The problem here is, you're browsing society at +5. The average 19th century house was built with the same surly, I-could-give-a-rat attitude that you find in many modern subcontractors. Or it was a bunch of logs thrown together, or even a construction based primarily on dirt. Not surprisingly, the average 19th century house is now rubble.
No, I think not. The problem is you are a product of a school system that teachs that humans are inherently corrupt and that mediocrity is human nature, except when they submit to an authoritarian power which knows better than they do. You are obviously from a suburban part of the world and have probably never even been to a neighborhood which existed in the 1880's let alone the 1920's. Walk into the Brooklyn Historical Society, or come to a neighborhood known as Cobble Hill, which was even in the 1970's a working class neighborhood. You will find brick town houses of relatively spacious size that look much as they did 120 years ago. These same brick houses which were once the homes of shippers who worked at the Brooklyn docks now go to rich financiers for well over $1 million. Yes, I love in Brooklyn. I am not even going to bother finding you references on this, if you can't come to the nations pre-emininent city and learn a little history, a quote won't matter to you one bit.
Sorry, but it is you who are incorrect, and yes I do know what I'm talking about.
The town I have lived in my entire life is a "historic" community. Most of the buildings in the town date to the 1860's, including the house I lived in from ages 12-20, which is on a map of the town from 1864.
Yes, there are a lot of brick buildings downtown, I would say 80-90 percent off the top of my head. You know why? Because everything that wasn't brick burned down! Brick buildings have never been cheap to build, and so it is highly unlikely that a brick building would have been built to anything less than the highest standards of the day. Even today, bricklayers (and similar) command top dollar.
There are many wooden houses that remain as well, but mostly because it is a legal requirement (it is against the law to tear down a structure built before a certain date, and the owner is fined if it falls into disrepair). They are a nightmare to maintain, difficult and costly. Those that have survived were built to survive, and little else, and even that survival is largely the result of continuous maintenance and improvement, which is the only thing that makes them habitable by modern standards.
I'm sure that in the 19th century it was perfectly acceptable, maybe even desirable, to have practically no insulation. All those gas lamps probably made up for the inefficiency of the big open fireplaces nicely, and a high rate of air exchange probably kept the air breathable. If not for the quarter-inch gaps between the boards in their all wood walls they likely would have died of asphyxiation. Don't even get me started on the hacks used to get electricity, phone, and running water into these things.
Of course, these are the ones that survived. There are various towns in the area that didn't, and the only structures on those sites today a reconstructions built by the various historical societies in the area.
I do know a thing or two about construction, by the way. My dad has been a Contractor for 30 years, and I worked in construction for over ten years, mostly residential, including a few remodels of Victorian homes.
The houses you describe were generally the houses of the relatively wealthy. They would be the ones with the money to hire the best builders, and to maintain those houses properly. The amazing quality of the construction you're claiming is most likely a myth.
Relative to Africa? Yeah, maybe. But I think a dock worker who built a house now affordable only to the top.5% of the US population speaks for itself. And as far as the quality of construction, I would like to see your plywood home last for 100+ years.
If properly maintained, as is the case with the vast majority of surviving Victorian structures, there is absolutely no reason why a modern home shouldn't last 100 years or more. Houses from the 1920-30's still survive, and that was definately a low point in terms of construction quality.
Your lack of understanding in this regard, however, is nothing compared to your lack of understanding of real estate value. My grandmother has been in real estate for 40 years, and she would be happy to inform you that quality of construction means only slightly more than dick in real estate. Really, there are only 3 important things: location, location, and location. This is why a crappy 1960s surf shack in Palo Alto sells for $500k.
Yeah, the fact that a dock worker could afford a house that now only the top.5% can afford does speak for itself, but the only thing it says is that it happens to be in NYC.
This is where you astonish me. Do you really think I would just spout this shit out of my ass?
That seems to be where everything else you've said has come from, why should I expect this to be any different.
Another great step in the forced schooling enslavement was an attempt to increase childhood, so as to rob the youth of their opportunity to organize and revolt. 20th century rebellious youth did precious little compared to the "adolescents" of the 19th century. They did great stuff like stage the French Revolution and the American Revolution.
If you think you would be better off fighting wars than doing whatever it is you are presently doing, be my guest. Please, run away and join the French Foreign Legion, if you think those kids had it so good!
Why do you think they use the term "rebellious" anyway?
