This is certainly more insightful than flamebait. TFA is a flawed comparison of OSes that appears designed to make UNIX variants, and in particular Linux, look good. It actually works against the whole movement to blindly support these studies, or moderate comments like the parent in a purely partisan way without actually thinking about them in context. It supports the the view that Linux users are irrational zealots.
Can somebody with mod points please, in the absence of a +0 Uncomfortable But True moderation option, please mod the parent Insightful.
Yes, I'm a GNU/Linux user. My promotion of Linux is based on its merits. It is not the support of an english football fan for their team.
I bet these babies will be sweet for red shift compensation when I'm riding my warp enabled rocket pack! You haven't lived 'till you felt the rush of the inky void through your hair!!
So yet another reason for assholes to "wear their sunglasses at night" and be distracted about whilst they drive.
Aren't there yellow glasses for people with bad night vision that reduce glare? They're _supposed_ to be worn at night for safety reasons and I think from TFA, these glasses also go yellow. If the shade of yellow is right, people could use the same pair for day and night driving, which is pretty cool.
By the way, people who drive with sunglasses at night are not assholes, they are dickheads. There's a subtle distinction.
We already have to deal with intoxicated people operating cars, planes, and other potentially lethal machinery. How much worse would things be if now, in addition to those, you've got people high on ecstasy or marijuana?
People already operate these machines under the influence of all manner of illicit drugs. People who use these drugs don't tend to care much about the legality or otherwise, so I don't think there is a valid case to make that ending prohibition will increase their numbers. If your argument is valid, will you also argue that cell phones should be banned? The reactions of people driving while talking on the phone is similar to driving drunk, so cell phones should be banned everywhere to prevent idiots from using them in cars. Is that your point?
The war on drugs is failing in the same way as a war on the common cold would fail. Declaring war on a health problem is great for propaganda but that's all. You cannot mend a broken bone by declaring war on it.
If the govermnet regulated the manufacture of synthetic drugs and allowed the taxed supply of all illicit drugs, it wouldn't matter what drug dealers thought. They would be out of business, their entire revenue stream would disappear and with it their power. The smart ones would go legitimate, much like the end of alcohol prohibition.
Your argument about taxes needing to be high to pay for addicts is flawed too. The government currently makes no revenue from the drug trade and, ignoring the cost to society of addiction, is idiotically throwing money at this war on drugs. If they stopped throwing that money away and started taxing drugs, they would eliminate an expense and turn it into a revenue stream.
If we now bring the cost of drug addiction back into the equation, in the case of physically addictive drugs like heroin and crack, one of the biggest costs to society is through associated crime. If the price of these drugs go down, the cost of maintaining an addiction goes down and associated crime levels drop. Also, by removing a huge disincentive to admit to drug problems people with are more likely to accept and even actively seek treatment. The war on drugs makes that more difficult.
As for cannabis, and the concept that it is a stepping stone to harder drugs, that has more to do with its illicit nature rather than the drug itself. Remove the "forbidden fruit" quality to it, and it stops being a stepping stone to anything.
All of these arguments are well established and have been proven true in countries around the world with the guts to stand up to the corruption that maintains US style drug laws. Remember, when advocating a tough stance on drugs, you are on the same side as organized criminals who stand nothing to lose from prohibition and everything to gain.
If you really want to stop the drug problem, the only sensible solution is to end prohibition. But then logic has no place in anti-drug rhetoric, or in "War on " propaganda.
Re:GNOME, Ubuntu, and the colour green...
on
Gnome 2.18 Released
·
· Score: 1
Red is green's complimentary color. Not brown. Unless I missed some advanced art class that went beyond the basics.
Actually, brown and green are complimentary for certain shades of brown and green.
See, a whole band of visible light from dark red to dark yellow is called brown and green fills that big bit between yellow and blue. Also, I once knew a kid who was colour blind and when I asked him what colour his breakfast cereal was (brown wheat flakes of some type) he said "green". Just shows ta go ya.
But what's this got to do with gnome 2.18 being released?
Greenpeace lives on people's donations that are fed by fear of technology.
