Why the hell did you put him on Red Hat when you don't know anything about it? You should have put him on Debian if that's what you know.
Why are you doing everything for him instead of making him do it himself with your oversight, or just telling him to RTFM? How do you expect him to learn anything if you do everything for him? Buy him a good Linux book for christmas, or just teach him 'man'. Just because he's 13 doesn't mean he somehow has subhuman intelligence. He'll pick it up if that's what he needs to do to get what he wants.
What the hell are you talking about? Your comment makes very little sense at all.
This isn't a charity, or a church, or an after school thing. This is a BUSINESS and a former EMPLOYER, who laid him off 5 months ago. So now, suddenly, they're entitled to his services for free? Bullshit. There is no charitable obligation here! It's a professional relationship, and this guys ex-boss is abusing his good will by not offering payment for his services before he even asked for the favor.
Sorry, but any moral obligation lies squarely on the ex-boss here.
She didn't mind Linux when I was a newbie using KDE, but I found it a little too bloaty and unstable for my tastes so I switched to WindowMaker. She would probably like it if she took the time to learn it, but in her opinion one of the great advantages of being married to a geek is that she never has to worry about the computer, she can just sit down and use it and it will work, and Windows is what she knows.
Yeah, I could set her up with her own user account with a more familiar desktop, but then she would think I was trying to hide something from her.
On Windows I have installed OSS apps where possible. For the most part Mozilla covers all the wife's needs, since she pretty much just uses it for browsing and email. OpenOffice, PowerDVD, Nero, and Morrowind cover the rest of our Windows use.
Personally, I use Linux for everything except playing Morrowind and watching DVDs. DVDs I just haven't had the time to get working in Linux, and Morrowind taxes my system enough without the added overhead of WINE (assuming it runs on WINE at all, I haven't checked).
I am working toward the day when I can switch my wife over to Linux completely and my Windows partition will become nothing more than a dll repository for WINE.
Bigger does not mean better, and quite simply, TV resolution and refresh rate blows. That's the big thing that keeps me from getting into console gaming.
I was beginning to question that opinion recently, but then a couple weeks ago I played Halo at a friends house. It's a really good game, design wise, but the res/refresh kept on the edge of playable for me.
I'm not really an eye-candy junky, mind you. I generally play at 1024x768 at 16 bits. That gives me the detail level I want, and puts me in the 100+fps range for most first person shooters, which is my prefered genre. And yes, I can tell the difference with refresh rates up to around 90fps. Basically, that's the point where the default machinegun in Quake3 actually becomes a useful weapon.
What desktop/WM are you using? I used to think that X was slow and buggy as hell, too, until I ditched KDE for WindowMaker. It's blazing fast, elegant (IMO), and I haven't had a single lockup since I switched.
I agree that there are issues that the Linux graphical environment as a whole needs to overcome, but the all too common belief that X is to blame is simply wrong.
I've been using reiserfs exclusively since SuSE 7.1, and it's been great. I haven't had a single problem, even during power outages and such (no, I don't have a UPS).
That's about as annecdotal as it gets!
Anyway, I'm not going to recomend reiser over the others since I don't have any experience with them, but I will say that I've developed great confidence in reiser's reliability. If I had any old data that I really cared about and wanted to use the same drive, though, I would probably go with Ext3 for the non-destructive (or so I've heard) upgrade.
I used to get 20-50 days uptime regularly with Win98SE, back when I let it run 24/7. That was before I started downloading patches and such for it, though, which seems to have made it much less stable. I wonder if they do that on purpose, so people will be encouraged to upgrade for increased stability?
While these are both excellent suggestions, I would be a little wary of a road case. They're designed to protect equipment from shipping/roadies, and may not have adequate airflow. As a source of bracketry, though, they're an excellent choice.
I think I would probably hit the hardware store first, though. It'll likely be cheaper, and there will be a guy there who will tell you exactly what you need to do (asuming you adequately explain the problem to him). I've found that hardware store employees are some of the most helpful people in the world.
