Ummm...apparently you've never tried Acer's customer service. I had one of their Ferrari 3200 laptops (i.e., a premium-brand, ridiculously expensive and therefore theoretically high-priority-support purchase), and it was unbelievably miserable. Their turnaround time was horrible, I was a better tech than the support reps, and when my hard drive failed and I asked for a replacement, they sent me a DESKTOP hard drive.
This sounds to me like nothing nothing more than a company I hate with my whole soul buying out a company I could not care less about.
On the other hand...maybe this could be really cool. I could totally see a Ferrari-branded, Holstein-spotted laptop....now that would really Turn Heads...
I hate to complicate matters, but...I'm not sure it's so cut-and-dried. The Nazi example above may seem a little silly to some, but it's not totally off-the-wall. It seems to me that the question that needs to be asked is "Who says it's a national security issue?" If it seems like a knee-jerk "He's a Muslim!"-type thing, then we're not really talking national security. But if we're dealing with someone who has a reasonable likelihood of wanting to harm the U.S., and the project itself actually lends itself to that, then...yeah, I suppose you'd need to seriously consider not allowing the guy to participate.
In other words: believe it or not, there are somethings that are more important than "freedom"...as far as SOFTWARE goes. =P
I managed to read the slashdotted article, and I think you're sorta missing HIS point. Which is that he is a Kernel Developer, not an OS developer. He's not really interested in the other parts of the system, just like you're not really all that interested in the nitty-gritty of kernel mechanics (which is more than fine, btw).
In other words...you need a lot of different kinds of people to build an operating system. Linus never claimed to be the benevolent dictator of an operating system - just of the Linux kernel. There's a difference, and there can't help but be. Related, yes, but the same thing: No, and they can't be.
Thankfully, there are many people out there who want to focus on stuff like UI design and the like. I might even disagree with Linus that such things are "fluffy", but I don't really think his opinions on that have influenced anybody any MORE toward the side of "we just like to code kernels, we don't care about ease-of-use".
So - yes, but no. Ease of use is an obstacle to widespread Linux adoption: Yes, and everyone knows that. But No, this doesn't really have anything to do with Linus.
We just ran a story here a few weeks ago about PunchScan, whose method solves that problem, and more. If you recall, they won a contest for the best Open Source Voting Systems Competition.
This may be somewhat off-topic, but I can't mourn this passing. "URGE" always seemed to me to be one of the ugliest, dumbest-sounding names of all the music download services available. And its front-row presence in WMP11 has always annoyed me to no end.
Plus, who really cares about these services anymore, now that WalMart is offering EMI and Universal MP3s without DRM for cheaper than iTunes, at 256 kbps....
If you feel like I'm stealing from you by not "viewing" your ads (which, as so many others have pointed out, I wasn't going to click on anyway), then explain this to me when I visit your site. Have one of those "click-through" pages that comes up before any of your actual pages, saying something to the effect of:
"We wish to advise you that our website is only accessible as a result of our payment of bandwidth costs to a hosting service. In order to make money, we display advertisements on our web pages. If you have no objections to viewing our advertisements, please click on the "OK - I Agree to View Your Ads" button below, and you will be redirected to our main page; if you do not agree, please click the "No - I Will Not View Your Ads" button, also below, and you will be redirected to (random porn site here). Please be aware that if you click on OK, but refuse to view our advertisements, we will consider you to be stealing from us as per our explanation above."
If it means that much to you, then I'll sadly but honestly navigate away from your page. As completely ridiculous as your position may be.
Here I was worried that China was about to wake up and discover their industrial and technological might, and crush the U.S. like a bug. It turns out they woke up alright, but instead decided to test their prowess by engaging in a multi-trillion dollar moon-ography bee.
Actually, you're perfectly right. This does not disprove global warming at all. It simply notes an interesting technology issue having to do with a study on US global warming that happened to be painfully inaccurate about its data. No one's shoving anything down your throat, but you certainly sound like you've got this one figured out anyway, so why are you complaining? No one is trying to convince you of anything, because it obviously wouldn't work.
