I've always wondered why one of the camera manufacturers hasn't gotten behind Gimp instead of writing their own buggy photo editing/raw conversion tools. It would prove interesting.
Same here. For $30 a month for a dataplan, I could go out and buy a new netbook EVERY YEAR, and be content on wifi if I got a call from work that something had gone completely pear shaped. I'm usually not THAT Far from wifi, and I certainly am not going to be hacking config files in VI with my smartphone while driving down the interstate.
You can lock down and secure any OS given enough time, effort and ingenuity. My Windows VMs seem to run along happily without any serious complications. My one physical window system has been largely happy. That being said, when my mom's computer died the last time I told her that if she wanted me to fix it, it had to be a Mac, if for no other reason than the hardware is more uniform, so it's easier to write a stable os. Other htan having some printer issues, it's worked great.
That is the biggest problem with windows. You install a program, it craps all over the registry, and uniinstall leaves kruft there. Do that a few dozen times and you have a machine utterly incapable of booting. I spent entire weekends fixing PCS like that. *NIX (including MacOs) doesn't get that krufty, at least with something that gets loaded into memory like the registry. Hmm. Maybe Windows 7 should have a/etc directory?
The model M keyboard is quieter than the profuse swearing when using a membrane keyboard and it breaks/ sticks / I accidentally rm -rf *.foo instead of *.foo because of the sloppy feel. Granted, after a couple of hours pounding away at a Model M, my head begins to hurt. . . .
Amen. When travelling, I use a laptop for 3 things: 1)Check email, 2) SSH back to the office if things go casters up, and 3) download and view pictures from my digitial camera, Especially when i am shooting underwater, I want to know what I am doing is working, so I can go reshoot if I need to.
Well, displaying the app is only part of the problem. Actually moving the bits around is a large part of the battle, and that's going to be the same no matter what your window manager is.
Of course, I'm making the assumption that Microsoft would code it in a modular manner, which is probably a false assumption.
I guess my point is that I feel that it would be easier to port from one unix to another than from Windows to Unix. I think.
This seems to pop up on our beloved/. every couple of years or so. Personally, I would LOVE to see Office on Linux, and I think it's in Microsoft's best interest to put it out there, but I doubt it will happen. It appears they've developed a myopic, RIAA-like fixation on propping up their current market without preparing adequately for the next one. Sure they have a 90%+ marketshare of the desktop, and finding a computer without Word is almost as hard as finding a TV without satellite or cable, but that's now. OpenOffice is making inroads into that market. Google is doing an end-run around the whole market by releasing Writely and Spreadsheets. Apple has their own office products. Adobe wants to make Powerpoint irrelevant by using flash for presentations. All it would really take is for one or two of those ideas to catch on to see Microsoft lose a fair amount of money.
Eventually, someone at Microsoft will realize that Linux / *BSD / *NIX WILL cut into their server market, and to a lesser extend the desktop market, and there is NOTHING they can do to prevent that. So long as Microsoft exists, there will be people on Slashdot bashing it, and they will hook a wi-fi card to an abacus before booting a windows box. The dumb thing to do, which what Redmond is doing now, woul be to ignore them, or worse villify them in some way as being communist or anti-American for not wanting to shell out large amounts of cash for an OS and software. The smart thing to do would be to finding markets where they can reach them. Office on *NIX would be one way to do that.
We know Office will run on *BSD. It's already running on Mac OS X. One would hope that it would not be impossible to run Office on Linux. I would like to think that there are at least a few geeks on the Office team that got loaded on half-caf double decaf expresso lattes with a twist of lemon and have ported it just to see if it could be done. Only time will tell.
For all my constant bitching about how much I despise Microsoft and hate having to reimage my computer every 6 months because of bit rot, you better bet i signed up for this as fast as my little fingers could type. Yeah, I feel dirty, but assuming my computers will support it and I can actually get the iso, I'll be attempting to install Vista this evening.
