. Therein lies the rub.
b) using a Tesla coil to burn crosses onto students arms.
Not sure how it works over there, maybe you have too many whacko cops and judges, but if someone did that to my kid, they would be charged with assaulting a minor and spend at least a year been forcibly sodomised and beaten by "Bubba". Why was this guy not just charged?
Criminal activity, having the conditions of bail such that he is not allowed in contact with students is more effective than firing him. If any law enforcement officer refused to go along with the charges, say for also being a religious nut job, I make sure they their pension. Religious freedom does not give anyone the right to commit assault.
The worst I saw in my ~25 years, and I include old COBOL and BASIC crap, was not spagetti in the strict sense of the word. It was a 10000 line Java method written by a VB developer. There were no gotos, but the entire thing was nested ifs switches and for loops nested to over 10 layers deep. Oh, and you did read that right, it was a method - the entire class had a solitary static method full of copy and pasted chunks. He explained that it was OO because it was Java. I might forgive him if it was gigantic nested unrolled loop that ran like stink, but it was slow and crash prone.
A bunch of gotos and gosubs are a pleasure to debug compared to that kind of poo, seriously.
No matter how nice a new paradigm that comes along, there is always some idiot who can make it suck far, far more than the last paradigm.
Re wrote that as 10 classes of ~20 lines each, it ran faster and never died until it was told to.
I think mine was a CD on a magazine cover. 1998 I think, perhaps '99. Funnily enough, I think I first read/. on that system, but of course I didn't register until around 2004/5 or something
I Had a lot of trouble getting it to behave the way I wanted on a pentium with 16MB of ram. At first it was little more than a test web server. Definitely not a desktop.
I kept trying until I discovered enlightenment (in beta), which to date is still my favourite ever desktop environment thingy. Kind of like the maid. Clean, quick and pretty, but start to fuck with it and things get complicated...
These days I use Linux 100% on my own machines, gnome and android, and have trouble understanding why anyone would actually want Windows or OSX. Seriously, XP is a bitch to set up to work efficiently, any windows OS after that is so slow that it's not funny and OSX requires the apple 100% tax for no obvious advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I know you guys are having fun floppin' it out and having a good ol' measure, but I can see the point that you don't need a whole lot of money to make something that kind of works. I can actually see how for around $1000 it would be possible to build a plane that could be launched and flown manually to around 300m AGL, carry 400g of explosive and another 600g of misc nails and bolts and glide autonomously to 10m above a preprogrammed spot before exploding above a market, for example, or barracks.
It wouldn't have to be military spec. If it crashes along the way, hey just set it up to explode anyway - this obviously is not a precision type project.
I think the summary is a bit confusing in that you have clearly interpreted "build you own version of" as "build something of the same quality as".
BTW, for the record, I would never condone building a device such as mentioned above and people who do are evil shits, no matter what the motive. I am however interested in the subject of automonous aircraft and in particular thoroughly enjoyed reading a link posted to an earlier story on /. which I share now for your enjoyment and my own karma whoring.
Don't know about Amtrak, but in Australia while all the state owned railways where selling to private companies, Queensland Rail (owned by the state of Queensland) was buying up rolling stock. Quensland Rail now runs major freight lines all over the country at a profit while all of the private operators are struggling to stay viable. A state run transport entity turning a profit reduces the tax burden and provides an excellent social service.
Here in Melbourne on the other hand, Connex has completely fucking destroyed what was once one of the best public transport networks in the world. Some things are best run in the interest of the people, rather than a company.
Fair use in your country? Not saying mine is different, just highlighting that wikipedia which is mostly available in most/all cuntries [sic] should have a license that works in all relevant jurisdictions. Exceptions must be explicitly granted for censorship. CoUNTrieS!.