I know this is slight off-topic, but I'm not sure where else to complain. Can we please at least spell tags correctly before displaying them to the public? Thanks...
Oh come ON. Were people like you (please, forgive the generalization, but I can't come up with a better way to put it) saying this when the NASA study came out originally? The bias you're exhibiting is much too obvious to be confused with rational, scientific thought, and it isn't helping anyone's 'cause', just or unjust.
Also, and this is a general complaint, but...unfounded statements like "the sensor network is poorly maintained" do NOT (EVER) qualify as "Informative", unless backed up by some actual reference material. They just aren't, and it's ridiculous that there is that much blind trust here that unsupported assertions like this one get quickly accepted and praised. =P
Yes, they will play on an iPod, and though I can't find the actual confirmation on their site that says they're.mp3s, it's pretty much a given that they are, because DRM-free files are nearly always.mp3 (because, as you point out, that's what drives sales).
There just isn't. Because this can't possibly mean more money for them, if prices cap at 0.98. And if they didn't cap there, no one would buy the more expensive tracks from them anyway. But unless these "trail-blazing" people either forfeit all profit for themselves in order to transfer it to the recording companies, or come up with some other, novel way of incentivizing this process (theoretically, at least using a simple model, averaging 50 cents a download) which will halve their profits compared to what they get from iTunes, there is NO WAY the Big Four will go for this.
On the other hand, maybe the simple model isn't true, and maybe popular = most everything that the average buyer buys, in which case it won't look any different to the average buyer, so except for the DRM-free part (another deal-breaker for the Big Four), why should the average buyer care?
Am I the only one who thinks it's ironic that they've only recently completely done away with brushed metal in their user interfaces, in favor of a more plastic-y, smooth feel, but are now introducing brushed metal iMacs to replace their plastic-y, smooth-looking old ones?
I like the change, but...how? Some auto-negation bug in the intra-office memo software? "!brushed_metal = brushed_metal....SENT"
...like that one. "If it were a country...it would be the ____ biggest country...."
If those 9 million people formed a country, there would be 9 million less people out there to be part of those other countries. So not only is the comparison ridiculous/pointless/ludicrous/silly, it's also very possibly simply wrong.
This is why you're supposed to think before you post...
But anyway, to add to his praise (and my previous comment), apparently Rick was the one who spotted the security hole in the other group's system. The judges were reported to have been very impressed. =)
Just wanted to mention that one of the graduate students behind Punchscan, Richard Carback, was/is a grad student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Way to get UMBC mentioned on Slashdot, Rick!
Disclaimer: I like Linux more than I like Windows.
Still, I just don't get why this would be somehow indicative of anything but good things of Microsoft. Everyone knows that 3 years ago, they were floundering in regards to Vista. Whether you like Vista now or not, it's a perfectly reasonable thing for him to have said (i.e. I'd buy a Mac), and most likely an exaggeration anyway. It all makes a lot of sense to me, and we don't do ourselves credit as part of the FOSS community by bashing anything that isn't just because we can. =)
A better voting machine would filter out the stupidity of the masses by selectively reducing votes of people who make bad decisions at the polling places. Just look at our country's history! How many times could we have avoided disaster if we had only had smart computers making real-time decisions about the validity/importance of individual votes?!?!?
Literally. Can the average Iranian afford high-speed internet access? I doubt this is going to cause a huge uproar in Iran, given that per capita GDP is a little over $8,000.
On the other hand, what would an uproar look like in a country like Iran? Probably burning American flags, since any other form of free speech is routinely squelched anyway.
File this under: "It's ALREADY worse."
That's exactly what I thought when I saw the headline. I was wondering what their reasoning would be. Then I saw the story, which just goes to show that truth is stranger than......imagination.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look around the web, you'll find that the main two fixes to be included in SP1 are already out, and have been since the beginning of August.