Because that has been the word used to describe the characteristics of a rebel since the 15th century. "Rebel" comes from the Latin rebellis, from re- + bellum war, from Old Latin duellum, which has some rather obvious connections to modern words as well.
The word "rebellious" has no connection with the concept of youth, except in the modern, post WW2, usage.
12 year olds today are barely off their mother's tit, and are more concerned with toys that the glory of war. You my friend, are exactly the young man JP Morgan wanted. Someone unwilling and incapable of waging war. A true bitch, forever a slave to the system.
The average 12 year old of JP Morgan's day was already working in the factory, no schooling needed. For an alleged student of history, you seem to know surprisingly little about it. You think we're slaves to the system now? You know nothing of this era you claim to be such an expert on.
Nor did literacy always imply fluency. I've had reason to read over quite a few nineteenth century documents. These people were, to put it mildly, not a generation of Edgar Allen Poes. For every person who could dash off a clear, insightful set of coherent sentences, there were a dozen who could just barely get the point across. Don't tell me that any fifteen year old in the nineteenth century could write better than 99% of Slashdot, because reading their journals is *exactly* like reading Slashdot.*
As a student of history, and someone who has spent much time reading civil war letters, I could not disagree with you more. But given your overall ignorance of the entire century you have exhibited thus far, I will give you one last change for redemption. Perhaps you can give me an example of this poor writing, so I can see for myself.
I'll take the word of someone who has read letters and journals over the word of someone who has only read the letters. As the parent says, you're only reading the letters that were good enough to keep, and the journals (in my admitedly limited experience) show a much lower level of education. Even those, though, were written by those who had some amount of education. The average 12 year old today is much more fluent than then average 12 year old during the Civil War, who quite likely couldn't read at all.
The internet will teach your kids, but probably not anything you want them to know.
I agree with all your other points. While sports may have benefits, as other responses go into, the first priority of a school needs to be education. The sad truth is that education is being sacrificed for sports at many schools, and that's just not right.
Re:Nintendo Game Cude Controller...
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Controllers for Kids?
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I also have a 12 year old brother who has no problem with the Game Cube controllers, and he's small for his age. Actually, he hasn't had any difficulty with any of the controllers put out in the last 2-3 years. Same goes for my youngest sister, now 10.
As for a joystick, I was quite fond of the old $12 Raider-X joysticks. I think I got them at Radio Shack, but I could be wrong. The last joystick I bought there was a different design and it fell apart after maybe 4-5 months of daily Tie-Fighter, but those old ones were practically indestructable. Ugly as hell, too...
Re:Listen up, this is the last time I'll say this
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Decentralization
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I was about to agree with you, but then it occured to me that the statement you're complaining about defines the difference between a suit and a geek. It has nothing to do with training or pigeonholing, but rather with base motivations.
A geek creates for primarily for personal enjoyment, profit is at best a secondary motivation. A geek in a suit is still a geek.
A suit creates primarily for profit. A suit in a ratty t-shirt is still a suit.
It has nothing to do with people reaching their full potential, it's just defining terms.
If someone tells a racist joke, are they not a racist regardless of if they were "just joking"?
My sister tells a lot of blonde jokes. Does that mean she hates blondes? I certainly hope not, since she is one. She also has a BS in Combined Sciences (medical focus), and is gaining some practical field experience, and paying off some debt, as a paramedic before she goes on to medical school. She thinks the blonde stereotype is funny, so she collects blonde jokes.
Similarly, most of the racist jokes I've heard have been told to me by people of the race the joke ridicules. Again, stereotypes are funny. Realizing that does not make me a racist.
It has nothing to do with patriotism, but with documentation. The Wright brothers flight was well documented, as was their research surrounding it. No one had to do anything special, like digitally enhancing a film of the flight to read the date of the newspaper in some guys back pocket, to verify when and where it happened.
There are other Americans who claim to have flown before the Wrights, such as Lyman Gilmore, who claimed to have flown in 1902. Of course, the guy was nutty as a fruitcake, and the only reason he wasn't dismissed out of hand was that he actually invented stuff that worked. No one was ever found that could verify his claim, though, so he remains obscure.
If Newton's documentation hadn't been as good as it was, Leibniz would likely get all the credit for Calculus.
Agriculture is becoming automated quickly, especially irrigation. However, it simply isn't complex enough, nor does it need to be, to require IT personel.
