This comment's written on an IBM Thinkpad R51 runnign GNU/Linux; everything works, just about, apart from the external monitor feed (so, no presentations at work) and the infrared port. Both are a problem caused by vendors not making specs and microcode for their devices available for use by Free software developers - it's not Linux' fault, OpenBSD (to pick one at random) and everything else has the same problems with the same Windows-only, proprietary crapware merchants. Fortunately most of that stuff is fisher-price stuff - tho' I really would like to be able to use a £20 USB webcam instead of £100 for a firewire cam that won't work on my other no-brand intel boxes because they haven't got firewire built-in.
It's a real shame Lenovo don't plan to continue the good work IBM did helping Linux and other free OSes to work on their machines. Guess our money isn't good enough for Lenovo: I'll add my voice to a rising chorus at work grumbling about Lenovo support. (We have a dozen or so full-time Linux users, not to mention lots of occasional dual-booters or live-cd tinkerers.) Any suggestions for good Free-friendly vendors of decent laptop hardware?
Right. OS X is closed, proprietary, non-Free, whatever you want to call it. Jobs' brief reign as the posterchild for the "open source business" crowd is hopefully now over. Those of us more interested in Freedom than eye candy will smile and grin and the change everywhere, pick up our computers and play... just like yesterday...;)
(For those who don't recognise it that's from "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The (Mighty) Who. Very, very apposite on this story I feel...
I assume that in India, the manual labor required to count all the paper ballots is cheaper than it would be in the U.S.
Here in the UK it's even cheaper. All polling station and electoral workers are volunteers with the exception of the returning officer, who's paid by the local council. I took part in this back in '87 (when I should have been taking my A Levels:)) and it was a very interesting experience.
I voted in the UK local elections in the week before last. Walked 100 yards down the hill to the village hall, nodded to the authorities - who was leaning up against his car, parked outside, and chatting to his eight or ten year old daughters, who were hanging around with that universal kids' "I'm boooorrrrreedddd...." vibe... went inside, swapped a piece of cardboard for a square of paper; walked behind a wobbly plywood partition; took the 3 inch stump of pencil (tied to the plywood with six inches of garden twine), drew a big fat X next to my preferred candidate, returned to the equally wobbly table, folded my slip of paper and punted it into the big metal box. Six hours later I was listening to the results on the radio.
Every time a story like this runs on Slashdot someone posts what seems to us (Euro-weenies, Canucks and other dubious foreign types) to be the obvious question "why not use bits of paper?" I've never seen a credible answer to this.
if you do not want the government snooping in your life, America is generally a far better place to be than Europe. Omnipresent video surveillance, automatic liscense plate recognition, and a central database of liscense plates, their locations, and the times. That's reality in parts of western Europe. They don't even lie and say it's for terrorism... it's for dealing with normal criminal activity.
The thing is, we generally trust our States not to morph into oppressive, authoritarian regime. That's the fundamemental reason for the difference. "But how can that be, when genuine full-blown fascist dictatorships and corrupt, 'soviet socialist' omni-present Big Brother societies still in living memory?" Americans cry. (I'm not exaggerating. My ex-girlfriend grew up under Communism, learned to use an AK47, invited to join the Party on leaving college, etc. My sister-in-law was born and spent her early life under the Honnecker regime, the one that made "Stasi" famous.) I think that it's precisely because genuine dictatorship's so fresh in recent memories that we trust our states. We know what real fascism looks like, and this ain't it.
Ironically, to many of us, it seems that the US is rolling steadily down the hill towards - well, the death of any real democracy, at any rate.
'Fancy' usually amounts to an Olive Garden or some other such chain restaurant, whose prices are reasonable.
Let me guess... you're American. Am I right?
(ducks) OK, OK, what gives me the right to act all superior? I'm in teh UK FFS, not traditionally known as the home of fine cuisine;) (But actually we now have hundreds and hundreds of really good restaurants throughout the country.) Gosh, I'm getting all nationalistic in my old age:(
sudo is your friend. Developers should not know (have no need to know) application or database passwords. Arguably the Right Thing is pass-through auth anyway, whereby (eg) database acccess by middleware triggered by interaction with a web UI passes through the end-user's credentials. I hate to say it but this particular aspect of (modern) Windows auth actually works fairly well in my experience. You can hack stuff up to do the same thing under Unix if you're prepared to take the risk of using PAM and the pain of integrating those pieces, but it's a real pain.