Hear hear. Now that this decision has been made, how long until the full transition occurs? It certainly looks like a much better choice. From the *wikipedia page on the Creative Commons licenses:
"Some within the copyleft movement argue that only the Attribution-ShareAlike license is actually a true copyleft license [24] and that there is no standard of freedom between Creative Commons licenses (as there is, for example, within the free software and open source movements). [25] An effort within the movement to define a standard of freedom has resulted in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.[26] In February 2008, Creative Commons recognized the definition and added an "Approved for Free Cultural Works" badge to its two Creative Commons licenses which comply -- Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. "
So Attribution-ShareAlike is a true copyleft license, but how long until we can reuse bits of wiki without having to include a full license?
------
*The quoted material from wikipedia is reposted under the GNU Free Documentaion License. A full copy of the license is included below to comply with the licensing requirements.
GNU Free Documentation License
Version 1.3, 3 November 2008
Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
0. PREAMBLE
The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.
This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software.
We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. But this License is not limited to software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
This License applies to any manual or other work, in any medium, that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this License. Such a notice grants a world-wide, royalty-free license, unlimited in duration, to use that work under the conditions stated herein. The "Document", below, refers to any such manual or work. Any member of the public is a licensee, and is addressed as "you". You accept the license if you copy, modify or distribute the work in a way requiring permission under copyright law.
A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work containing the Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into another language.
A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (Thus, if the Document is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them.
The "Invariant Sections" are certain Secondary Section
http://xkcd.com/$(RANDOM % 500)/
I have wanted that for years, but not just for basic tasks, I want everything from /boot /bin and /sbin at the least, and possibly /etc, /usr/lib, /usr/bin or paths under those. Give it a physical lock to switch between read only and read/write.
I have fond memories of the acorn archemides machines at school that booted in seconds and ran some pretty cool full 3D graphics stuff in 1991. Even todays latest greatest PCs seem like a step backwards in some ways. They take longer to get to a state that's usable and use a crap load more power to do the same tasks.
They are also vulnerable to exploits that require minimal user involvement, whereas having to physically replace or flash a chip or flick a switch makes the purely technical exploit nearly impossible. With that kind of setup, pretty much all exploits become social.
Some of the design choices of the eighties, born from technical limitations, far outdo anything we use toady. I say bring it back.
It's not always bad. Cactoblastis caterpillar larvae introduction was pretty effective against prickly pear.
Yay!
Yeah I know, intel has been really good to OS development of late - really good. And the free market blah blah blah and stuff and whatever rant.
But this sends a clear message. It says they don't just go for MS, they target all businesses that behave in this way. See I live in, and glean my cultural background from, Australia and here we have a strong understanding of the tall poppy syndrome. While tall poppy syndrome sounds like a disease, and probably is, it can be beneficial on a societal level in that it helps to maintain diversity, which makes us all more adaptable. Nature naturally culls anything that gets too strong in one area and technology improves with diversity.
The old 8086 legacy sucks and licks and covets huge anus [citation needed]. Compare now when PCs are either x86 or .... x86 to the situation in the 80's or 90's. Then I remember "compatible" was the word - "is this compatible with that?", etc etc. Now we have open protocols and formats, everything is nearly compatible, but hardware is still stuck in that one model that was successful for the same reason MS is successful. We can improve, and I welcome this fine judgement and hope it is followed with more.
Of course being in Australia I can welcome another 15 years of government mandating that all CPUs must be intel based. PHBs are a little more backwards over here. Dell still doesn't offer linux except RHEL on servers..... wtf!?!? Even my luddite media friends know what linux is and want it - keeps me busy.
I only looked at the comments here for this. I likes a good tinfoil hat!
while it's a bit screwy using brain scans, if they can eliminate false positives, it ain't so bad. We just need to make sure enough "good people" are descion makers in the new paradigm. We are all human.
without wanting to sound like a bad 80s rapper or 60s tripper... peace.
don't think of this as me repying again, try to see it as an extra endorsement
Actually - thanx again. That's exactly the kind of comment that kept me reading /, since '98. If the mods where sane and unlimited you would be (+maxint)Informative
I just went to my local manchoir and my battery didn't leave 100% while I needed a pitch pipe. Sweet.
whoever in these comments mentioned the dream is f%&ked for /. Is right though.
/. Is too heavy these days. I want an "old school" button. We need a web campaign - because they always work.
posted from my dream while the new school /. takes its toll on the battery... especially the index.