I've been somewhat reluctantly using windows for 15 years, Although for much of that Linux has been my primary production environment. I'm starting to feel that Microsoft is starting to finally get a clue about stability and reliability. At home, I have XP and Ubuntu running side by side. Usually, uptime on both of them is limited by the need to either muck about inside the cases or to physically move the cases. I actually really, really like Flight Simulator, and Microsoft Office is a very solid product, although I wouldn't have it installed if I didn't get a license from work.
That being said, Microsoft is in the position now that they pretty much have to be angelic from here on out because of their past performance. I remember Windows 98 crashing 5 times in one morning for me at my first job. After that, I ran Linux as my main desktop for the next 5 years. Often, I would be the only person in the entire building that was still up and running when some virus would take out all the systems. I still refuse to use Internet Explorer, Outlook, or IIS. Why? Because these products have historically been so insecure that using them is tantamount to not only leaving the front door unlocked, but leaving out a spare set of keys and instructions on how to disable the alarm for passing thieves.
Being the optomist that I am, I would like to think that the guys at Microsoft are finally getting their act together, and Vista will be a secure, stable, and user-friendy product that will happily exist in my network for a few years. I do know, however, that if this is not the case, Microsoft will be hurting very bad as revenue dips as people hold on to XP for a few more years until something better comes along. Considering that there are still a decent percentage of corporate computers running Win2K, this should keep Bill & Balmer up at night worrying.
As an aside, I'd FAR rather buy Microsoft than Sony. Microsoft is a giant, soul-crushing company hell-bent on world domination, but at least they don't own a record label and a motion picture studio. they're nowhere NEAR that evil.
Really, you can't do web development without one of the two. GUI's will only slow you down in the long run, the code will be crap, and you will spend hours and hours debugging some piddly error introduced by a WYSIWIG editor that threw some crap in because it thought it was a good idea.
My girlfriend was in London for two weeks, and I happen to have Vonage at home. I was able to call her for $0.03/minute, and the sound quality was as good, if not better than using my cell phone when she called me. I've noticed a little noise on domestic calls, but if your broadband connection is good, it's a great deal for the money.
With my somewhat limited knowledge of orbital mechanics (i.e I've taken classical mechanics and played KSpaceDuel a bunch), it seems the best way to handle this is not to try to move the asteroid on approach, but to propell it further away from earth on it's outward leg of orbit. Say we knew asteroid $FOO was going to strike earth in 2020, 5 orbits from now. we would use far less fuel nudging it faster as it left past Earth (and hence into a larger orbit) than trying to decelerate and/or modify the orbit of a huge rock heading our way.
Of course, we're still trying to move several million metric tons of iron with what amounts to an overgrown bottle rocket, so what do I know?
You are entirely corrrect. Yet, how many lives have been lost in the space race? Very, very few. If I recall, the US has lost 17 and the Former Soviet Union lost either 3 or 6. That is a remarkable safety record for such an achievement
The point in competing would be that two sets of engineers would try to solve the same problem using two sets of approaches that may or may not have anything to do with eachother. Worst case is that two different systems are created, one of which is better than the other. Is that wasted effort? Not really, since the research into the "failed" capsule will probably spawn new projects. The best case is that the two different systems are designed to accomplish different missions, and both are useful. It's not much different than the design competitions that the USAF has to choose a new fighter.
I did some thought of doing a UI based off LCARS when I was going to put a computer in my truck after the radio was stolen. Based on the Technical Manual descriptions, it would be a good, flexible UI for a car, when you can't take a lot of tiemt o look at what's on the screen while driving.
I don't think so, but I am convinced that watching Star Trek is 90% of the reason I got my latest cell phone, which is a flip phone. If I could only find some Star Trek ring tones. . .
Seriously, Paramount is sitting on a goldmine here. Someone ought to license that. There are enough of us Geeks floating around that whoever came out with at ST:TOS style cell phone would probably make decent money on it.