Greenpeace is not driven by a fear of technology. Some new technologies are actively supported by Greenpeace, others are not. Greenpeace is motivated by conservation of our natural habitat, and that sometimes leads them to speak out against certain technologies they see as damaging. I tend to believe that if Greenpeace had existed when Tesla wanted to broadcast electricity instead of running it through a wired grid, they would have opposed that too. That's what they do.
This is a method I agree with wholeheartedly, and I think any sane and rational person with a modicum of intelligence would also agree with. They have a well publicized political position, and they assess technologies from that position and advocate or oppose accordingly.
Whether or not you agree with their political position, it's not wise to endorse or discount what they say on the basis of who they are and your prejudice about their support base; rather read their argument and make an assesment based on and limited to the case at hand.
In some cases I have disagreed with them, in particular their opposition to high temperature incineration of toxic waste, but as in this case I think it is best to keep an open mind, listen to their point of view and wait until I have read the studies and can make an informed decision. They have alerted me to a potential danger here and I need to find out more. I am thankful that someone with a vested interest is taking an opposing view to Monsanto, which also has a vested interest, because I feel it makes for a more balanced debate.
Knee jerk reactionaries have no useful place in public debate, except of course in tabloids, mainstream biased media and trolling on/. ;-P
Re:GNOME, Ubuntu, and the colour green...
on
Gnome 2.18 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I will stick with blue because it sooths, calms and refreshes me so that I don't smash my monitor in uncontrollable rages.
I thought green was better at soothing psychopathic behaviour. It's also suppoosed to be easier for people with various types of dyslexia to read and absorb information, so yeah, go green
My own view is that the solution should be a plug-in series hybrid with about 60 miles of electric-only range and the ability to run maybe 400 more with the engine providing generator power.
I love this idea, and I'd go so far as to say the solution should use a gas fired stirling cycle engine as a generator rather than an internal combustion engine.
Then we should have nuclear power behind all those 220v outlets... and 90% of cars should be much smaller
This is where our opinions diverge. I think natural gas is a better energy source than nuclear, at least until truly viable renewables are available, but then I'm Australian and we don't have existing nuclear infrastructure. We do have large natural gas reserves and perfect conditions for a range of renewable technologies, so the only people who would seriously argue for nuclear power here are either thick, have something to gain or both.
I'm also reasonably tall and have a family spread over a large part of the South East corner of the continent. When I drive it's usually on weekends and I often do long distances. Small cars shit me to tears, to the point where I refuse to ride in my mothers little hyundai. I certainly don't like spending hours with my knees up around my ears and I tend to drive conservatively, so I'd opt for larger, heavier cars with regenerative breaking that can do longer distances and higher speeds with less wear.
As for TFA, why on earth do we need another way of keeping (mostly) fossil fuel powered internal combustion engines alive as a technology? I mean really.....
"Linux Learnings. We're listening". ... Maybe they're not listening well enough?
My immediate thought on this is that maybe they're not learning enough lessons. In basic english grammar, for example.
For f**ks sake, learning is a verb. You cannot pluralise a verb, or even if it can be done for a few verbs, learning is definitely not one of them. The word is f**king lessons idiots! LESSONS!!! Saying "learnings" when you mean "lessons" will not, contrary to the theory of management speak, succeed in making me stupid. It does make you look stupid for believing it will and I don't trust stupid people to build f**cking PCs for me!!! F**KING F**CK F**CKS!!!!
Whew.. sorry for that outburst people, management speak makes my brain itch.
They seem to want to gain customers and they do have a business to run. That's why they're doing the survey, I think. They would prefer to offer paid telephone support because it's lucrative for them and all they really need to do to support the average consumer is hire some bunny to sit and answer the easy questions or search forums for answers to the tricky ones. There are people who don't know how to use forums or even google effectively.
I selected all of the support options they listed because community forums can always use more people who are paid to participate, a Dell forum would be useful for specific issues and phone support catches all those people who aren't very good at searching the net or have lost the net by doing something stupid - and these people do exist in the real world.
Much as people are critisizing Dell over this, I see only positives.
Aside from that, I don't think anyone at Halliburton takes the notion seriously that they will be sued when an ex-CEO is practically running the country... if they were ever afraid of that the abuses wouldn't have happened in the first place.
