There are, unfortunately, times when the only viable manual isn't even reachable -- for example, when troubleshooting the installation of an application. If you didn't quite install it properly (or something was fubared), the manual might not even be there for you unless you have a paper copy.
As well, I for one constantly print paper copies of online documentation so that I can take it home from work, for example. With the growing popularity of VPNs from home at my place of work, this will soon become unnecessary, but I'll probably still do it anyway; sometimes it's just easier to read something on paper than it is to read it on a screen (especially after having stared at a screen all day).
It's nice to see them including "Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds" at the end of the press release!
In any case, this isn't a bad thing at all. This just means that most of those who use VMware on non-Windows platforms (and some who do) will have an out-of-the-box solution ready for them to use the second that they buy it.
This could mean that people will be more likely to consider Linux + VMware, for example, as an alternative to Windows. Not everyone wants to worry about running installation scripts, creating virtual drives, etc. Sure, I do -- I'd rather do a clean install than trust anyone else -- but that's me. I simply won't choose the ready-to-run VMware.:)
Not only did Microsoft invent symbolic links, they also invented text-to-speech, a tool which allows you to troubleshoot computer problems (whoah) and IPv6!
Very impressive work -- and now that we know that Microsoft has somehow kidnapped (penguinnapped?) Tux, we know who's responsible for all these wonderful additions to Windows.
Tux is changing Microsoft from the inside!
Eventually, the world will be forced to say "oh, forget this Windows garbage, let's just use ______ (name of your favourite *nix here)".
I've used StarOffice since its version 3.0, and I disagree with you whole-heartedly. Sure, SO5.1 still has issues, but they are no more or less annoying or damaging to my productivity than issues with MS Office 97 have been over the years.
The only complaint that I have about StarOffice is that its import filter for MS Word doesn't work quite right. I imagine that this will eventually be fixed, and it only misbehaves some of the time, so it generally isn't a problem.
Now, I will say this: if you're unwilling to learn even the slightest bit of new behaviour, yes, MS Office is the de facto standard. However, packages like StarOffice (and KOffice, ApplixWare, Corel Office, etc.) can usually give you the same results, with the same amount of work involved, as long as you're willing to deviate from the Microsoft Way of Doing Things .
I can't remember the last time that I worked a 40-hour work week (37.5 hrs for those that succumb to that urban legend known as "lunch time"). I think it was about 4 years ago, when the company that I worked for at the time didn't approve of co-op students charging for overtime.
These days I probably work about 50-60 hours in a slow week, and I'm about to go back to school, so bump that up to 90-100. That's going to hurt, but it's the way of the world if you want to pay for rent, school and taxes...
The time demands of the high tech industry are going up. As people get used to having everything -now-, they are beginning to demand everything five minutes ago; this is both unreasonable and unfair, but who can't criticize their employers/clients for being unreasonable or unfair at least part of the time?
The only way to get around this is to work for yourself in an environment with few clients and little real-time client presence. Even then, though, expectations are still high, and you have your own finances to do, your own shipping, your own deliver, etc. etc. etc.
I don't deny that there are far fewer Mac stories than PC stories, but perhaps you should take a look at http://slashdot.org/search.pl?topic=apple for a list of other Apple topics that have been submitted.
There are a couple on OS X there, and these aren't all of the Apple-related articles, either; these are only the articles that have been submitted under the Apple section.
Don't know about you, but I'm not a diehard Mac user -- I wouldn't have known about this if I hadn't read it on Slashdot. I like the ability to get all of my news in one place, so I'm glad it was posted.
Hey, if you don't want to read it, no one's forcing you to do so.
There are probably a lot of mutterings among the market that Macs "aren't as fast" as PCs, given the staggering rise in MHz lately in the PC market (AMD and Intel are both shipping 800+ MHz versions, and planning to ship faster in the near future). Crusoe is going to debut at 700 MHz in the mobile market, isn't it? If so, then yes, I'd say that the speed is a factor here.