Thanks for that - really handy. I found wifi, gps, etc but not that one.
Did you read the part of my post about having an HTC dream? That's right! I am not in the US, never have been and don't really mind if I never go. So whatever T1 has is irrelevant to me. My entire house is covered by wifi, as are the houses of plenty of people I know, the office and the coffee shop downstairs. Occasionally I'm out and about and I want something that involves data, I use my providers connection, which is pretty cheap by Australian standards. I have rooted my phone so I can use it as an access point for my laptop. I like the smart phone features and I like it to quickly check my emails without having to use heaps of power on a laptop or desktop machine.
I do object to it syncing email when I don't want it too and making me pay for it when I can just wait and do it for free on wifi. It's configurable but out of the box that's not clear and I find that extremely rude. I also don't like the way they have made voip impossible (it appears). It's all geared toward making telcos happy, not owners. Even copying music to it over the air from my laptop using the hardware I own outright involves ftp because there is no bluetooth and wifi tethering requires root access and unsupported builds of the OS.
So far, what it does well is awesome, but there are so many unpleasant surprises that at this stage the whole thing is a little sour. Why on earth would anyone want a smart phone that uses a data service based on what the data service provider wants rather than on own their needs and lifestyle? Gotta root these things and keep hacking to get them really smart.
The parent makes some good points
I own an HTC Dream (called TMobile G1 in the US). My first phone bill after I bought the phone was $200 more than usual. It is now dropped because I changed my plan to allow for more mobile data, but buying the phone to start with, I had no idea that when I first turned it on it would start downloading a crap load of my gmail. It took me a little bit to figure out how to get the data usage down.
I really like the phone, but I wish there was clearer pre-sales on how much data it was going to use and how to make it cheaper to operate. I also would like a "turn data off - just be a phone" mode. Also the fact that it's advertised as having bluetooth but still - even with cupcake - can't do bluetooth file transfer is just stupid.
Yep. And they are doing a piss poor job.
I was in a shop the other day and had a good look at whatever the latest Linux EeePC thing is. I use Linux exclusively for my personal computing and I found the desktop really confusing. And it looks so bland - as if they have spent several years and multiple design cycles iteratively increasing it's blandness until it makes a plain brown paper bag look absolutely fascinating in comparison. "Hey, that browser icon looks a little interesting, I'd better file a bug report."
What do Windows users do with one of these? They stuff around, find they can't figure out how to use it (I could barely figure it out) and take it back. What do Linux users do? Most put Ubuntu on it rather than the crap it comes with.
I wonder how long it will be before a manufacturer to realise that if they stop sabotaging Linux user interfaces and start using distros that everyone is using, e.g. Ubuntu for the EeePC, then they will actually have a market. I reckon they are deliberately screwing with the user experience to make windows look more favourable, and I think they are being stupid in doing that.
Not necessarily. I think it's far more likely that cradlepoint isn't mentioned because the entire thing is an ad. An ad for something that /. readership outside the US probably can't use, and /. readership within the US who know what they are doing wouldn't bother using.
Thanks kdawson, your amazing editorial skills astound me once again.
No he wasn't, and I read the whole thing.
No explanation in comments, documentation or the bug report. He was specifically asked for an explainaintion and he effectively said "I couldn't be bothered, fuck off". When he did finally implement a fix, having ignored valid patches provided, he didn't mark the ticket as fixed, he just pretended the ticket didn't exist and there was never a bug. He even insisted he be paid to fix it.
There is absolutely nothing correct about this action as a maintainer of an important library. He deserves every piece of shit that is thrown at him, and then some. Someone with this attitude has no place as a maintainer - this case clearly illustrates the difference between a benevolent dictator like Linus Torvalds and an incompetent loon like Robert Mugabe.
should I s/he/you/g on this post? You seem to be jumping to his defence throughout the comments here by making assertions and not bothering to back them up. Are you in fact him?