When I first read TFA, I found myself wondering whether they are moving because they're pretty sure that an ex-CEO won't be involved in running the country for very much longer... if there is a paper trail inadvertantly left behind, it might be best to be based in a country with no extradition treaty with the US...
I haven't personally listened to her side of the story, but I intend to just as soon as get the run down from the bum who hangs around my office building raving about aliens and mind control and such. As soon as I get that straight, I'm sure to want to hear about the benefits of driving in diapers.
Hey, doesn't the US have minimum sanity standards for officers in the armed services?
It doesn't strike me as redundant to point out that this story is slashvertising. It is not tagged as such, so a having highly visible post saying so would be nicer than burying the post.
All of which you would already have know if you actually used Eclipse like you said.
What a load of complete and utter bullshit. If I had the mod points buddy......
I read the crap summary and had no idea what MyEclipse is, what GA or WTP stands for or that Vi is supposed to be Vista. I've been using Eclipse for four or five years now, just not with commercial extensions or plugins that I don't need.
That you were not modded troll to oblivion is amazing. Bullshit disguised as superiority is far more repulsive than the ordinary kind.
I have to ask, what's so good about an office produce that makes it worth more than a grand... and what's special about "Ultimate"?
It's called ultimate because they changed the interface, it's release coincided with the release of Vista and they're selling on sites that are flagged as phishing.
If they continue their current approach, it will be the "Ultimate" version of office.
...you can simply write a script to convert all your mp3s into wav and then into ogg
BZZZZZZZZZZT! No way! At least not for anyone who enjoys listening to music, as distinct from people you enjoy carefully discerning something vaguely musical from a bunch of garbled noise. MP3 and vorbis are both lossy codecs, so the mp3 you start with is already missing information, you convert that to wav, you're still missing that information, you convert that to vorbis, you throw out more information and degrade the audio.
It's worse than dubbing tape to tape because of the nature of the formats. With tape you get a bit of hiss and mild degradation for each generation, subject to the quality of the equipment you use for dubbing. With lossy digital compression you get crappy sounding artifacts, in the same way as heavily compressing a jpeg gives you visual artifacts. Even though vorbis is technically better than mp3, and subjectively sounds better, it doesn't improve an mp3 sample, it kills it and that's not an option.
In my case, the only reason I use mp3 at all is that there is a player in my phone. IIRC vorbis is more complicated to decode and therefore more of a drain on power. This may have changed with hardware decoders, but if everything switches to vorbis, I'll need a new player or a new phone and mp3 player because a firmware upgrade wont cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, did anyone ever tell you you're an idiot?
Probably because there are no "-1 I don't get it" or "-1 That joke was really lame" options.
This is certainly more insightful than flamebait. TFA is a flawed comparison of OSes that appears designed to make UNIX variants, and in particular Linux, look good. It actually works against the whole movement to blindly support these studies, or moderate comments like the parent in a purely partisan way without actually thinking about them in context. It supports the the view that Linux users are irrational zealots.
Can somebody with mod points please, in the absence of a +0 Uncomfortable But True moderation option, please mod the parent Insightful.
Yes, I'm a GNU/Linux user. My promotion of Linux is based on its merits. It is not the support of an english football fan for their team.
Ummmm. In case you didn't know, people have been using light for years. Ever heard of semaphore?
Pfffft. Flying cars are for weenies.
I bet these babies will be sweet for red shift compensation when I'm riding my warp enabled rocket pack! You haven't lived 'till you felt the rush of the inky void through your hair!!
Aren't there yellow glasses for people with bad night vision that reduce glare? They're _supposed_ to be worn at night for safety reasons and I think from TFA, these glasses also go yellow. If the shade of yellow is right, people could use the same pair for day and night driving, which is pretty cool.
By the way, people who drive with sunglasses at night are not assholes, they are dickheads. There's a subtle distinction.
People already operate these machines under the influence of all manner of illicit drugs. People who use these drugs don't tend to care much about the legality or otherwise, so I don't think there is a valid case to make that ending prohibition will increase their numbers. If your argument is valid, will you also argue that cell phones should be banned? The reactions of people driving while talking on the phone is similar to driving drunk, so cell phones should be banned everywhere to prevent idiots from using them in cars. Is that your point?