It's a very tough market to sell to. The best pitch I've seen was basically "you can use this system to control irrigation automatically based on soil moisture and temperature", which is pretty damned cool if you're a farmer, but only requires a pentium that can boot Win95, and even that is only because the interface was written in VB.
Yeah, well, Dmitry Skylarov isn't an American, either.
Jon Johanson is not only not an American, but has likely never been to America, and lives in a country where reverse engineering is supposedly still legal.
I'm going to take a wild guess and say that kiddie porn, sedition, and terrorism are still illegal in Portugal, despite the relative scarcity of law enforcement. Even if they aren't illegal, or are but aren't enforced, there's still this little thing called "extradition". There aren't that many countries in the world that don't have extradition treaties with the US, and I don't recall Portugal being on that list.
If you think the US can't put enough pressure on your governemnt to get you if it's important to them, I'm going to guess that you haven't gone much past the government mandated education yourself.
Remember, the program Skylarov wrote is not only explicitly legal in Russia, but Russian law makes Adobe the criminals for limiting access to purchased works. That didn't stop the FBI from nabbing him though, did it?
2)NOTHING! There is nothing of value in my pc! Zero!
Your computer has no CPU? No Hard Drive? No internet access?
Those are the only things of value on the vast majority of computers that get hacked, but they are of value.
What if a hacker is using your machine to hack into something important, like the NSA or a Defense Contractor? Or, of course, there's the kiddie porn example already presented. Or maybe you'd like your computer to be a zombie for a DDOS attack or a spammer?
Most of those could get you any combination of: Computer confiscated as evidence (the computer itself is of value to you, right?), heafty fines, or jail time. In the kiddie porn example it doesn't stop there, either. You'll be in a sex offender database for the rest of your life, which means every time a child disappears you're a possible suspect, and as an added bonus every time you move you'll likely have to go around your new neighborhood and introduce yourself and your crimes. "Hi, I'm your new neighbor, eggstacy. I just moved in down the street, and I'm required by law to inform you that I'm a convicted sex offender." Fun for the whole family!
Oh, and they did mention that it doesn't matter whether you knew the kiddie porn was on your HDD or not, right?
If your controller just spontaneously lost it's configuration, it's a problem with the card. Call the manufacturer and get a replacement. If they will configure it for you before they send it (which shouldn't be difficult for them), you should be able to just swap it in and go.
You'll need to do something like this, since you won't be able to get at the data on the drives unless you can hook them up to a RAID controller that will recognize the particular flare code etc of your setup.
If you can stomach losing the data (you backed up the important stuff, right?) then you could try starting over from scratch, but I would not trust your RAID controller if I were you. Replace it or don't use it.
Metallica's response was not out of character at all. Their actions were all about control. Metallica is one of the very few groups who have managed to maintain control of their music despite standard industry practice, and that's very important to them.
It's unfortunate that Lars expressed himself so poorly. It wasn't that their songs were being traded that pissed them off, but that nobody bothered to ask them if it was OK! That the Napster folks were trying to make money off of it was salt in the wounds. If not for that, they might have overlooked the trading.
Lars has said that if anybody had bothered to ask him, he probably would have tried to work something out with them.
Exactly what I was going to say. He had a modicum of credibility until he made that blatantly ignorant statement. I was even willing to let his confusion about who coined the term "viral lecense" slide until I read that.
The comment on the quality of MS support was really interesting, though, and he started to make some other good points, but failed to follow through. To bad he had to go and destroy his credibility like that, it might have become an interesting debate.
is it really fair to expect a refund for the OS when you buy a computer package?
Absolutely.
The OEM is selling the entire package, including the EULA that specifically states I'm entitled to a refund if I don't use the software that came installed on it, and they are very much aware of that fact.
All of your analogies are completely broken because none of those items come with a EULA that specifically says I am entitled to a refund.
When an OEM sells me a computer with Windows preinstalled, they are agreeing to the terms of the Microsoft EULA. When they refuse to give a refund, they are in breach of that contract. If they don't want to be bound by the terms of the Windows EULA, they can sell me a machine without Windows preinstalled on it, which is exactly what I wanted in the first place.
Is it fair for the OEM to expect me to be bound by the various contracts between us but not bound by them themselves?
You knew exactly what you were getting.
That's right, I know exactly that I'm getting a EULA which specifically entitles me to a refund for preinstalled software that I don't use.