Let's just put this into perspective: the average computer user (I'm not talking about the average slashdot reader, here) doesn't know where the line can be drawn when it comes to MHz. The media preys on these people; "bigger is better" is what they tout, otherwise they wouldn't bother advertising the MHz number like they do (with phrases like "This system features a super-fast 750MHz Intel Pentium III processor"). They're hoping to catch people in the craze of buying the latest and greatest.
So, Apple raising the performance (and speed) bar on their chips will certainly help them say "Look, we can compete with their super-fast chips, by using our New Super-Duper-Fast Chips ". A lot of would-be Mac buyers will listen to this.
I don't know why your "som much knowledge about administering and troubleshooting Linux systems" isn't working for you here, but you've forgetten a step.
If you typed 'xhost +' in one of your xterms, as the user you're logged in as, it might help. If you never had to do this before, you must have changed the configuration manually -- go ahead, change it again, it won't kill you.
As far as "really hosing your system up", that really doesn't sound too bad. You didn't lose anything terribly important, and, I could ask you this: why didn't you make backups? If you had, your Apache configuration wouldn't have been lost.
Speaking as a linux user of many years, I -wish- that they'd concentrate more on the newbies and less on the experts. The experts don't need their concentration; we're going to make it work anyway, and chances are that we don't -want- their help to do it as it would take too much of our time.
Then again, there are always users who call themselves experts, and make ridiculously unfounded claims...
Oh, and by the way: they didn't hose anyone's system up. You hosed your system up, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why you're blaming the company who canned the distribution.
Release early, release often. It's all good. It lets people who like to have the newest of everything do their upgrades painlessly (well, almost painlessly), and it lets Red Hat dump their bugs on a whole bunch of readily-available users who will do the debugging for them.
Incidentally, I've never found upgrading my Red Hat (or Red Hat-clone) systems anything other than "simple and powerful". Many people speak of these horrible problems created by the RH upgrade process -- never had a single problem except when I've created the problem myself.
If you use a product marked 'beta', fully expecting it to be bug-free, and you get angry when you find bugs, you're a fool.
I don't recall being forced to read this thread or its comments. If you don't want to read the article, it seems to me that you have a simple choice, unless your mouse is somehow tuned to automatically click on every link on the page...
If you don't know any of that, I guess you didn't read the article very carefully. Most, if not all of those things, were covered in the article.
And, I don't know how many movies you've gone to lately, but The Matrix was definitely a movie for "nerds", and I didn't hear about many so-called "nerds" getting the beats for wanting to watch it. Did you?
I'd say that's really too bad, and that we'll miss your wonderfully creative wit, but you won't be back to read this comment -- I'm somewhat sure that Roblimo's still around.;)
I don't know who you're talking about, Anonymous one -- but long before Shaver was associated with Netscape, I had the pleasure of working with him for a while, and I can tell you that he put more hours into Linux in general than I can count.
He should be applauded for his work, both in the general interest of open source, and with Netscape/Mozilla. It's close-minded thinking like your stock option comment that keep these sorts of people from receiving their due respect.
Just because Shaver and jwz have been rewarded for their insight and effort does not mean that they have made less of a contribution than the rest of us.
As far as working nights goes -- you really should take a look at bugzilla sometime.
I don't think the technology required to steal the numbers is the issue here. All it requires is for the numbers to be stored on a server that has limited, breakable security, and for some cracker to find them.
I think the issue here is more one of what companies like CDuniverse are doing to protect our credit card numbers from malicious individuals like this guy. After the break of this story, some e-commerce sites will hopefully take a very serious look at what they're doing, and maybe improve their security.
Of course, it's doubtful that much will change with this story's appearance. After all, credit card theft is nothing new; the thieves simply keep getting better and the commercial industry has to struggle to keep up. But, they will keep up, or they'll lose their customers, and few companies can be accused of wanting to lose their business that badly.
Actually, the folks at Slashdot have done a very good job of explaining that the more posts are made asking for the code, the more the code will be delayed.