Ars Technica article about the packs
Ummm...apparently you've never tried Acer's customer service. I had one of their Ferrari 3200 laptops (i.e., a premium-brand, ridiculously expensive and therefore theoretically high-priority-support purchase), and it was unbelievably miserable. Their turnaround time was horrible, I was a better tech than the support reps, and when my hard drive failed and I asked for a replacement, they sent me a DESKTOP hard drive.
This sounds to me like nothing nothing more than a company I hate with my whole soul buying out a company I could not care less about.
On the other hand...maybe this could be really cool. I could totally see a Ferrari-branded, Holstein-spotted laptop....now that would really Turn Heads...
I hate to complicate matters, but...I'm not sure it's so cut-and-dried. The Nazi example above may seem a little silly to some, but it's not totally off-the-wall. It seems to me that the question that needs to be asked is "Who says it's a national security issue?" If it seems like a knee-jerk "He's a Muslim!"-type thing, then we're not really talking national security. But if we're dealing with someone who has a reasonable likelihood of wanting to harm the U.S., and the project itself actually lends itself to that, then...yeah, I suppose you'd need to seriously consider not allowing the guy to participate.
In other words: believe it or not, there are somethings that are more important than "freedom"...as far as SOFTWARE goes. =P
Yeah, you might have been modded funny, but that was my first thought as well.
Cavemen are people too!
...that's a mite better than "Mom, Johnny broke my rigid and inflexible LCD display again!", doncha think? ;-)
I managed to read the slashdotted article, and I think you're sorta missing HIS point. Which is that he is a Kernel Developer, not an OS developer. He's not really interested in the other parts of the system, just like you're not really all that interested in the nitty-gritty of kernel mechanics (which is more than fine, btw).
In other words...you need a lot of different kinds of people to build an operating system. Linus never claimed to be the benevolent dictator of an operating system - just of the Linux kernel. There's a difference, and there can't help but be. Related, yes, but the same thing: No, and they can't be.
Thankfully, there are many people out there who want to focus on stuff like UI design and the like. I might even disagree with Linus that such things are "fluffy", but I don't really think his opinions on that have influenced anybody any MORE toward the side of "we just like to code kernels, we don't care about ease-of-use".
So - yes, but no. Ease of use is an obstacle to widespread Linux adoption: Yes, and everyone knows that. But No, this doesn't really have anything to do with Linus.
We just ran a story here a few weeks ago about PunchScan, whose method solves that problem, and more. If you recall, they won a contest for the best Open Source Voting Systems Competition.
/.
Links: Recent headline about winning the competition PunchScan's website original mention on
This may be somewhat off-topic, but I can't mourn this passing. "URGE" always seemed to me to be one of the ugliest, dumbest-sounding names of all the music download services available. And its front-row presence in WMP11 has always annoyed me to no end.
Plus, who really cares about these services anymore, now that WalMart is offering EMI and Universal MP3s without DRM for cheaper than iTunes, at 256 kbps....
Awww, c'mon. That was clever, and you (ought to) know it. If I had mod points, I'd be chucking them at the guy.
If you feel like I'm stealing from you by not "viewing" your ads (which, as so many others have pointed out, I wasn't going to click on anyway), then explain this to me when I visit your site. Have one of those "click-through" pages that comes up before any of your actual pages, saying something to the effect of:
"We wish to advise you that our website is only accessible as a result of our payment of bandwidth costs to a hosting service. In order to make money, we display advertisements on our web pages. If you have no objections to viewing our advertisements, please click on the "OK - I Agree to View Your Ads" button below, and you will be redirected to our main page; if you do not agree, please click the "No - I Will Not View Your Ads" button, also below, and you will be redirected to (random porn site here). Please be aware that if you click on OK, but refuse to view our advertisements, we will consider you to be stealing from us as per our explanation above."
If it means that much to you, then I'll sadly but honestly navigate away from your page. As completely ridiculous as your position may be.
Here I was worried that China was about to wake up and discover their industrial and technological might, and crush the U.S. like a bug. It turns out they woke up alright, but instead decided to test their prowess by engaging in a multi-trillion dollar moon-ography bee.