The war on drugs is failing in the same way as a war on the common cold would fail. Declaring war on a health problem is great for propaganda but that's all. You cannot mend a broken bone by declaring war on it.
If the govermnet regulated the manufacture of synthetic drugs and allowed the taxed supply of all illicit drugs, it wouldn't matter what drug dealers thought. They would be out of business, their entire revenue stream would disappear and with it their power. The smart ones would go legitimate, much like the end of alcohol prohibition.
Your argument about taxes needing to be high to pay for addicts is flawed too. The government currently makes no revenue from the drug trade and, ignoring the cost to society of addiction, is idiotically throwing money at this war on drugs. If they stopped throwing that money away and started taxing drugs, they would eliminate an expense and turn it into a revenue stream.
If we now bring the cost of drug addiction back into the equation, in the case of physically addictive drugs like heroin and crack, one of the biggest costs to society is through associated crime. If the price of these drugs go down, the cost of maintaining an addiction goes down and associated crime levels drop. Also, by removing a huge disincentive to admit to drug problems people with are more likely to accept and even actively seek treatment. The war on drugs makes that more difficult.
As for cannabis, and the concept that it is a stepping stone to harder drugs, that has more to do with its illicit nature rather than the drug itself. Remove the "forbidden fruit" quality to it, and it stops being a stepping stone to anything.
All of these arguments are well established and have been proven true in countries around the world with the guts to stand up to the corruption that maintains US style drug laws. Remember, when advocating a tough stance on drugs, you are on the same side as organized criminals who stand nothing to lose from prohibition and everything to gain.
If you really want to stop the drug problem, the only sensible solution is to end prohibition. But then logic has no place in anti-drug rhetoric, or in "War on " propaganda.
But you'd have to admit that January 23rd once a decade is pretty darn regular.
USA! USA! USA!
Actually, brown and green are complimentary for certain shades of brown and green.
See, a whole band of visible light from dark red to dark yellow is called brown and green fills that big bit between yellow and blue. Also, I once knew a kid who was colour blind and when I asked him what colour his breakfast cereal was (brown wheat flakes of some type) he said "green". Just shows ta go ya.
But what's this got to do with gnome 2.18 being released?
Greenpeace is not driven by a fear of technology. Some new technologies are actively supported by Greenpeace, others are not. Greenpeace is motivated by conservation of our natural habitat, and that sometimes leads them to speak out against certain technologies they see as damaging. I tend to believe that if Greenpeace had existed when Tesla wanted to broadcast electricity instead of running it through a wired grid, they would have opposed that too. That's what they do.
This is a method I agree with wholeheartedly, and I think any sane and rational person with a modicum of intelligence would also agree with. They have a well publicized political position, and they assess technologies from that position and advocate or oppose accordingly.
Whether or not you agree with their political position, it's not wise to endorse or discount what they say on the basis of who they are and your prejudice about their support base; rather read their argument and make an assesment based on and limited to the case at hand.
In some cases I have disagreed with them, in particular their opposition to high temperature incineration of toxic waste, but as in this case I think it is best to keep an open mind, listen to their point of view and wait until I have read the studies and can make an informed decision. They have alerted me to a potential danger here and I need to find out more. I am thankful that someone with a vested interest is taking an opposing view to Monsanto, which also has a vested interest, because I feel it makes for a more balanced debate.
Knee jerk reactionaries have no useful place in public debate, except of course in tabloids, mainstream biased media and trolling on /.
;-P
I thought green was better at soothing psychopathic behaviour. It's also suppoosed to be easier for people with various types of dyslexia to read and absorb information, so yeah, go green
You forgot:
Why doesn't the cup holder pour me a drink when I'm feeling thirsty?
But do you produce a usable solid?
Gotta get me some freaky space stockings
I love this idea, and I'd go so far as to say the solution should use a gas fired stirling cycle engine as a generator rather than an internal combustion engine.
This is where our opinions diverge. I think natural gas is a better energy source than nuclear, at least until truly viable renewables are available, but then I'm Australian and we don't have existing nuclear infrastructure. We do have large natural gas reserves and perfect conditions for a range of renewable technologies, so the only people who would seriously argue for nuclear power here are either thick, have something to gain or both.