>Seriously, WWII ended over 60 years ago now, only someone really
>insular would still find Nazi jokes funny.
>
I guess you're unaware of the highly popular & successful UK sitcom 'Allo 'Allo, set in occupied France during WW2, with a cast including comedy Gestapo/SS officer, fat Bavarian Army commandant, plucky escaping prisoner RAF types with enormous moustaches, a maid who naturally (being French) is massively consumed with passion for a married man, wears fishnet stockings and that pseudo-fetish black and white maid uniform, and every other WW2 cliche imaginable. It sounds awful but is actually very funny. You probably have to see it to get it.
Incidentally this show, which ran for more than a decade, was sold across Europe and indeed elsewhere in the world. Friends of mine remember watching it on Yugoslavian state television in the late 80s.
The Wikipedia page is probably better than IMDB, actually.
You might have half a point if you were to object to the association of german accent==Nazi, but read it in context. I actually think the German "humour" in the UK tabloids this summer (the the benefit of readers in uncivilised parts -- the football World Cup's in Germany this time round) is looking a lot more self-pardodic and ironic than , say, during the European Championshop of 96. I think we've moved on a generation, at last.
Fair point. No, I don't think it's the existence of different opinions or points of view, in general that's pissed me off about/. . But I've made some effort over the last few years to research this particular issue in quite a lot of depth. The 'sceptic' argument is no more a "differing opinion" than `intelligent design` or astrology or pixies dancing in the moonlight. There IS no "differing opinion" on this issue, in any serious sense. Perhaps I'm just getting old and set in my ways (I'm in closer to 40 than 30, I'd have been in my 20s when I first got into/. )
This really was a straw breaking my back; a tiny, insignificant thing in itself, but just too much to bear along with all the rest. It's been an interesting process to observe in myself... my disenchantment and disinterest has blossommed unexpectedly in the last year, it doesn't correlate with any other particular changes in my life, and that's why I suspect it's more likely the site than me. At the end of the day, though, it doesn't matter to me why I've decided to knock the habit on the head. Perhaps it IS just me... if so, it's a pretty radical change, cos I was a fairly open fan of/. and would read a few stories (including comments) at least, virtually every day. And when I couldn't, I would skip back over the week I'd missed visiting relatives in Ireland (say), and save off interesting stories, then go back and read them and the comments.
Perhaps someone who cares enough to have kept track can draw a chart showing start and end dates of particular editors. I well remember the Katz Wars,.. and various trollfests deciding to pick on particular editors... I had personal gripes with a couple, nothing major, and certainly not enough to even motivate me to check the box to not display their stories, let alone stop reading / commenting. I've no idea how many comments I've posted over the years (and I must admit I've used a couple of other accounts over that time)... or how many stories I submitted which ran - I think it was in the region of "dozens"; no big deal, and I'm sure plenty of alternative submissions of the same stories came through as well and would have been as good.
Ach, I dunno. I don't have to work tomorrow and I've a quarter-bottle of Stolichnaya here with my name on. I'm sure I'll carry on skimming the RSS feed now and again, but... I have plenty of alternative RSS feeds on any given 5 minute break.
One final thought: I used to read down at -1 every now and then, because sometimes the trolls were diverting, in a mindless fashion to be sure. I read a few of the troll pages for a while. Fucking morons, of course, but kind of nice to know they were there if you wanted to wallow in now and then... sort of like National Enquirer. Where are the original, diverting, or amusing trolls now? Even they've got bored and drifted off to somewhere else. I dunno where the kids are these days.. blogspot or b3ta.com or fark or boingboing or whatever... it's not that any of them have suddenly become my new fave, either (tho' I skim the BB RSS feed once a day, too); they're just as lame as they used to be. I still AM big; it's Slashdot that's got small.
Seeing this story on the Slashdot front page makes me realise my recent disillusion with the site is more profound than just my normal cynicism and sense that everything used to be better than it is. Slashdot was great. As you can see from my UID I was there very early on -- in fact I remember reading the announcement of user registration and wondering whether to bother -- and I learned of many, many stories through the site. In the last year or so it's slid steadily downhill, though, and running supermarket tabloid shite like this is the last straw. This is no longer a site for nerds, it's a site for kiddies. So long Slashdot, I loved you in your time... but that time's gone, for me at any rate.
Top be precise, the IE patch (MS06-013, in fact) fixes ten security bugs, but only eight of them allow remote code execution.