Actually, you're perfectly right. This does not disprove global warming at all. It simply notes an interesting technology issue having to do with a study on US global warming that happened to be painfully inaccurate about its data. No one's shoving anything down your throat, but you certainly sound like you've got this one figured out anyway, so why are you complaining? No one is trying to convince you of anything, because it obviously wouldn't work.
I know this is slight off-topic, but I'm not sure where else to complain. Can we please at least spell tags correctly before displaying them to the public? Thanks...
Oh come ON. Were people like you (please, forgive the generalization, but I can't come up with a better way to put it) saying this when the NASA study came out originally? The bias you're exhibiting is much too obvious to be confused with rational, scientific thought, and it isn't helping anyone's 'cause', just or unjust.
Also, and this is a general complaint, but...unfounded statements like "the sensor network is poorly maintained" do NOT (EVER) qualify as "Informative", unless backed up by some actual reference material. They just aren't, and it's ridiculous that there is that much blind trust here that unsupported assertions like this one get quickly accepted and praised. =P
Yes, they will play on an iPod, and though I can't find the actual confirmation on their site that says they're .mp3s, it's pretty much a given that they are, because DRM-free files are nearly always .mp3 (because, as you point out, that's what drives sales).
There just isn't. Because this can't possibly mean more money for them, if prices cap at 0.98. And if they didn't cap there, no one would buy the more expensive tracks from them anyway. But unless these "trail-blazing" people either forfeit all profit for themselves in order to transfer it to the recording companies, or come up with some other, novel way of incentivizing this process (theoretically, at least using a simple model, averaging 50 cents a download) which will halve their profits compared to what they get from iTunes, there is NO WAY the Big Four will go for this.
On the other hand, maybe the simple model isn't true, and maybe popular = most everything that the average buyer buys, in which case it won't look any different to the average buyer, so except for the DRM-free part (another deal-breaker for the Big Four), why should the average buyer care?
Am I the only one who thinks it's ironic that they've only recently completely done away with brushed metal in their user interfaces, in favor of a more plastic-y, smooth feel, but are now introducing brushed metal iMacs to replace their plastic-y, smooth-looking old ones?
I like the change, but...how? Some auto-negation bug in the intra-office memo software? "!brushed_metal = brushed_metal....SENT"
...like that one. "If it were a country...it would be the ____ biggest country...."
If those 9 million people formed a country, there would be 9 million less people out there to be part of those other countries. So not only is the comparison ridiculous/pointless/ludicrous/silly, it's also very possibly simply wrong.
This is why you're supposed to think before you post... But anyway, to add to his praise (and my previous comment), apparently Rick was the one who spotted the security hole in the other group's system. The judges were reported to have been very impressed. =)
Just wanted to mention that one of the graduate students behind Punchscan, Richard Carback, was/is a grad student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Way to get UMBC mentioned on Slashdot, Rick!
Disclaimer: I like Linux more than I like Windows.
Still, I just don't get why this would be somehow indicative of anything but good things of Microsoft. Everyone knows that 3 years ago, they were floundering in regards to Vista. Whether you like Vista now or not, it's a perfectly reasonable thing for him to have said (i.e. I'd buy a Mac), and most likely an exaggeration anyway. It all makes a lot of sense to me, and we don't do ourselves credit as part of the FOSS community by bashing anything that isn't just because we can. =)
A better voting machine would filter out the stupidity of the masses by selectively reducing votes of people who make bad decisions at the polling places. Just look at our country's history! How many times could we have avoided disaster if we had only had smart computers making real-time decisions about the validity/importance of individual votes?!?!?
And if they make a UWB version of these USB rechargeable batteries...that would be so so so so coooool!
Literally. Can the average Iranian afford high-speed internet access? I doubt this is going to cause a huge uproar in Iran, given that per capita GDP is a little over $8,000. On the other hand, what would an uproar look like in a country like Iran? Probably burning American flags, since any other form of free speech is routinely squelched anyway. File this under: "It's ALREADY worse."
That's exactly what I thought when I saw the headline. I was wondering what their reasoning would be. Then I saw the story, which just goes to show that truth is stranger than......imagination.