But this is a good point. Someone should ask anyways. Probably everybody that actually cares about it. Let the vendors know that this information is actually useful, and that people want to know that it works under Linux (and other OSes, in other words, standards-compliant). Why cant they put "usb storage compliant" on the information, instead of (or in addition to) "works with Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP" ?
Never underestimate secretaries. Linux may very well be quite right for them too.
In the mid-90s, I was working a place where Unix (no, not Linux, Unix - we were in academic business, probably had huge discounts) was standard on the desktop. Things worked all right, and everyone was mostly satisfied. There was one exception, our house-economist, which needed more tools. Today, even he would be satisfied, I guess.
Anyways, the administration increased in size, and at some point, someone decided that we, too, should go the Windows way. Needless to say, tecnical staff was less than satisified, including me.
We had two secretaries. I did a little mini-poll on what they would prefer on the desktop? The answer: It doesn't matter, as long as it makes communication with the tecnical staff easy.
Well, it seemed for a while like we were going the Windows route. Then, one day, over lunch, one of the secretaties dropped the magic line: "I think I would prefer this. Now, I've learnt it, and don't really want to switch at all".
This seemed to have done the trick. Not long after, the course changed, instead of standardizing on Windows, one standardized on formats that made it easy for everyone to choose for himself. Nowadays, people are using Windows or Linux depending on what they like, and as long as you avoid the lock-in-traps in Microsoft,this is quite possible it seems.
So, yes, a mixed environment is possible, but don't automatically assume that the secretaries will be slow picking up Linux. They will use whatever tool makes them do their work best, given choice. As should everyone.
This is true. But, the underlying reason that I keep hoping that people "get it", rather soon that ASAP, are a few:
1) The more people start using Linux, the more chance that that's what I'm going to WORK with and on in the future. More fun work.
2) The bigger market share Linux gets, the more people will start taking Linux into consideration with products and services they supply. This means it gets easier for me as a Linux-using consumer to "be a part of the world". This is already getting easier and easier.
However, there are a few things I'm really afraid of, the most notable one is the various e-governement initiatives. I'm dead scared that these will be based on proprietary, Windows-only solutions, making it harder and harder to be a part of the society as a non-Windows-user.
This is the main reason that spreading the word of and furthering the acceptance of Linux is something that I engage in. Once we have true competition, and people have to start factoring in the non-Windows-users or lose significant business, I couldn't care less what people actually use. It's a free world.
Uh. This is a feature, not a bug. As far as I know, it's turned off in most if not all vendor-supplied kernels. It can be turned on when compiling the kernel. However, it can be pretty useful when debugging something that makes the possibility of lockups large.
By the way, it's more than just rebooting you can do this way. During a lockup, you can sync your disks (alt+print screen+s), unmount them (alt+print screen+u), and kill everything on the current virtual console (for example X) with (alt+print screen+k). This is useful when you are running with less than stable drivers, X11-setups etc, but I would not recommend it instead of trying to get to the bottom of the stability problem.
I would recommend it hands down to having to push the power button, though, it can actually help saving your data.
Actually, we better let the salesmen travel. It's a little known secret that the reason computers are so bad at solving the travelling salesmen problem is that those who design computers are technicians, and everyone knows that tech people hates salesmen, so the longer they spend travelling, the better for the techs.
By the way, the code on those pages haven't worked for a while, since the TUN-interface in the Linux kernel changed a while ago. This just as a warning if anyone else decides to test it out...it makes for a fun social even for a LUG, for example!
Or, better yet, make your own implementation, and if you live within pigeon flying distance of us (basically southern Norway, if we don't want the experiment to last *too* long), we'll do interoperability tests, so we can advance the standard! We need two independent but interoperable implementations.
- Vegard, one of those that implemented TCP/IP over pigeons.
Actually, a customer of an ISP MIGHT complain about receiving a letter about getting a bigger dick. Thus, filtering your mail as an ISP is probably a little more difficult than filtering for other people. Add that to the fact that ISPs support mail very often *have* to be publically listed on a web page, and I can easily see how it becomes a *very* time-consuming problem.
But, the point is *not* how much it costs, to the dime. The point is: It costs *me* money to read advertisements, and they are NOT sponsoring any services I use. They're parasites, they're not doing anyone any good. The reason people don't complain so much about TV commercials etc. are that they pay some of the bill *you* else would have to pay.