I'm sure you would find this information meaningless, as do I, and I am from another land. In fact, if stories did include political affiliations, you would get confused because in Australia the liberal party is not "liberal" in your sense of the world. They are more of a fascist party, much like your republicans.
Just why do people from the United States assume that the whole world is either democrat or republican? Is it anything to do with the way you have a "world series" in which only americans compete?
Not specifically, but I know that MacDonalds is the fast food chain pushing hardest to run tuck shops (cafeterias) around the world and always jump at the opportunity to have their brand plastered over anything that might be of interest to kids. I also know of large communities where no one gives a shit enough to care whether all their kids eat is that shit.
Who mentioned the organic food industry? The only thing I mentioned is a way of feeding oneself without having to pay as much. Use whatever pesticides you want in your own backyard, just don't be surprised if the neighbours complain about runoff.
Yeah, the government is always going to have some level of corruption. At least the motivation of a government is primarily abouty getting elected. A private company is motivated entirely by money which is why, to my mind, they have no place running schools. The government is the lesser of two evils.
I think you're right about the status quo, the fact that there are government schools that perform well, at least in my country, means that the private schools are forced to maintain high standards. Otherwise, why would you pay the extra?
Yeah, but then you get big housing estates full of fat slobs who think that food comes from MacDonalds and processed cheese an essential nutrient, because that's all they learn at school, because MacDonalds owns the only company prepared to offer a school in the area.
I know someone that works in a state funded school here that teaches kids who have grown up on junk food in suburban wastelands how to grow their own food. Private companies have little incentive to teach students to buy less and a lot of parents don't give a shit. Apparently a fair percentage of them really love and find the variety of vegetables delicious.
Government intervention can actually be a good thing, as long as their aren't too many union or business lobbiests. Therein lies the rub.
Not sure how it works over there, maybe you have too many whacko cops and judges, but if someone did that to my kid, they would be charged with assaulting a minor and spend at least a year been forcibly sodomised and beaten by "Bubba". Why was this guy not just charged?
Criminal activity, having the conditions of bail such that he is not allowed in contact with students is more effective than firing him. If any law enforcement officer refused to go along with the charges, say for also being a religious nut job, I make sure they their pension. Religious freedom does not give anyone the right to commit assault.
And Goddards law applies if someone is arguing for the dard, which the GGP was.
You clearly don't know what a dard is.
People get infected with viruses, or worms, but not malware. Computers get infected with malware, spyware and trojans.
Man, you've gotta get out more often.
I've always done that and never new it was called inside out..... Thanks.
The worst I saw in my ~25 years, and I include old COBOL and BASIC crap, was not spagetti in the strict sense of the word. It was a 10000 line Java method written by a VB developer. There were no gotos, but the entire thing was nested ifs switches and for loops nested to over 10 layers deep. Oh, and you did read that right, it was a method - the entire class had a solitary static method full of copy and pasted chunks. He explained that it was OO because it was Java. I might forgive him if it was gigantic nested unrolled loop that ran like stink, but it was slow and crash prone.
A bunch of gotos and gosubs are a pleasure to debug compared to that kind of poo, seriously.
No matter how nice a new paradigm that comes along, there is always some idiot who can make it suck far, far more than the last paradigm.
Re wrote that as 10 classes of ~20 lines each, it ran faster and never died until it was told to.
I think mine was a CD on a magazine cover. 1998 I think, perhaps '99. Funnily enough, I think I first read /. on that system, but of course I didn't register until around 2004/5 or something
I Had a lot of trouble getting it to behave the way I wanted on a pentium with 16MB of ram. At first it was little more than a test web server. Definitely not a desktop.
I kept trying until I discovered enlightenment (in beta), which to date is still my favourite ever desktop environment thingy. Kind of like the maid. Clean, quick and pretty, but start to fuck with it and things get complicated...
These days I use Linux 100% on my own machines, gnome and android, and have trouble understanding why anyone would actually want Windows or OSX. Seriously, XP is a bitch to set up to work efficiently, any windows OS after that is so slow that it's not funny and OSX requires the apple 100% tax for no obvious advantage.
Yay, got my OS of choice flamewar trigger in ; )