Another reason that OEMs don't like to sell computers without an OS is because after the computer is built, they TEST it.
Dell has any given desktop PC in their possession for less than an hour, and their business model depends on that. The parts belong to their vendors until they hit the recieving dock, and the assembled PC belongs to the customer as soon as it hits the shipping dock, just under one hour later. Yeah, I'm sure they do plenty of testing! Any testing they do could be just as easily done by having the machine boot to a test CD that runs through whatever automated tests they run.
There is absolutely no reason why they need an OS installed on the HDD in order to test these machines.
why take the extra step when 95% will use that OS?
Because putting in a blank HDD takes no more extra time than dealing with any of the other custom options I might order (like, for example, a bigger HDD).
Well, one reason is that it seemed to crash more often than Windows. *20 second obligatory pause for laughter* Anyway, the Linux Kernel is a brick house sure...but on top of that I was running X -> Enlightenment -> Netscape for most of my web browsing. Somewhere in those 3 layers(not the kernel) things just kept crashing. Usually once of twice a day the xserver would crash, and I'd be left back in console mode...typing startx again.
I had similar problems until I switched to WindowMaker. It's been about 6 months, and in that time I've only had Mozilla crash on me once and it didn't take anything else with it. Prior to that I was using KDE and having crashes all the time, which was particularly irritating since it would take my USB drivers with it, which made it quite difficult for me to recover from console with my USB keyboard.
Anyway, my conclusion is that the problem there is not the oft maligned X, but rather what you have running on top of it. In the last 6 months it has become quite clear to me that X does not at all deserve the bad reputation that it has. I'm guessing you were not running Enlightenment by itself, but rather over GNOME? I'll bet that GNOME was the problem. Try running Enlightenment without GNOME under it, or if that's how you were running it, try a different wm. One of the things I really like about Linux is that I can mix and match apps as I choose. I can be running WindowMaker and still use Konqueror whenever I like without having to take the KDE stability hit. I know the same is true for GNOME apps, and as long as Enlightenment is properly designed it should be true for those apps as well. WindowMaker isn't for everyone, so you might try icewm or blackbox, both of which I've heard good things about.
Where as Linux was always about racking dozens of unrelated library dependancies, (which got more and more out of date, and more and more difficult/tedious to maintain). All 'n all it was a headache to use.
All I can say to this is don't say the distro sucks because you didn't use the tools it provided for you. SuSE is a very comprehensive distro, and they provide just about everything that you could need, and all of it is installable through YaST which takes care of dependencies automatically. In the almost 3 years that I've been running SuSE the only time I've had to deal with a dependency issue was when I had to custom compile samba for a server I was building; two files weren't in the same place Red Hat puts them, I created symlinks and was on my way.
There's no reason why you would have to deal with dependecies under SuSE. They provide excellent tools for that job, and it's not their fault if you chose not to use them.
in a small or medium sized office, you're probably going to want full workstations for workers.
Why?
Seriously, why do they need full workstations? In my experience, putting a hard drive on a users desk causes more problems than it solves, and most of them begin with the users saving important documents to their C drive instead of to the fileserver. The only reason for workers to have full workstations is if they're running a bloated OS, which isn't the situation in Largo.
RedHat training costs more and is more comprehensive than MCS*, and it also lasts longer, because it teaches you system fundamentals instead of a flow-chart driven O/S template for a specific version of windows.
Well, there's also the issue that Red Hat doesn't completely shuffle around their admin interfaces with every version.
You have made a career on Slashdot of posting bullshit [slashdot.org] and insults [slashdot.org].
I've got the same thing at the school lab I have to do my VB.NET homework in. It's a new policy, though, up to about 2 weeks ago users could tweak all the display settings no problem. As an added bonus, certain machines are now no longer able to connect as "Debugger User", so I'm no longer able to use the fantastic debugger which is IMHO Visual Studio's only selling point (other than that it's the only DE that allows me to program in VB, but that's not something I'd do by choice).
I don't know where you've been for the last couple of months, but the next release is going to be 2.6, according to Linus.
I can only assume that the moderators that moderated this up are similarly misinformed, which is why I chose to reply rather than moderate this "Overrated" like it should be.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here is, you're browsing society at +5. The average 19th century house was built with the same surly, I-could-give-a-rat attitude that you find in many modern subcontractors. Or it was a bunch of logs thrown together, or even a construction based primarily on dirt. Not surprisingly, the average 19th century house is now rubble.