Spammers probably use *more* resources than average for the payment they give to ISPs - especially in human resources (dealing with complaints about them, etc, adding and deleting their throw-away-accounts, etc), and does not pay more than other people.
No, spammers are parasites on the information highway. Unless they start paying real money that actually PROVIDE something to the society, ALL spam should go away.
But it also states that those logs from IRC was basically worthless, taken out of its context. One can't know what is a joke and what is not. The smiley, however, should be a strong hint...
He hass also said that he likes FreeBSD better. Whether or not he likes FreeBSD or Linux is more or less irrelevant. I guess the arguments would be even stronger if he did it to make a player for FreeBSD. FreeBSD doesn't have that much public attention or public support, yet, so a DVD player for FreeBSD, I guess, was even longer away. (does there exist one yet, for FreeBSD?)
I once worked on a larger software project, where we (a team of 3 persons) were developing a curses-based client, developed in a standard editor. At the same time, someone developed a windows-based client, in visual studio. Ok, the Windows-based client had more bells and whistles, of course. But ours did the job. We had roughly 1/3 the estimates for development time as the Windows team (which were more persons than us, too, I think), and we KEPT our schedule, which the Windows team did not.
With good programming skills, any editor you like will do as a programming environment. It's not the tools that makes a good program, it's the programmer.
Whatever happened to smart advertising?
on
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Internet is a wonderful media, used right. It *could* also be a wonderful media for the advertising business.
The reason the ads get larger and more annoying, is that noone clicks on them - because no one WANTS those ads. This is *not* going to change by making them more annoying, only the oppsosite.
No, the advertising business does *not* understand Internet. Had they done that, they would have done a lot more targeted advertising, to people who WANTED it, and perhaps even used some effort to build up interesting web-sites related to the field they operated in.
Take, for example, a sports chain. Would it be as annoying if a sports chain co-financed a sports news site, or an outdoor activities site? There could be a prominent, non-intrusive link on the front page, pointing to "shop". This is only one example of things that would be less intrusive but perhaps more effective.
Instead of buying ads, buy a part of a well-used website, make the commercial section well accessible from the front page, but non-intrusive unless you REALLY want to see it.
Another thing they could do, once having bought access to an internet site, is participate in talkback fora. Teach a person that task, and make him inform about general topics AND advice about products. What makes me like and want to buy from a shop, is *service*, *well-informed personell* and willingness to help.
In other words - contribute to the community, make your name known through *that*, and I think one would benefit in the long run.
There might be better ways than my examples, they're just examples of ways *I* think are better than push-your-ads-in-the-face-of-too-many-people-strat egies.
But no, the advertising business hasn't understood the media at all. It's all about pushing annoying ads in the face of unwilling customers, in the hope of catching *one* willing customer more.
From a national point of view, it makes good sense to support open source if you're not in the US. Most of money for MS-ware goes directly in MS pockets, out of the country. If you encourage and use open source, you can stimulate a services-based local industry.
Also, using MS software have been more and more expensive, at least when you compare the relative costs between hardware and software. I'd bet many companies use more than half the IT budget on commercial licences, most of which is basically Microsoft Windows and Office anyways. That's a heck of a lot of money that could go to build good open source solutions!
I know one's not supposed to feed the trolls, but bugs DO get fixed in the stable version. But unlike some other distributions, that just toss in a new package, that *might* break some functionality on a server, Debian backports the bug-fix. The version is the same, but the bugs - and ONLY the bugs - are fixed.
Interesting you should mention this. Language could actually be a factor in FAVOUR of dropping Windows. Norway actually have TWO written forms, Windows only comes in one of them (as far as I know, someone might correct me on this one). Whereas both GNOME/KDE is well on their way into be translated into both of them.
And if this wasn't enough, we have a lappish minority in the north of Norway, and I bet it'd be quite hard to convince Microsoft into making a version for THAT.
For Linux, situation might be a little different. It's much simpler for the norwegian government to hire someone to do translations of Linux softwate, much of it which uses gettext, and is easily translatable. Not to mention that a project, Skolelinux (Linux for schools, see http://www.skolelinux.no/) has that as one of their stated goals, and are working on exactly that.
So, language might be an argument against Windows and FOR free software.