I signed up with a temp agency at the end of '99 and have worked through them for the majority of time since then. Honestly, the state of the economy hasn't really effected me that much. Yeah, companies are scrammbling to reduce headcount, but the work still needs to get done, and temps are expensed (meaning it's a cost hidden in with all the other costs, not something that's easily definable like payroll), so there's much less of a shareholder issue.
It's pretty dumb, really, since it's often more expensive to bring in a temp than it is to hire a regular employee, but it looks better on paper, and that's worked out well for me. I'd much rather have a regular job, to be perfectly honest, but I can appreciate the varied experience I'm getting, and I've yet to be out of work for more than a couple weeks a year.
Currently, I've got the next best thing to a regular job, and the cool thing is that my department manager actually planned it this way, since he really needed to hire another regular employee and his managers wouldn't let him; I'm a temp who is the sole holder (for the most part) of mission-critical knowledge. When they say "We can't extend his contract, we're laying off!" my manager can respond with "Do you want the work done or not?" It's a really strange position to be in, but nice at the same time.
Anyway, my advice to those of you who are having trouble finding work is: go sign up with a temp agency. There's nothing like having a dedicated team of professionals looking for work for you, especially in times like these. Another tip for those who decide to go that way: They work harder for people who want to work. If you call your temp agency every morning by 9am and ask them if they have anything for you, they will call you first if they get anything that's even vaguely near your field of expertise. Sometimes that presents some really interesting opportunities.
Ghostscript runs fine on Windows, and it isn't in any way a hack.
Hmmm, that wasn't the impression that I got when I was looking into it, but that was over a year ago. I might look into it again if I ever need to do that on Windows again. Thanks for the info.
there are so many C++ constructs not C++ should not be considered an "incremental improvement" anymore.
The ANSI C++ Standard, for example, is four times the size of the ANSI C Standard.
It was incrementally improved by extension, which is what I said if you read my entire comment. Naturally, a library or compiler that didn't include those extensions wouldn't work properly with source that required them. I don't think this invalidates my position in the slightest, and I'm not sure why one would expect otherwise.
Also, could you give an example of some valid C that isn't valid C++? I have yet to encounter any.
First of all, I was talking about TV, not broadband, since that's what the article is about.
Second, I got broadband for the same reasons you did, and I specifically chose DSL over Cable because of ATT's reputation (well earned, in my experience) for shitty customer service. My own personal experience with ATT has been so bad that if DSL were not available to me I still would not have gotten a Cable modem. I might have gotten ISDN, or I may have gone with Satalite if I could stomach the latency. More likely I would just annoyed my wife into letting me go to more LAN parties.
If your management is willing to give up MS Office/Outlook/IE on Windows in favor of, say OpenOffice/Mozilla on thin clients, then the TCO picture is much prettier than if they want to stick with MS on the desktop.
You simply haven't given enough information for anyone here to give you a real answer, likely because you don't have enough information yourself.
You need to sit down with your management and determine exactly what functionality you're going to replace with OSS and over what period they expect to realize the savings. At that point the questions are fairly simple: (1) does an OSS app exist which can fill this functional need, and (2) will the costs of retraining be less than the costs of licensing over the time period given to you?
If you have that info, then you can answer the question yourself. If you don't, all you're going to get is a muddle of lies, anecdotes, and resounding maybes.
* what the standards are * that the person who did the 'work' is the same person in front of you.
And you know these things WRT a non-online program how?
Someone who's going to cheat is going to cheat, regardless of the class medium. It's not like cheating was invented on the internet.
You know the standards, as well as who did the work, for an online course the same way you know it for any other type of course: by taking someones word for it. That's what accreditation is all about, and that's why the article specifically says "I'm not interested in something like University of Phoenix or one of the other schools like that".
So what you're saying is that a good Masters degree program is based on communication.
The internet is, primarily, a communication medium.
So, where exactly is the conflict here?
For the record, I used to scoff at Online courses as well. Now that I've taken one, though, I have to say there is potential for an online course to be much better than a "physical presence" course. Obviously that depends greatly on the instructor, but a poor instructor is not a problem that will be avoided simply by being in the same room with them. In fact, physical presence could easily exacerbate the problem, since online discussion (via newsgroups, chat, IM, IRC, mailing lists, whatever) facilitates in depth discussion much more than oral communication does.