.5% of the US population speaks for itself. And as far as the quality of construction, I would like to see your plywood home last for 100+ years.
.5% can afford does speak for itself, but the only thing it says is that it happens to be in NYC.
No, I think not. The problem is you are a product of a school system that teachs that humans are inherently corrupt and that mediocrity is human nature, except when they submit to an authoritarian power which knows better than they do. You are obviously from a suburban part of the world and have probably never even been to a neighborhood which existed in the 1880's let alone the 1920's. Walk into the Brooklyn Historical Society, or come to a neighborhood known as Cobble Hill, which was even in the 1970's a working class neighborhood. You will find brick town houses of relatively spacious size that look much as they did 120 years ago. These same brick houses which were once the homes of shippers who worked at the Brooklyn docks now go to rich financiers for well over $1 million. Yes, I love in Brooklyn. I am not even going to bother finding you references on this, if you can't come to the nations pre-emininent city and learn a little history, a quote won't matter to you one bit.
Sorry, but it is you who are incorrect, and yes I do know what I'm talking about.
The town I have lived in my entire life is a "historic" community. Most of the buildings in the town date to the 1860's, including the house I lived in from ages 12-20, which is on a map of the town from 1864.
Yes, there are a lot of brick buildings downtown, I would say 80-90 percent off the top of my head. You know why? Because everything that wasn't brick burned down! Brick buildings have never been cheap to build, and so it is highly unlikely that a brick building would have been built to anything less than the highest standards of the day. Even today, bricklayers (and similar) command top dollar.
There are many wooden houses that remain as well, but mostly because it is a legal requirement (it is against the law to tear down a structure built before a certain date, and the owner is fined if it falls into disrepair). They are a nightmare to maintain, difficult and costly. Those that have survived were built to survive, and little else, and even that survival is largely the result of continuous maintenance and improvement, which is the only thing that makes them habitable by modern standards.
I'm sure that in the 19th century it was perfectly acceptable, maybe even desirable, to have practically no insulation. All those gas lamps probably made up for the inefficiency of the big open fireplaces nicely, and a high rate of air exchange probably kept the air breathable. If not for the quarter-inch gaps between the boards in their all wood walls they likely would have died of asphyxiation. Don't even get me started on the hacks used to get electricity, phone, and running water into these things.
Of course, these are the ones that survived. There are various towns in the area that didn't, and the only structures on those sites today a reconstructions built by the various historical societies in the area.
I do know a thing or two about construction, by the way. My dad has been a Contractor for 30 years, and I worked in construction for over ten years, mostly residential, including a few remodels of Victorian homes.
The houses you describe were generally the houses of the relatively wealthy. They would be the ones with the money to hire the best builders, and to maintain those houses properly. The amazing quality of the construction you're claiming is most likely a myth.
Relative to Africa? Yeah, maybe. But I think a dock worker who built a house now affordable only to the top
If properly maintained, as is the case with the vast majority of surviving Victorian structures, there is absolutely no reason why a modern home shouldn't last 100 years or more. Houses from the 1920-30's still survive, and that was definately a low point in terms of construction quality.
Your lack of understanding in this regard, however, is nothing compared to your lack of understanding of real estate value. My grandmother has been in real estate for 40 years, and she would be happy to inform you that quality of construction means only slightly more than dick in real estate. Really, there are only 3 important things: location, location, and location. This is why a crappy 1960s surf shack in Palo Alto sells for $500k.
Yeah, the fact that a dock worker could afford a house that now only the top
This is where you astonish me. Do you really think I would just spout this shit out of my ass?
That seems to be where everything else you've said has come from, why should I expect this to be any different.
Another great step in the forced schooling enslavement was an attempt to increase childhood, so as to rob the youth of their opportunity to organize and revolt. 20th century rebellious youth did precious little compared to the "adolescents" of the 19th century. They did great stuff like stage the French Revolution and the American Revolution.
If you think you would be better off fighting wars than doing whatever it is you are presently doing, be my guest. Please, run away and join the French Foreign Legion, if you think those kids had it so good!
Why do you think they use the term "rebellious" anyway?
Because that has been the word used to describe the characteristics of a rebel since the 15th century. "Rebel" comes from the Latin rebellis, from re- + bellum war, from Old Latin duellum, which has some rather obvious connections to modern words as well.
The word "rebellious" has no connection with the concept of youth, except in the modern, post WW2, usage.