Ok, I know I'm not supposed to feed the troll. But here goes:
If Linus *could* do that, that is licence for example 2.4.21 under a non-GPL license, anyone is free to take for example 2.4.20 and continue development with GPL. Linus could make his own, proprietary implementation, but 2.4.20 and it's GPL successors would still be GPL, and Linus' proprietary kernel would soon be irrelevant. I don't think the kernel is as dependent upon Linus as it once was, there's plenty of people who knows as much about each specific part of the kernel as Linus does.
This is *exactly* one of the benefits of open source, and an argument the proprietary/closed source software business had better NOT try to press, because the problem is much worse with closed source software. What if MS decided that they didn't want to develop Microsoft SQL server OR provide security fixes anymore? What if they decided that they for example didn't like a specific business, and decided to alter the license so that that business was no longer allowed to use MS SQL server?
We did actually think about that. But, you don't send email as your first network test. You send a
ping - or a traceroute, but that was not really
interesting, as it was only one hop. And well,
losing packets with email is quite worse than
losing them with a ping. A retransmission could
easily mean an hour or three extra time:) And
basically, we'd have needed more pigeons...
I have an explanation for this.
We had 8 carriers for one direction, 6 for the return direction. I started a ping with 7.5 minutes interval, and envisioned having 2-3 packets in the loop. But, the neighbor had just let his pigeons out. Our pigeons seemed to want to fly with his pigeons for a while. Thus, at one time we had 5 packets in that flock.
When they finally broke off from the flock, they all broke off more or less simultaneously. This created some chaos at the other end. Simply said, they forgot to close the door of the pigeon cage, so the 2 last pigeons of 6 escaped.
We could have had 6 replies in maximum, but I had to let it go to 9 packet sent to get all the replies back. 8 of those packets was sent to the remote sent, for the 9th, we didn't have a pigeon to carry it. And alas, loosing two pigeons at the remote site, we only had 4 return pigeons.
No - however, if you choose to PUBLISH what you read/download, you are REDISTRIBUTING, and can't do so without a permission. This does, however, more or less apply whether or not the author applies a copyright statement. In other words, just because something doesn't have a copyright-statement doesn't mean it isn't copyrighted.
Slashdot Mirror
As one of the original implementers of rfc1149 in Bergen, I have only one thing to say:
Congratulations for a successful test!
But this is a good point. Someone should ask anyways. Probably everybody that actually cares about it. Let the vendors know that this information is actually useful, and that people want to know that it works under Linux (and other OSes, in other words, standards-compliant). Why cant they put "usb storage compliant" on the information, instead of (or in addition to) "works with Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP" ?
Never underestimate secretaries. Linux may very well be quite right for them too.
In the mid-90s, I was working a place where Unix (no, not Linux, Unix - we were in academic business, probably had huge discounts) was standard on the desktop. Things worked all right, and everyone was mostly satisfied. There was one exception, our house-economist, which needed more tools. Today, even he would be satisfied, I guess.
Anyways, the administration increased in size, and at some point, someone decided that we, too, should go the Windows way. Needless to say, tecnical staff was less than satisified, including me.
We had two secretaries. I did a little mini-poll on what they would prefer on the desktop? The answer: It doesn't matter, as long as it makes communication with the tecnical staff easy.
Well, it seemed for a while like we were going the Windows route. Then, one day, over lunch, one of the secretaties dropped the magic line: "I think I would prefer this. Now, I've learnt it, and don't really want to switch at all".
This seemed to have done the trick. Not long after, the course changed, instead of standardizing on Windows, one standardized on formats that made it easy for everyone to choose for himself. Nowadays, people are using Windows or Linux depending on what they like, and as long as you avoid the lock-in-traps in Microsoft,this is quite possible it seems.
So, yes, a mixed environment is possible, but don't automatically assume that the secretaries will be slow picking up Linux. They will use whatever tool makes them do their work best, given choice. As should everyone.
This is true. But, the underlying reason that I keep hoping that people "get it", rather soon that ASAP, are a few:
1) The more people start using Linux, the more chance that that's what I'm going to WORK with and on in the future. More fun work.
2) The bigger market share Linux gets, the more people will start taking Linux into consideration with products and services they supply. This means it gets easier for me as a Linux-using consumer to "be a part of the world". This is already getting easier and easier.
However, there are a few things I'm really afraid of, the most notable one is the various e-governement initiatives. I'm dead scared that these will be based on proprietary, Windows-only solutions, making it harder and harder to be a part of the society as a non-Windows-user.