So, the more you flame them, the more they will simply ignore you. Not only that, but they're delaying the source release for all of us who have enough respect to not pester them. So, please, give them the time they need.
Unless, of course, you're some sort of anti-Slashdot agent, and simply want the code release pushed back.:)
If they were to release the keymaster source, or the client source as written somewhere above, there could be rampant abuse of the source in order to produce what some people would think of as desirable results.
We've seen this before, actually, and it's still in the process of being dealt with; the release of the Quake source to the hungry open source world. Immediately, those few (it's always the few) who have suspicious morals began to use the Quake source to cheat, effectively giving themselves impressive handicaps.
The same thing could most certainly be done with distributed.net source, especially if one knows how to trick the keymaster into thinking certain things (a block is done without really being done, a client submitted 100 packets instead of 10, who knows). It is for this reason that I not only thank distributed.net for -not- releasing their source, but applaud their decision to not do so.
Sure, I'd be more than happy to know how they do what they're doing so well, and yes, the bug would probably have been noticed/squashed more quickly had there been a few thousand code monkeys jabbering away at it, but to be quite honest, the distributed.net team responded as quickly as they could, and in a very professional manner. So, there's really nothing to complain about, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you honestly expect that there will never be a single grammatical error in a Slashdot header? Give me a break.
Some people just have far too much thyme^H^H^H^Hime on their hands.
In any case, you asked for some attention to be "payed" to basic grammar; obviously, you've forgotten that the correct word is "paid".
"He who criticizes hypocritically" is synonymous with "he who loses much face".
Cheers,
meisenst
There are, unfortunately, times when the only viable manual isn't even reachable -- for example, when troubleshooting the installation of an application. If you didn't quite install it properly (or something was fubared), the manual might not even be there for you unless you have a paper copy.
As well, I for one constantly print paper copies of online documentation so that I can take it home from work, for example. With the growing popularity of VPNs from home at my place of work, this will soon become unnecessary, but I'll probably still do it anyway; sometimes it's just easier to read something on paper than it is to read it on a screen (especially after having stared at a screen all day).
meisenst
Here are some links that might be useful:
Press Release for the 3440CT
Press Release about the cooling technology
meisenstIt's nice to see them including "Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds" at the end of the press release!
:)
In any case, this isn't a bad thing at all. This just means that most of those who use VMware on non-Windows platforms (and some who do) will have an out-of-the-box solution ready for them to use the second that they buy it.
This could mean that people will be more likely to consider Linux + VMware, for example, as an alternative to Windows. Not everyone wants to worry about running installation scripts, creating virtual drives, etc. Sure, I do -- I'd rather do a clean install than trust anyone else -- but that's me. I simply won't choose the ready-to-run VMware.
meisenst
If I were Mr. de Joode, I'd be offended -- he simply doesn't appear to be squatting.
Take a look at http://www.openssh.org/org-vs-com/. This seems to outline his position very well, without resorting to name-calling.
meisenstWow!
Not only did Microsoft invent symbolic links, they also invented text-to-speech, a tool which allows you to troubleshoot computer problems (whoah) and IPv6!
Very impressive work -- and now that we know that Microsoft has somehow kidnapped (penguinnapped?) Tux, we know who's responsible for all these wonderful additions to Windows.
Tux is changing Microsoft from the inside!
Eventually, the world will be forced to say "oh, forget this Windows garbage, let's just use ______ (name of your favourite *nix here)".
meisenst
I guess AC doesn't know about "Loki". :)
meisenst
I've used StarOffice since its version 3.0, and I disagree with you whole-heartedly. Sure, SO5.1 still has issues, but they are no more or less annoying or damaging to my productivity than issues with MS Office 97 have been over the years.
The only complaint that I have about StarOffice is that its import filter for MS Word doesn't work quite right. I imagine that this will eventually be fixed, and it only misbehaves some of the time, so it generally isn't a problem.