Mind you, MS released four other Security Bulletins today, two of which are remote code execution / rated 'critical' bugs. One's in Windows Explorer, the other's in MSDAC, some data access middleware crap that's also remotely exploitable.
I just had to set up my Dad's new Dell for him - lovely hardware BTW (well, compared to the no-name crap pulled out of skips that I normally deal with, and not counting rackmount ProLiants and whatnot at work:) - but did you know that in 2006, Windows XP (which being NT a full-blown proper multi-user kernel) *still* sets up a default user account as an administrator, with no password?! Couldn't believe my eyes. I was also amused to see the new Windows 'security' features, which are causing him no end of problems -- there are dialogs and popups and animated bubbles out of the toolbar demanding to know whether so-and-so program should be allowed to talk to the Internet - many of which shouldn't need to, so are presumably phoning home - amongst these is the "McAfee security centre" which apart from trying to get him to pressure him into buying a subscription, I noticed was using IE as it's web-browser. Surely that's a breach of the Trade Descriptions Act, selling "security software" that uses IE?? Anyway, in beween telling him he should have got a Mac like I told him, he's good to go now with Firefox, T'bird and Open Office. (He was horrified when I explained that Word, Access and Excel aren't part of Windows, and that you have to pay an extra £250 if you want to use all his old files. And no, I can't just move the old programs onto the new computer... apart from anything else, I suspect he found some dodgy geezer to fix it at some point when I wasn't around, and he doesn't seem to have any Office install CDs... heh! I think that's what they call a teachable moment.
The story submitter has profoundly misunderstood the BBC story.
"> reduced air pollution and increased water evaporation appears to be >adding to man-made global warming.
Actually, the pollution was (or 'is', in southern Asia and China) *masking* the effects of increased warming at ground level. Cleaning up the air doesn't add additional forcing; it merely keeps it elsewhere.
I don't think I can bear to read the following hundreds of ignorant "I've heard it's all due to the sun getting hotter" crap we always get on Slashdot AGW stories. If you think that, you don't know what you're talking about. Go away and read Real Climate or, for a comprehensive refutation of all the trolls we can expect to see attached to this story, please refer to this excellent debunking of so-called 'sceptic' canards, lies and deliberate mis-statements of facts.
You only know about this because journalists were able to investigate and publish stories quoting people (even if most quotees said 'no comment'.) If they had received National Security Letters, you would not know about it. Neither would the journalists. Google search.
You'd make a lousy psychiatrist. Those are classic symptoms of a schizophreniform disorder, possibly classical paranoid schizophrenia. SSRIs don't help in schizophrenia, unfortunately. There haven't been any good new drugs for the condition for decades (as far as I'm aware).
Well, the LibDems really are a broad church;)
but I find most of your assertions here to be irrelevant or logically falacious.
Saying Blair's a liar is outraegous?! I don't know which country you're living in but it's a pretty uncontroversial statement. I suggest you read some current newspapers... I haven't the time to dig out the references, but I'm confident time and history will prove me wrong and you right. I believe he was and is deliberately and consciously lying to the public about Iraq.
>I am a gay man, and I was positively victimised under the tories for 20 years.
Nonsense. Clause 17 was evil and rude but hardly "victimisation". As a bisexual man myself (ha!) I seem to remember spending a fair amount of time in various clubs in Manchester in the late 80s where, hmmm, well let's say no-one looked particularly victimised. I'm afraid I think you are trying to portray yourself as a victim for psychological reasons of your own... take a chill pill, dude, and stop blaming the world for your own unhappiness!;)
Anyway, that's all moot. I can't really think of ANYTHING that any govt could do domestically in the UK which would in some way outweigh the tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost in Iraq, over a predictably pointless attempt to prop up an obviously cretinous, corrupt and chauvinist (in the original sense) US President. Adducing to me that statement that "letting Iraquis continue to live under a brutal child-torturing dictatorship was a good idea?" is a logical fallacy, and I suggest you Google around to see what I mean by that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a real shame Lenovo don't plan to continue the good work IBM did helping Linux and other free OSes to work on their machines. Guess our money isn't good enough for Lenovo: I'll add my voice to a rising chorus at work grumbling about Lenovo support. (We have a dozen or so full-time Linux users, not to mention lots of occasional dual-booters or live-cd tinkerers.) Any suggestions for good Free-friendly vendors of decent laptop hardware?