It depends on where you are. I'm from the South, and you pretty much can count on someone stopping pretty quick if you have a problem, provided you're outside the city limits. Not saying that I would always TRUST who stops, but you can count on SOMEONE stopping. I'll generally try to stop for someone who obviously has a car problem, especially if it's a woman with small children. Leaving them on the side of the road would just be dangerous (I've seen, and nearly been involved in, bad wrecks on the side of the road)
That being said, when I was driving out West once, we stopped to help a lady that was pulling a trailer, and the brakes were starting to catch fire since they had locked. The people in the car with us, who were from the area, were completely flabbergasted that we would do that.
I don't want to say that ALL/.ers think that you have to give up your soul when you get an MBA. What I will say is that for those of us that are about my age (30), the vast majority of the people we knew in business school in college were soulless, greedy shadows of humanity. It seemed they were only interested in getting rich, and by the mid 90's, I'd have enough of the "me generation". Of course, it doesn't help that Business majors and CS majors (or liberal arts majors. I was getting my English degree then) don't speak the same language.
All that being said, I've considered getting an MBA. Eventually I am going to have to get promoted out of the programmer category or change jobs if I wish to advance. Sad, but true.
No, I'm suggesting that if you approach any text outside of the context in which it was written, you are going to get utterly lost. If I didn't know anything about *NIX, and you told me to finger you, I would most likely back away slowly and think you were a pervert. Hebrew and Greek has a different structure than English. If you try to translate the words as accurately as you can, you can lose the context. If you try to keep the context, you can lose shades of meaning.
It should have absolutely no bearing on Christianity. IANACL (I am not a canon lawyer), (I'm a lay Catholic) but as far as I know, there is nothing in Christian theology that would be seriously upset by the existence of life on other planets, even intelligent life. That being said, it would seriously shake the faith of some people who think that the earth is 6000 years old, and that the check out date is soon, but the existence of extraterrestrial life really shouldn't be seen as a threat to Christianity.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always wondered why one of the camera manufacturers hasn't gotten behind Gimp instead of writing their own buggy photo editing/raw conversion tools. It would prove interesting.
Same here. For $30 a month for a dataplan, I could go out and buy a new netbook EVERY YEAR, and be content on wifi if I got a call from work that something had gone completely pear shaped. I'm usually not THAT Far from wifi, and I certainly am not going to be hacking config files in VI with my smartphone while driving down the interstate.
You can lock down and secure any OS given enough time, effort and ingenuity. My Windows VMs seem to run along happily without any serious complications. My one physical window system has been largely happy.
That being said, when my mom's computer died the last time I told her that if she wanted me to fix it, it had to be a Mac, if for no other reason than the hardware is more uniform, so it's easier to write a stable os. Other htan having some printer issues, it's worked great.
That is the biggest problem with windows. You install a program, it craps all over the registry, and uniinstall leaves kruft there. Do that a few dozen times and you have a machine utterly incapable of booting. I spent entire weekends fixing PCS like that. *NIX (including MacOs) doesn't get that krufty, at least with something that gets loaded into memory like the registry. Hmm. Maybe Windows 7 should have a /etc directory?
fire them from a Rail gun into a concrete wall. Get the Drive wipe and catastrophic impact all in one neat, tidy package.
The model M keyboard is quieter than the profuse swearing when using a membrane keyboard and it breaks/ sticks / I accidentally rm -rf * .foo instead of *.foo because of the sloppy feel. Granted, after a couple of hours pounding away at a Model M, my head begins to hurt. . . .
Amen. When travelling, I use a laptop for 3 things: 1)Check email, 2) SSH back to the office if things go casters up, and 3) download and view pictures from my digitial camera, Especially when i am shooting underwater, I want to know what I am doing is working, so I can go reshoot if I need to.
Well, displaying the app is only part of the problem. Actually moving the bits around is a large part of the battle, and that's going to be the same no matter what your window manager is.
Of course, I'm making the assumption that Microsoft would code it in a modular manner, which is probably a false assumption.
I guess my point is that I feel that it would be easier to port from one unix to another than from Windows to Unix. I think.