Now, I will say this: if you're unwilling to learn even the slightest bit of new behaviour, yes, MS Office is the de facto standard. However, packages like StarOffice (and KOffice, ApplixWare, Corel Office, etc.) can usually give you the same results, with the same amount of work involved, as long as you're willing to deviate from the Microsoft Way of Doing Things .
meisenst
Oh, good grief; next, you're going to tell me that the time I spend playing Everquest doesn't count as work time, either.
;)
How ridiculous.
meisenst
I can't remember the last time that I worked a 40-hour work week (37.5 hrs for those that succumb to that urban legend known as "lunch time"). I think it was about 4 years ago, when the company that I worked for at the time didn't approve of co-op students charging for overtime.
These days I probably work about 50-60 hours in a slow week, and I'm about to go back to school, so bump that up to 90-100. That's going to hurt, but it's the way of the world if you want to pay for rent, school and taxes...
The time demands of the high tech industry are going up. As people get used to having everything -now-, they are beginning to demand everything five minutes ago; this is both unreasonable and unfair, but who can't criticize their employers/clients for being unreasonable or unfair at least part of the time?
The only way to get around this is to work for yourself in an environment with few clients and little real-time client presence. Even then, though, expectations are still high, and you have your own finances to do, your own shipping, your own deliver, etc. etc. etc.
"What a wonderful world" indeed.
meisenst
I don't deny that there are far fewer Mac stories than PC stories, but perhaps you should take a look at http://slashdot.org/search.pl?topic=apple for a list of other Apple topics that have been submitted.
There are a couple on OS X there, and these aren't all of the Apple-related articles, either; these are only the articles that have been submitted under the Apple section.
meisenstDon't know about you, but I'm not a diehard Mac user -- I wouldn't have known about this if I hadn't read it on Slashdot. I like the ability to get all of my news in one place, so I'm glad it was posted.
Hey, if you don't want to read it, no one's forcing you to do so.
meisenst
There are probably a lot of mutterings among the market that Macs "aren't as fast" as PCs, given the staggering rise in MHz lately in the PC market (AMD and Intel are both shipping 800+ MHz versions, and planning to ship faster in the near future). Crusoe is going to debut at 700 MHz in the mobile market, isn't it? If so, then yes, I'd say that the speed is a factor here.
Let's just put this into perspective: the average computer user (I'm not talking about the average slashdot reader, here) doesn't know where the line can be drawn when it comes to MHz. The media preys on these people; "bigger is better" is what they tout, otherwise they wouldn't bother advertising the MHz number like they do (with phrases like "This system features a super-fast 750MHz Intel Pentium III processor"). They're hoping to catch people in the craze of buying the latest and greatest.
So, Apple raising the performance (and speed) bar on their chips will certainly help them say "Look, we can compete with their super-fast chips, by using our New Super-Duper-Fast Chips ". A lot of would-be Mac buyers will listen to this.
meisenst
If you xhost +, start your program, then xhost -, it's all good...
Or, alternatively, use something like gsu or kdesu to run something as root...
meisenst
I don't know why your "som much knowledge about administering and troubleshooting Linux systems" isn't working for you here, but you've forgetten a step.
If you typed 'xhost +' in one of your xterms, as the user you're logged in as, it might help. If you never had to do this before, you must have changed the configuration manually -- go ahead, change it again, it won't kill you.
As far as "really hosing your system up", that really doesn't sound too bad. You didn't lose anything terribly important, and, I could ask you this: why didn't you make backups? If you had, your Apache configuration wouldn't have been lost.
Speaking as a linux user of many years, I -wish- that they'd concentrate more on the newbies and less on the experts. The experts don't need their concentration; we're going to make it work anyway, and chances are that we don't -want- their help to do it as it would take too much of our time.
Then again, there are always users who call themselves experts, and make ridiculously unfounded claims...
Oh, and by the way: they didn't hose anyone's system up. You hosed your system up, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why you're blaming the company who canned the distribution.
meisenst
Release early, release often. It's all good. It lets people who like to have the newest of everything do their upgrades painlessly (well, almost painlessly), and it lets Red Hat dump their bugs on a whole bunch of readily-available users who will do the debugging for them.