"You say I live in a bubble? I find a bubble's best."
(For those who don't recognise it that's from "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The (Mighty) Who. Very, very apposite on this story I feel...
Every time a story like this runs on Slashdot someone posts what seems to us (Euro-weenies, Canucks and other dubious foreign types) to be the obvious question "why not use bits of paper?" I've never seen a credible answer to this.
Anyone?
Ironically, to many of us, it seems that the US is rolling steadily down the hill towards - well, the death of any real democracy, at any rate.
Let me guess... you're American. Am I right?
(ducks) OK, OK, what gives me the right to act all superior? I'm in teh UK FFS, not traditionally known as the home of fine cuisine ;) (But actually we now have hundreds and hundreds of really good restaurants throughout the country.) Gosh, I'm getting all nationalistic in my old age :(
sudo is your friend. Developers should not know (have no need to know) application or database passwords. Arguably the Right Thing is pass-through auth anyway, whereby (eg) database acccess by middleware triggered by interaction with a web UI passes through the end-user's credentials. I hate to say it but this particular aspect of (modern) Windows auth actually works fairly well in my experience. You can hack stuff up to do the same thing under Unix if you're prepared to take the risk of using PAM and the pain of integrating those pieces, but it's a real pain.
>insular would still find Nazi jokes funny.
>
I guess you're unaware of the highly popular & successful UK sitcom 'Allo 'Allo, set in occupied France during WW2, with a cast including comedy Gestapo/SS officer, fat Bavarian Army commandant, plucky escaping prisoner RAF types with enormous moustaches, a maid who naturally (being French) is massively consumed with passion for a married man, wears fishnet stockings and that pseudo-fetish black and white maid uniform, and every other WW2 cliche imaginable. It sounds awful but is actually very funny. You probably have to see it to get it.
Incidentally this show, which ran for more than a decade, was sold across Europe and indeed elsewhere in the world. Friends of mine remember watching it on Yugoslavian state television in the late 80s.
The Wikipedia page is probably better than IMDB, actually.
You might have half a point if you were to object to the association of german accent==Nazi, but read it in context. I actually think the German "humour" in the UK tabloids this summer (the the benefit of readers in uncivilised parts -- the football World Cup's in Germany this time round) is looking a lot more self-pardodic and ironic than , say, during the European Championshop of 96. I think we've moved on a generation, at last.
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen, when Skynet achieved consciousness."
Here's a threaded view of the Full Disclosure thread, rather than the first follow-up post to Dave Korn's OP, which the story submitter seems to have decided would be a better way... http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclos ure/2006-04/thread.html#268
This really was a straw breaking my back; a tiny, insignificant thing in itself, but just too much to bear along with all the rest. It's been an interesting process to observe in myself... my disenchantment and disinterest has blossommed unexpectedly in the last year, it doesn't correlate with any other particular changes in my life, and that's why I suspect it's more likely the site than me. At the end of the day, though, it doesn't matter to me why I've decided to knock the habit on the head. Perhaps it IS just me... if so, it's a pretty radical change, cos I was a fairly open fan of /. and would read a few stories (including comments) at least, virtually every day. And when I couldn't, I would skip back over the week I'd missed visiting relatives in Ireland (say), and save off interesting stories, then go back and read them and the comments.
Perhaps someone who cares enough to have kept track can draw a chart showing start and end dates of particular editors. I well remember the Katz Wars,.. and various trollfests deciding to pick on particular editors... I had personal gripes with a couple, nothing major, and certainly not enough to even motivate me to check the box to not display their stories, let alone stop reading / commenting. I've no idea how many comments I've posted over the years (and I must admit I've used a couple of other accounts over that time)... or how many stories I submitted which ran - I think it was in the region of "dozens"; no big deal, and I'm sure plenty of alternative submissions of the same stories came through as well and would have been as good.
Ach, I dunno. I don't have to work tomorrow and I've a quarter-bottle of Stolichnaya here with my name on. I'm sure I'll carry on skimming the RSS feed now and again, but... I have plenty of alternative RSS feeds on any given 5 minute break.
One final thought: I used to read down at -1 every now and then, because sometimes the trolls were diverting, in a mindless fashion to be sure. I read a few of the troll pages for a while. Fucking morons, of course, but kind of nice to know they were there if you wanted to wallow in now and then... sort of like National Enquirer. Where are the original, diverting, or amusing trolls now? Even they've got bored and drifted off to somewhere else. I dunno where the kids are these days.. blogspot or b3ta.com or fark or boingboing or whatever... it's not that any of them have suddenly become my new fave, either (tho' I skim the BB RSS feed once a day, too); they're just as lame as they used to be. I still AM big; it's Slashdot that's got small.