This seems to pop up on our beloved /. every couple of years or so. Personally, I would LOVE to see Office on Linux, and I think it's in Microsoft's best interest to put it out there, but I doubt it will happen. It appears they've developed a myopic, RIAA-like fixation on propping up their current market without preparing adequately for the next one. Sure they have a 90%+ marketshare of the desktop, and finding a computer without Word is almost as hard as finding a TV without satellite or cable, but that's now. OpenOffice is making inroads into that market. Google is doing an end-run around the whole market by releasing Writely and Spreadsheets. Apple has their own office products. Adobe wants to make Powerpoint irrelevant by using flash for presentations. All it would really take is for one or two of those ideas to catch on to see Microsoft lose a fair amount of money.
Eventually, someone at Microsoft will realize that Linux / *BSD / *NIX WILL cut into their server market, and to a lesser extend the desktop market, and there is NOTHING they can do to prevent that. So long as Microsoft exists, there will be people on Slashdot bashing it, and they will hook a wi-fi card to an abacus before booting a windows box. The dumb thing to do, which what Redmond is doing now, woul be to ignore them, or worse villify them in some way as being communist or anti-American for not wanting to shell out large amounts of cash for an OS and software. The smart thing to do would be to finding markets where they can reach them. Office on *NIX would be one way to do that.
We know Office will run on *BSD. It's already running on Mac OS X. One would hope that it would not be impossible to run Office on Linux. I would like to think that there are at least a few geeks on the Office team that got loaded on half-caf double decaf expresso lattes with a twist of lemon and have ported it just to see if it could be done. Only time will tell.
For all my constant bitching about how much I despise Microsoft and hate having to reimage my computer every 6 months because of bit rot, you better bet i signed up for this as fast as my little fingers could type. Yeah, I feel dirty, but assuming my computers will support it and I can actually get the iso, I'll be attempting to install Vista this evening.
Better than my gut reaction, which was "Trek" meets "Saved by the Bell"
I've been somewhat reluctantly using windows for 15 years, Although for much of that Linux has been my primary production environment. I'm starting to feel that Microsoft is starting to finally get a clue about stability and reliability. At home, I have XP and Ubuntu running side by side. Usually, uptime on both of them is limited by the need to either muck about inside the cases or to physically move the cases. I actually really, really like Flight Simulator, and Microsoft Office is a very solid product, although I wouldn't have it installed if I didn't get a license from work.
That being said, Microsoft is in the position now that they pretty much have to be angelic from here on out because of their past performance. I remember Windows 98 crashing 5 times in one morning for me at my first job. After that, I ran Linux as my main desktop for the next 5 years. Often, I would be the only person in the entire building that was still up and running when some virus would take out all the systems. I still refuse to use Internet Explorer, Outlook, or IIS. Why? Because these products have historically been so insecure that using them is tantamount to not only leaving the front door unlocked, but leaving out a spare set of keys and instructions on how to disable the alarm for passing thieves.
Being the optomist that I am, I would like to think that the guys at Microsoft are finally getting their act together, and Vista will be a secure, stable, and user-friendy product that will happily exist in my network for a few years. I do know, however, that if this is not the case, Microsoft will be hurting very bad as revenue dips as people hold on to XP for a few more years until something better comes along. Considering that there are still a decent percentage of corporate computers running Win2K, this should keep Bill & Balmer up at night worrying.
As an aside, I'd FAR rather buy Microsoft than Sony. Microsoft is a giant, soul-crushing company hell-bent on world domination, but at least they don't own a record label and a motion picture studio. they're nowhere NEAR that evil.
Was I the only one that thought a flight simulator + google Earth = hours and hours of fun?
Really, you can't do web development without one of the two. GUI's will only slow you down in the long run, the code will be crap, and you will spend hours and hours debugging some piddly error introduced by a WYSIWIG editor that threw some crap in because it thought it was a good idea.
My girlfriend was in London for two weeks, and I happen to have Vonage at home. I was able to call her for $0.03/minute, and the sound quality was as good, if not better than using my cell phone when she called me. I've noticed a little noise on domestic calls, but if your broadband connection is good, it's a great deal for the money.