12 year olds today are barely off their mother's tit, and are more concerned with toys that the glory of war. You my friend, are exactly the young man JP Morgan wanted. Someone unwilling and incapable of waging war. A true bitch, forever a slave to the system.
The average 12 year old of JP Morgan's day was already working in the factory, no schooling needed. For an alleged student of history, you seem to know surprisingly little about it. You think we're slaves to the system now? You know nothing of this era you claim to be such an expert on.
Nor did literacy always imply fluency. I've had reason to read over quite a few nineteenth century documents. These people were, to put it mildly, not a generation of Edgar Allen Poes. For every person who could dash off a clear, insightful set of coherent sentences, there were a dozen who could just barely get the point across. Don't tell me that any fifteen year old in the nineteenth century could write better than 99% of Slashdot, because reading their journals is *exactly* like reading Slashdot.*
As a student of history, and someone who has spent much time reading civil war letters, I could not disagree with you more. But given your overall ignorance of the entire century you have exhibited thus far, I will give you one last change for redemption. Perhaps you can give me an example of this poor writing, so I can see for myself.
I'll take the word of someone who has read letters and journals over the word of someone who has only read the letters. As the parent says, you're only reading the letters that were good enough to keep, and the journals (in my admitedly limited experience) show a much lower level of education. Even those, though, were written by those who had some amount of education. The average 12 year old today is much more fluent than then average 12 year old during the Civil War, who quite likely couldn't read at all.
The internet will teach your kids, but probably not anything you want them to know.
I agree with all your other points. While sports may have benefits, as other responses go into, the first priority of a school needs to be education. The sad truth is that education is being sacrificed for sports at many schools, and that's just not right.
I also have a 12 year old brother who has no problem with the Game Cube controllers, and he's small for his age. Actually, he hasn't had any difficulty with any of the controllers put out in the last 2-3 years. Same goes for my youngest sister, now 10.
As for a joystick, I was quite fond of the old $12 Raider-X joysticks. I think I got them at Radio Shack, but I could be wrong. The last joystick I bought there was a different design and it fell apart after maybe 4-5 months of daily Tie-Fighter, but those old ones were practically indestructable. Ugly as hell, too...
I was about to agree with you, but then it occured to me that the statement you're complaining about defines the difference between a suit and a geek. It has nothing to do with training or pigeonholing, but rather with base motivations.
A geek creates for primarily for personal enjoyment, profit is at best a secondary motivation. A geek in a suit is still a geek.
A suit creates primarily for profit. A suit in a ratty t-shirt is still a suit.
It has nothing to do with people reaching their full potential, it's just defining terms.
If someone tells a racist joke, are they not a racist regardless of if they were "just joking"?
My sister tells a lot of blonde jokes. Does that mean she hates blondes? I certainly hope not, since she is one. She also has a BS in Combined Sciences (medical focus), and is gaining some practical field experience, and paying off some debt, as a paramedic before she goes on to medical school. She thinks the blonde stereotype is funny, so she collects blonde jokes.
Similarly, most of the racist jokes I've heard have been told to me by people of the race the joke ridicules. Again, stereotypes are funny. Realizing that does not make me a racist.
And if you're hosting kiddie porn in Portugal, which is discovered in the course of a US investigation?
It has nothing to do with patriotism, but with documentation. The Wright brothers flight was well documented, as was their research surrounding it. No one had to do anything special, like digitally enhancing a film of the flight to read the date of the newspaper in some guys back pocket, to verify when and where it happened.
There are other Americans who claim to have flown before the Wrights, such as Lyman Gilmore, who claimed to have flown in 1902. Of course, the guy was nutty as a fruitcake, and the only reason he wasn't dismissed out of hand was that he actually invented stuff that worked. No one was ever found that could verify his claim, though, so he remains obscure.
If Newton's documentation hadn't been as good as it was, Leibniz would likely get all the credit for Calculus.
Agriculture is becoming automated quickly, especially irrigation. However, it simply isn't complex enough, nor does it need to be, to require IT personel.
It's a very tough market to sell to. The best pitch I've seen was basically "you can use this system to control irrigation automatically based on soil moisture and temperature", which is pretty damned cool if you're a farmer, but only requires a pentium that can boot Win95, and even that is only because the interface was written in VB.
It's slashdot math. You know, it's just like how 50+2-1=49
That's straight out of the Unix world. The standard is 3 bad login attempts and you're out.