I'm also reasonably tall and have a family spread over a large part of the South East corner of the continent. When I drive it's usually on weekends and I often do long distances. Small cars shit me to tears, to the point where I refuse to ride in my mothers little hyundai. I certainly don't like spending hours with my knees up around my ears and I tend to drive conservatively, so I'd opt for larger, heavier cars with regenerative breaking that can do longer distances and higher speeds with less wear.
As for TFA, why on earth do we need another way of keeping (mostly) fossil fuel powered internal combustion engines alive as a technology? I mean really.....
My immediate thought on this is that maybe they're not learning enough lessons. In basic english grammar, for example.
For f**ks sake, learning is a verb. You cannot pluralise a verb, or even if it can be done for a few verbs, learning is definitely not one of them. The word is f**king lessons idiots! LESSONS!!! Saying "learnings" when you mean "lessons" will not, contrary to the theory of management speak, succeed in making me stupid. It does make you look stupid for believing it will and I don't trust stupid people to build f**cking PCs for me!!! F**KING F**CK F**CKS!!!!
Whew.. sorry for that outburst people, management speak makes my brain itch.
They seem to want to gain customers and they do have a business to run. That's why they're doing the survey, I think. They would prefer to offer paid telephone support because it's lucrative for them and all they really need to do to support the average consumer is hire some bunny to sit and answer the easy questions or search forums for answers to the tricky ones. There are people who don't know how to use forums or even google effectively.
I selected all of the support options they listed because community forums can always use more people who are paid to participate, a Dell forum would be useful for specific issues and phone support catches all those people who aren't very good at searching the net or have lost the net by doing something stupid - and these people do exist in the real world.
Much as people are critisizing Dell over this, I see only positives.
When I first read TFA, I found myself wondering whether they are moving because they're pretty sure that an ex-CEO won't be involved in running the country for very much longer... if there is a paper trail inadvertantly left behind, it might be best to be based in a country with no extradition treaty with the US...
GAFSOH: Get a sense of Humour
I haven't personally listened to her side of the story, but I intend to just as soon as get the run down from the bum who hangs around my office building raving about aliens and mind control and such. As soon as I get that straight, I'm sure to want to hear about the benefits of driving in diapers.
Hey, doesn't the US have minimum sanity standards for officers in the armed services?
It doesn't strike me as redundant to point out that this story is slashvertising. It is not tagged as such, so a having highly visible post saying so would be nicer than burying the post.
What a load of complete and utter bullshit. If I had the mod points buddy......
I read the crap summary and had no idea what MyEclipse is, what GA or WTP stands for or that Vi is supposed to be Vista. I've been using Eclipse for four or five years now, just not with commercial extensions or plugins that I don't need.
That you were not modded troll to oblivion is amazing. Bullshit disguised as superiority is far more repulsive than the ordinary kind.
It's called ultimate because they changed the interface, it's release coincided with the release of Vista and they're selling on sites that are flagged as phishing.
If they continue their current approach, it will be the "Ultimate" version of office.
BZZZZZZZZZZT! No way! At least not for anyone who enjoys listening to music, as distinct from people you enjoy carefully discerning something vaguely musical from a bunch of garbled noise. MP3 and vorbis are both lossy codecs, so the mp3 you start with is already missing information, you convert that to wav, you're still missing that information, you convert that to vorbis, you throw out more information and degrade the audio.
It's worse than dubbing tape to tape because of the nature of the formats. With tape you get a bit of hiss and mild degradation for each generation, subject to the quality of the equipment you use for dubbing. With lossy digital compression you get crappy sounding artifacts, in the same way as heavily compressing a jpeg gives you visual artifacts. Even though vorbis is technically better than mp3, and subjectively sounds better, it doesn't improve an mp3 sample, it kills it and that's not an option.
In my case, the only reason I use mp3 at all is that there is a player in my phone. IIRC vorbis is more complicated to decode and therefore more of a drain on power. This may have changed with hardware decoders, but if everything switches to vorbis, I'll need a new player or a new phone and mp3 player because a firmware upgrade wont cut it.