This is the main reason that spreading the word of and furthering the acceptance of Linux is something that I engage in. Once we have true competition, and people have to start factoring in the non-Windows-users or lose significant business, I couldn't care less what people actually use. It's a free world.
Uh. This is a feature, not a bug. As far as I know, it's turned off in most if not all vendor-supplied kernels. It can be turned on when compiling the kernel. However, it can be pretty useful when debugging something that makes the possibility of lockups large.
By the way, it's more than just rebooting you can do this way. During a lockup, you can sync your disks (alt+print screen+s), unmount them (alt+print screen+u), and kill everything on the current virtual console (for example X) with (alt+print screen+k). This is useful when you are running with less than stable drivers, X11-setups etc, but I would not recommend it instead of trying to get to the bottom of the stability problem.
I would recommend it hands down to having to push the power button, though, it can actually help saving your data.
Actually, we better let the salesmen travel. It's a little known secret that the reason computers are so bad at solving the travelling salesmen problem is that those who design computers are technicians, and everyone knows that tech people hates salesmen, so the longer they spend travelling, the better for the techs.
See the project page for pictures and documentation.
By the way, the code on those pages haven't worked for a while, since the TUN-interface in the Linux kernel changed a while ago. This just as a warning if anyone else decides to test it out...it makes for a fun social even for a LUG, for example!
Or, better yet, make your own implementation, and if you live within pigeon flying distance of us (basically southern Norway, if we don't want the experiment to last *too* long), we'll do interoperability tests, so we can advance the standard! We need two independent but interoperable implementations.
- Vegard, one of those that implemented TCP/IP over pigeons.
Actually, a customer of an ISP MIGHT complain about receiving a letter about getting a bigger dick. Thus, filtering your mail as an ISP is probably a little more difficult than filtering for other people. Add that to the fact that ISPs support mail very often *have* to be publically listed on a web page, and I can easily see how it becomes a *very* time-consuming problem.
But, the point is *not* how much it costs, to the dime. The point is: It costs *me* money to read advertisements, and they are NOT sponsoring any services I use. They're parasites, they're not doing anyone any good. The reason people don't complain so much about TV commercials etc. are that they pay some of the bill *you* else would have to pay.
Spammers probably use *more* resources than average for the payment they give to ISPs - especially in human resources (dealing with complaints about them, etc, adding and deleting their throw-away-accounts, etc), and does not pay more than other people.
No, spammers are parasites on the information highway. Unless they start paying real money that actually PROVIDE something to the society, ALL spam should go away.
But it also states that those logs from IRC was basically worthless, taken out of its context. One can't know what is a joke and what is not. The smiley, however, should be a strong hint...
He hass also said that he likes FreeBSD better. Whether or not he likes FreeBSD or Linux is more or less irrelevant. I guess the arguments would be even stronger if he did it to make a player for FreeBSD. FreeBSD doesn't have that much public attention or public support, yet, so a DVD player for FreeBSD, I guess, was even longer away.
(does there exist one yet, for FreeBSD?)
I do not know if this is really relevant, but:
I once worked on a larger software project, where we (a team of 3 persons) were developing a curses-based client, developed in a standard editor. At the same time, someone developed a windows-based client, in visual studio. Ok, the Windows-based client had more bells and whistles, of course. But ours did the job. We had roughly 1/3 the estimates for development time as the Windows team (which were more persons than us, too, I think), and we KEPT our schedule, which the Windows team did not.
With good programming skills, any editor you like will do as a programming environment. It's not the tools that makes a good program, it's the programmer.
Internet is a wonderful media, used right. It *could* also be a wonderful media for the advertising business.
t egies.
The reason the ads get larger and more annoying, is that noone clicks on them - because no one WANTS those ads. This is *not* going to change by making them more annoying, only the oppsosite.
No, the advertising business does *not* understand Internet. Had they done that, they would have done a lot more targeted advertising, to people who WANTED it, and perhaps even used some effort to build up interesting web-sites related to the field they operated in.
Take, for example, a sports chain. Would it be as annoying if a sports chain co-financed a sports news site, or an outdoor activities site? There could be a prominent, non-intrusive link on the front page, pointing to "shop". This is only one example of things that would be less intrusive but perhaps more effective.
Instead of buying ads, buy a part of a well-used website, make the commercial section well accessible from the front page, but non-intrusive unless you REALLY want to see it.