Yeah, well, Dmitry Skylarov isn't an American, either.
Jon Johanson is not only not an American, but has likely never been to America, and lives in a country where reverse engineering is supposedly still legal.
I'm going to take a wild guess and say that kiddie porn, sedition, and terrorism are still illegal in Portugal, despite the relative scarcity of law enforcement. Even if they aren't illegal, or are but aren't enforced, there's still this little thing called "extradition". There aren't that many countries in the world that don't have extradition treaties with the US, and I don't recall Portugal being on that list.
If you think the US can't put enough pressure on your governemnt to get you if it's important to them, I'm going to guess that you haven't gone much past the government mandated education yourself.
Remember, the program Skylarov wrote is not only explicitly legal in Russia, but Russian law makes Adobe the criminals for limiting access to purchased works. That didn't stop the FBI from nabbing him though, did it?
2)NOTHING! There is nothing of value in my pc! Zero!
Your computer has no CPU? No Hard Drive? No internet access?
Those are the only things of value on the vast majority of computers that get hacked, but they are of value.
What if a hacker is using your machine to hack into something important, like the NSA or a Defense Contractor? Or, of course, there's the kiddie porn example already presented. Or maybe you'd like your computer to be a zombie for a DDOS attack or a spammer?
Most of those could get you any combination of: Computer confiscated as evidence (the computer itself is of value to you, right?), heafty fines, or jail time. In the kiddie porn example it doesn't stop there, either. You'll be in a sex offender database for the rest of your life, which means every time a child disappears you're a possible suspect, and as an added bonus every time you move you'll likely have to go around your new neighborhood and introduce yourself and your crimes. "Hi, I'm your new neighbor, eggstacy. I just moved in down the street, and I'm required by law to inform you that I'm a convicted sex offender." Fun for the whole family!
Oh, and they did mention that it doesn't matter whether you knew the kiddie porn was on your HDD or not, right?
If your controller just spontaneously lost it's configuration, it's a problem with the card. Call the manufacturer and get a replacement. If they will configure it for you before they send it (which shouldn't be difficult for them), you should be able to just swap it in and go.
You'll need to do something like this, since you won't be able to get at the data on the drives unless you can hook them up to a RAID controller that will recognize the particular flare code etc of your setup.
If you can stomach losing the data (you backed up the important stuff, right?) then you could try starting over from scratch, but I would not trust your RAID controller if I were you. Replace it or don't use it.
Metallica's response was not out of character at all. Their actions were all about control. Metallica is one of the very few groups who have managed to maintain control of their music despite standard industry practice, and that's very important to them.
It's unfortunate that Lars expressed himself so poorly. It wasn't that their songs were being traded that pissed them off, but that nobody bothered to ask them if it was OK! That the Napster folks were trying to make money off of it was salt in the wounds. If not for that, they might have overlooked the trading.
Lars has said that if anybody had bothered to ask him, he probably would have tried to work something out with them.
The last line of the source says "By VK". Obviously this can only refer to one person: Vince Klortho, Keymaster of Ghozzer!
Exactly what I was going to say. He had a modicum of credibility until he made that blatantly ignorant statement. I was even willing to let his confusion about who coined the term "viral lecense" slide until I read that.
The comment on the quality of MS support was really interesting, though, and he started to make some other good points, but failed to follow through. To bad he had to go and destroy his credibility like that, it might have become an interesting debate.
is it really fair to expect a refund for the OS when you buy a computer package?
Absolutely.
The OEM is selling the entire package, including the EULA that specifically states I'm entitled to a refund if I don't use the software that came installed on it, and they are very much aware of that fact.
All of your analogies are completely broken because none of those items come with a EULA that specifically says I am entitled to a refund.
When an OEM sells me a computer with Windows preinstalled, they are agreeing to the terms of the Microsoft EULA. When they refuse to give a refund, they are in breach of that contract. If they don't want to be bound by the terms of the Windows EULA, they can sell me a machine without Windows preinstalled on it, which is exactly what I wanted in the first place.
Is it fair for the OEM to expect me to be bound by the various contracts between us but not bound by them themselves?
You knew exactly what you were getting.
That's right, I know exactly that I'm getting a EULA which specifically entitles me to a refund for preinstalled software that I don't use.
Another reason that OEMs don't like to sell computers without an OS is because after the computer is built, they TEST it.