Incidentally, I've never found upgrading my Red Hat (or Red Hat-clone) systems anything other than "simple and powerful". Many people speak of these horrible problems created by the RH upgrade process -- never had a single problem except when I've created the problem myself.
If you use a product marked 'beta', fully expecting it to be bug-free, and you get angry when you find bugs, you're a fool.
meisenst
I don't recall being forced to read this thread or its comments. If you don't want to read the article, it seems to me that you have a simple choice, unless your mouse is somehow tuned to automatically click on every link on the page...
Have you been feeding your mouse too much again?
meisenst
If you don't know any of that, I guess you didn't read the article very carefully. Most, if not all of those things, were covered in the article.
And, I don't know how many movies you've gone to lately, but The Matrix was definitely a movie for "nerds", and I didn't hear about many so-called "nerds" getting the beats for wanting to watch it. Did you?
meisenst
I'd say that's really too bad, and that we'll miss your wonderfully creative wit, but you won't be back to read this comment -- I'm somewhat sure that Roblimo's still around. ;)
meisenst
I don't know who you're talking about, Anonymous one -- but long before Shaver was associated with Netscape, I had the pleasure of working with him for a while, and I can tell you that he put more hours into Linux in general than I can count.
He should be applauded for his work, both in the general interest of open source, and with Netscape/Mozilla. It's close-minded thinking like your stock option comment that keep these sorts of people from receiving their due respect.
Just because Shaver and jwz have been rewarded for their insight and effort does not mean that they have made less of a contribution than the rest of us.
As far as working nights goes -- you really should take a look at bugzilla sometime.
meisenst
Quite frankly, if television brings thinking like the above to our homes, I'm all for killing your television...
:)
Sorry. It had to be said.
meisenst
I don't think the technology required to steal the numbers is the issue here. All it requires is for the numbers to be stored on a server that has limited, breakable security, and for some cracker to find them.
I think the issue here is more one of what companies like CDuniverse are doing to protect our credit card numbers from malicious individuals like this guy. After the break of this story, some e-commerce sites will hopefully take a very serious look at what they're doing, and maybe improve their security.
Of course, it's doubtful that much will change with this story's appearance. After all, credit card theft is nothing new; the thieves simply keep getting better and the commercial industry has to struggle to keep up. But, they will keep up, or they'll lose their customers, and few companies can be accused of wanting to lose their business that badly.
meisenst
Actually, the folks at Slashdot have done a very good job of explaining that the more posts are made asking for the code, the more the code will be delayed.
:)
So, the more you flame them, the more they will simply ignore you. Not only that, but they're delaying the source release for all of us who have enough respect to not pester them. So, please, give them the time they need.
Unless, of course, you're some sort of anti-Slashdot agent, and simply want the code release pushed back.
meisenst
If they were to release the keymaster source, or the client source as written somewhere above, there could be rampant abuse of the source in order to produce what some people would think of as desirable results.
We've seen this before, actually, and it's still in the process of being dealt with; the release of the Quake source to the hungry open source world. Immediately, those few (it's always the few) who have suspicious morals began to use the Quake source to cheat, effectively giving themselves impressive handicaps.
The same thing could most certainly be done with distributed.net source, especially if one knows how to trick the keymaster into thinking certain things (a block is done without really being done, a client submitted 100 packets instead of 10, who knows). It is for this reason that I not only thank distributed.net for -not- releasing their source, but applaud their decision to not do so.
Sure, I'd be more than happy to know how they do what they're doing so well, and yes, the bug would probably have been noticed/squashed more quickly had there been a few thousand code monkeys jabbering away at it, but to be quite honest, the distributed.net team responded as quickly as they could, and in a very professional manner. So, there's really nothing to complain about, IMHO.
meisenst
There is kernel support in 2.3 for the onboard sound on the K7M, I believe, although I have not tried it.
meisenst