With my somewhat limited knowledge of orbital mechanics (i.e I've taken classical mechanics and played KSpaceDuel a bunch), it seems the best way to handle this is not to try to move the asteroid on approach, but to propell it further away from earth on it's outward leg of orbit. Say we knew asteroid $FOO was going to strike earth in 2020, 5 orbits from now. we would use far less fuel nudging it faster as it left past Earth (and hence into a larger orbit) than trying to decelerate and/or modify the orbit of a huge rock heading our way.
Of course, we're still trying to move several million metric tons of iron with what amounts to an overgrown bottle rocket, so what do I know?
My Suggestions:
Linus
Tux (already posted, but a good one)
Dust Puppy
Daemon (or whatever the BSD mascot is called)
coredump
Sagan (after Call Sagan)
All I can think of right now.
You are entirely corrrect. Yet, how many lives have been lost in the space race? Very, very few. If I recall, the US has lost 17 and the Former Soviet Union lost either 3 or 6. That is a remarkable safety record for such an achievement
The point in competing would be that two sets of engineers would try to solve the same problem using two sets of approaches that may or may not have anything to do with eachother. Worst case is that two different systems are created, one of which is better than the other. Is that wasted effort? Not really, since the research into the "failed" capsule will probably spawn new projects. The best case is that the two different systems are designed to accomplish different missions, and both are useful. It's not much different than the design competitions that the USAF has to choose a new fighter.
I did some thought of doing a UI based off LCARS when I was going to put a computer in my truck after the radio was stolen. Based on the Technical Manual descriptions, it would be a good, flexible UI for a car, when you can't take a lot of tiemt o look at what's on the screen while driving.
I don't think so, but I am convinced that watching Star Trek is 90% of the reason I got my latest cell phone, which is a flip phone. If I could only find some Star Trek ring tones. . .
Seriously, Paramount is sitting on a goldmine here. Someone ought to license that. There are enough of us Geeks floating around that whoever came out with at ST:TOS style cell phone would probably make decent money on it.
It depends on where you are. I'm from the South, and you pretty much can count on someone stopping pretty quick if you have a problem, provided you're outside the city limits. Not saying that I would always TRUST who stops, but you can count on SOMEONE stopping. I'll generally try to stop for someone who obviously has a car problem, especially if it's a woman with small children. Leaving them on the side of the road would just be dangerous (I've seen, and nearly been involved in, bad wrecks on the side of the road)
That being said, when I was driving out West once, we stopped to help a lady that was pulling a trailer, and the brakes were starting to catch fire since they had locked. The people in the car with us, who were from the area, were completely flabbergasted that we would do that.
I don't want to say that ALL /.ers think that you have to give up your soul when you get an MBA. What I will say is that for those of us that are about my age (30), the vast majority of the people we knew in business school in college were soulless, greedy shadows of humanity. It seemed they were only interested in getting rich, and by the mid 90's, I'd have enough of the "me generation". Of course, it doesn't help that Business majors and CS majors (or liberal arts majors. I was getting my English degree then) don't speak the same language.
All that being said, I've considered getting an MBA. Eventually I am going to have to get promoted out of the programmer category or change jobs if I wish to advance. Sad, but true.
No, I'm suggesting that if you approach any text outside of the context in which it was written, you are going to get utterly lost. If I didn't know anything about *NIX, and you told me to finger you, I would most likely back away slowly and think you were a pervert. Hebrew and Greek has a different structure than English. If you try to translate the words as accurately as you can, you can lose the context. If you try to keep the context, you can lose shades of meaning.
It should have absolutely no bearing on Christianity. IANACL (I am not a canon lawyer), (I'm a lay Catholic) but as far as I know, there is nothing in Christian theology that would be seriously upset by the existence of life on other planets, even intelligent life. That being said, it would seriously shake the faith of some people who think that the earth is 6000 years old, and that the check out date is soon, but the existence of extraterrestrial life really shouldn't be seen as a threat to Christianity.