Dell has any given desktop PC in their possession for less than an hour, and their business model depends on that. The parts belong to their vendors until they hit the recieving dock, and the assembled PC belongs to the customer as soon as it hits the shipping dock, just under one hour later. Yeah, I'm sure they do plenty of testing! Any testing they do could be just as easily done by having the machine boot to a test CD that runs through whatever automated tests they run.
There is absolutely no reason why they need an OS installed on the HDD in order to test these machines.
why take the extra step when 95% will use that OS?
Because putting in a blank HDD takes no more extra time than dealing with any of the other custom options I might order (like, for example, a bigger HDD).
Well, one reason is that it seemed to crash more often than Windows. *20 second obligatory pause for laughter*
Anyway, the Linux Kernel is a brick house sure...but on top of that I was running X -> Enlightenment -> Netscape for most of my web browsing. Somewhere in those 3 layers(not the kernel) things just kept crashing. Usually once of twice a day the xserver would crash, and I'd be left back in console mode...typing startx again.
I had similar problems until I switched to WindowMaker. It's been about 6 months, and in that time I've only had Mozilla crash on me once and it didn't take anything else with it. Prior to that I was using KDE and having crashes all the time, which was particularly irritating since it would take my USB drivers with it, which made it quite difficult for me to recover from console with my USB keyboard.
Anyway, my conclusion is that the problem there is not the oft maligned X, but rather what you have running on top of it. In the last 6 months it has become quite clear to me that X does not at all deserve the bad reputation that it has. I'm guessing you were not running Enlightenment by itself, but rather over GNOME? I'll bet that GNOME was the problem. Try running Enlightenment without GNOME under it, or if that's how you were running it, try a different wm. One of the things I really like about Linux is that I can mix and match apps as I choose. I can be running WindowMaker and still use Konqueror whenever I like without having to take the KDE stability hit. I know the same is true for GNOME apps, and as long as Enlightenment is properly designed it should be true for those apps as well. WindowMaker isn't for everyone, so you might try icewm or blackbox, both of which I've heard good things about.
Where as Linux was always about racking dozens of unrelated library dependancies, (which got more and more out of date, and more and more difficult/tedious to maintain). All 'n all it was a headache to use.
All I can say to this is don't say the distro sucks because you didn't use the tools it provided for you. SuSE is a very comprehensive distro, and they provide just about everything that you could need, and all of it is installable through YaST which takes care of dependencies automatically. In the almost 3 years that I've been running SuSE the only time I've had to deal with a dependency issue was when I had to custom compile samba for a server I was building; two files weren't in the same place Red Hat puts them, I created symlinks and was on my way.
There's no reason why you would have to deal with dependecies under SuSE. They provide excellent tools for that job, and it's not their fault if you chose not to use them.
in a small or medium sized office, you're probably going to want full workstations for workers.
Why?
Seriously, why do they need full workstations? In my experience, putting a hard drive on a users desk causes more problems than it solves, and most of them begin with the users saving important documents to their C drive instead of to the fileserver. The only reason for workers to have full workstations is if they're running a bloated OS, which isn't the situation in Largo.
RedHat training costs more and is more comprehensive than MCS*, and it also lasts longer, because it teaches you system fundamentals instead of a flow-chart driven O/S template for a specific version of windows.
Well, there's also the issue that Red Hat doesn't completely shuffle around their admin interfaces with every version.
You have made a career on Slashdot of posting bullshit [slashdot.org] and insults [slashdot.org].
Are you sure you linked the right comments?
How exactly is one Progressive and Conservative at the same time? Is that the joke?
Ouch! The truth hurts!
Really, very well put.
I've got the same thing at the school lab I have to do my VB.NET homework in. It's a new policy, though, up to about 2 weeks ago users could tweak all the display settings no problem. As an added bonus, certain machines are now no longer able to connect as "Debugger User", so I'm no longer able to use the fantastic debugger which is IMHO Visual Studio's only selling point (other than that it's the only DE that allows me to program in VB, but that's not something I'd do by choice).
From what I've read in interviews since the recent cruise it's definately 2.6, and Linus didn't ever seriously consider calling it 3.0.
I don't know where you've been for the last couple of months, but the next release is going to be 2.6, according to Linus.
I can only assume that the moderators that moderated this up are similarly misinformed, which is why I chose to reply rather than moderate this "Overrated" like it should be.