Another thing they could do, once having bought access to an internet site, is participate in talkback fora. Teach a person that task, and make him inform about general topics AND advice about products. What makes me like and want to buy from a shop, is *service*, *well-informed personell* and willingness to help.
In other words - contribute to the community, make your name known through *that*, and I think one would benefit in the long run.
There might be better ways than my examples, they're just examples of ways *I* think are better than push-your-ads-in-the-face-of-too-many-people-stra
But no, the advertising business hasn't understood the media at all. It's all about pushing annoying ads in the face of unwilling customers, in the hope of catching *one* willing customer more.
From a national point of view, it makes good sense to support open source if you're not in the US. Most of money for MS-ware goes directly in MS pockets, out of the country. If you encourage and use open source, you can stimulate a services-based local industry.
Also, using MS software have been more and more expensive, at least when you compare the relative costs between hardware and software. I'd bet many companies use more than half the IT budget on commercial licences, most of which is basically Microsoft Windows and Office anyways. That's a heck of a lot of money that could go to build good open source solutions!
I know one's not supposed to feed the trolls, but bugs DO get fixed in the stable version. But unlike some other distributions, that just toss in a new package, that *might* break some functionality on a server, Debian backports the bug-fix. The version is the same, but the bugs - and ONLY the bugs - are fixed.
Interesting you should mention this. Language could actually be a factor in FAVOUR of dropping Windows. Norway actually have TWO written forms, Windows only comes in one of them (as far as I know, someone might correct me on this one). Whereas both GNOME/KDE is well on their way into be translated into both of them.
And if this wasn't enough, we have a lappish minority in the north of Norway, and I bet it'd be quite hard to convince Microsoft into making a version for THAT.
For Linux, situation might be a little different. It's much simpler for the norwegian government to hire someone to do translations of Linux softwate, much of it which uses gettext, and is easily translatable. Not to mention that a project, Skolelinux (Linux for schools, see http://www.skolelinux.no/) has that as one of their stated goals, and are working on exactly that.
So, language might be an argument against Windows and FOR free software.
Ok, I know I'm not supposed to feed the troll. But here goes:
If Linus *could* do that, that is licence for example 2.4.21 under a non-GPL license, anyone is free to take for example 2.4.20 and continue development with GPL. Linus could make his own, proprietary implementation, but 2.4.20 and it's GPL successors would still be GPL, and Linus' proprietary kernel would soon be irrelevant. I don't think the kernel is as dependent upon Linus as it once was, there's plenty of people who knows as much about each specific part of the kernel as Linus does.
This is *exactly* one of the benefits of open source, and an argument the proprietary/closed source software business had better NOT try to press, because the problem is much worse with closed source software. What if MS decided that they didn't want to develop Microsoft SQL server OR provide security fixes anymore? What if they decided that they for example didn't like a specific business, and decided to alter the license so that that business was no longer allowed to use MS SQL server?
More pictures, this time mostly from the other site, is at http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/bjoff_bilder/
- Vegard
We did actually think about that. But, you don't send email as your first network test. You send a ping - or a traceroute, but that was not really interesting, as it was only one hop. And well, losing packets with email is quite worse than losing them with a ping. A retransmission could easily mean an hour or three extra time :) And
basically, we'd have needed more pigeons...
- Vegard
When they finally broke off from the flock, they all broke off more or less simultaneously. This created some chaos at the other end. Simply said, they forgot to close the door of the pigeon cage, so the 2 last pigeons of 6 escaped.
We could have had 6 replies in maximum, but I had to let it go to 9 packet sent to get all the replies back. 8 of those packets was sent to the remote sent, for the 9th, we didn't have a pigeon to carry it. And alas, loosing two pigeons at the remote site, we only had 4 return pigeons.
- Vegard
Indeed. And they did leave at least one audit trail, as seen in http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/bilder/tn/20audit _trail.jpg.html
www.blug.linux.no should have both cpu and
bandwith that can withstand som slashdotting.
However, there is a mirror at http://www.pvv.org/rfc1149/
- Vegard, member of BLUG and the CPIP WG.
No - however, if you choose to PUBLISH what you read/download, you are REDISTRIBUTING, and can't do so without a permission. This does, however, more or less apply whether or not the author applies a copyright statement. In other words, just because something doesn't have a copyright-statement doesn't mean it isn't copyrighted.
- Vegard