8(
Mind you, MS released four other Security Bulletins today, two of which are remote code execution / rated 'critical' bugs. One's in Windows Explorer, the other's in MSDAC, some data access middleware crap that's also remotely exploitable.
I just had to set up my Dad's new Dell for him - lovely hardware BTW (well, compared to the no-name crap pulled out of skips that I normally deal with, and not counting rackmount ProLiants and whatnot at work :) - but did you know that in 2006, Windows XP (which being NT a full-blown proper multi-user kernel) *still* sets up a default user account as an administrator, with no password?! Couldn't believe my eyes. I was also amused to see the new Windows 'security' features, which are causing him no end of problems -- there are dialogs and popups and animated bubbles out of the toolbar demanding to know whether so-and-so program should be allowed to talk to the Internet - many of which shouldn't need to, so are presumably phoning home - amongst these is the "McAfee security centre" which apart from trying to get him to pressure him into buying a subscription, I noticed was using IE as it's web-browser. Surely that's a breach of the Trade Descriptions Act, selling "security software" that uses IE?? Anyway, in beween telling him he should have got a Mac like I told him, he's good to go now with Firefox, T'bird and Open Office. (He was horrified when I explained that Word, Access and Excel aren't part of Windows, and that you have to pay an extra £250 if you want to use all his old files. And no, I can't just move the old programs onto the new computer... apart from anything else, I suspect he found some dodgy geezer to fix it at some point when I wasn't around, and he doesn't seem to have any Office install CDs... heh! I think that's what they call a teachable moment.
Hint: Venus.
I refer the Hon. member to the answer I gave a moment ago.
Actually, the pollution was (or 'is', in southern Asia and China) *masking* the effects of increased warming at ground level. Cleaning up the air doesn't add additional forcing; it merely keeps it elsewhere.
I don't think I can bear to read the following hundreds of ignorant "I've heard it's all due to the sun getting hotter" crap we always get on Slashdot AGW stories. If you think that, you don't know what you're talking about. Go away and read Real Climate or, for a comprehensive refutation of all the trolls we can expect to see attached to this story, please refer to this excellent debunking of so-called 'sceptic' canards, lies and deliberate mis-statements of facts.
You only know about this because journalists were able to investigate and publish stories quoting people (even if most quotees said 'no comment'.) If they had received National Security Letters, you would not know about it. Neither would the journalists. Google search.
You'd make a lousy psychiatrist. Those are classic symptoms of a schizophreniform disorder, possibly classical paranoid schizophrenia. SSRIs don't help in schizophrenia, unfortunately. There haven't been any good new drugs for the condition for decades (as far as I'm aware).
LOL, probably the worst typo I ever submitted... I'm sure you know what I mean ... :)
Saying Blair's a liar is outraegous?! I don't know which country you're living in but it's a pretty uncontroversial statement. I suggest you read some current newspapers... I haven't the time to dig out the references, but I'm confident time and history will prove me wrong and you right. I believe he was and is deliberately and consciously lying to the public about Iraq.
>I am a gay man, and I was positively victimised under the tories for 20 years.
Nonsense. Clause 17 was evil and rude but hardly "victimisation". As a bisexual man myself (ha!) I seem to remember spending a fair amount of time in various clubs in Manchester in the late 80s where, hmmm, well let's say no-one looked particularly victimised. I'm afraid I think you are trying to portray yourself as a victim for psychological reasons of your own... take a chill pill, dude, and stop blaming the world for your own unhappiness! ;)
Anyway, that's all moot. I can't really think of ANYTHING that any govt could do domestically in the UK which would in some way outweigh the tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost in Iraq, over a predictably pointless attempt to prop up an obviously cretinous, corrupt and chauvinist (in the original sense) US President. Adducing to me that statement that "letting Iraquis continue to live under a brutal child-torturing dictatorship was a good idea?" is a logical fallacy, and I suggest you Google around to see what I mean by that.
Dupe , even if it is linking to different articles - they're saying the same thing as yesterday, as far as I can tell.
"It is symbolic of our struggle against the Romans!"
"Symbolic of his struggle against reality, more like..."