I think it's much simpler than that, and it's pretty clearly stated above.
Microsoft has demonstarted that it wants to own DRM. Sony and Philips have acted defensively to prevent MS from owning DRM completely.
Thomson (parent of Philips) makes most of its money from patents. The example given in a recent Thomson company newsletter was a DVD player: Most manufacturers get a net profit of about $2 per unit, whereas Thomson makes about $5 per unit in patent royalties, or $7 if they actually make it themselves. (When I say Thomson, I also mean (judging from experience and evidence available on the company store site) Philips, RCA, and GE.)
It does seem, from recent articles, that Thomson/Philips is as pro-consumer, at least WRT DRM, as one could expect from a giant corporation. It's important to realize that they produce equipment involved in all phases of content production, delivery, and consumption, so where they will end up on these issues eventually is hard to say. They are not a content company, though, so it is profitable for them to be able to offer the consumer as much flexibility as possible. People want to be able to use the stuff they buy, and are willing to pay for that, we just aren't willing to pay the inflated prices the content companies are asking.
Disclaimer (if you haven't already guessed): I am currently employed (contract) at Thomson Grass Valley, where I service Philips broadcast equipment (which is being rebranded as Thomson MultiMedia, if you care).
There are all sorts of ways to create PDFs on Linux, usually via Ghostscript. For Windows, though, last time I looked there was Distiller and that was about it. I saw rumors that you could hack Ghostscript to run on Windows, but I was never able to find any reliable information in that regard.
Summary: yes there are free PDF tools, but not for Windows.
In my experience, Distiller is OK, but can be difficult to work with. There is a better way, which is included with the full version of Acrobat, which allows you to print to PDF. It uses a dummy postscript printer (you have to have a postscript printer driver installed) and then converts the postscript to PDF, which introduces a lot less errors than Distiller does. I believe that's what is done with Ghostscript, which is actually a postscript tool.
Distiller is usually fine for text documents, but generally sucks for things like CAD drawings, which comprises most of my PDF experience. It's probably worth it to spring the $250 for the full version of Acrobat, especially if you can just set it up on one machine as a shared printer (never tried it, so I don't know if it can be done). If you're looking at buying a license for every workstation, though, you probably want to at least look into the Ghostscript thing.
I definately agree about RTF for text documents, but PDF does more than just text.
I have to disagree. Every assembly instruction directly maps to a machine code instruction, so there is absolutely nothing hidden or being done behind the scenes.
Assembly is just mnemonics for machine code. There is no abstraction in assembly since it doesn't hide anything, it simply makes it easier for humans to read through direct substitution. You might as well say that binary is an abstraction; you'd be equally correct.
Also, there is no such thing as an "assembly compiler". There are assemblers, which are not compilers.
There is a common misconception that permeates your statement. C++ is not a seperate language from C, it is merely an incremental improvement, an add-on basically. That's why it's called C++ and not D (and yes, the name is an intentional joke).
So, "backwards compatability" is really the wrong term, since C++ is just an extension of C, not a seperate language.
If you're curious, yes, there was a B, but there was not actually an A (or rather, there was, but it was called ALGOL).
PayPal is what happened to digital cash. They're the best (only?) option out there for micropayments and such, but I've heard enough PayPal horror stories that I'm not about to trust them with my money.
Maybe if a bank comes up with a viable micropayment method, or maybe if PayPal admits that they are acting as a bank and submit to regulation, then maybe digital cash will happen. It's all about trust, and nobody trustworthy is making digital cash happen.
Even for those of us where cable is available Satalite is the only way to go, since cable company service tends to be, at best, unresponsive. I know plenty of people who have decided to pay extra to DircTV for local channels just so they wouldn't have to deal with AT&T "customer service" anymore.
Re:WinTV PVR is like this, but...
on
Review: EyeTV
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· Score: 2
High quality MPEG encoding can't be done in real time.
Yes it can, and it has been done for a few years on a regular basis. Perhaps you mean it can't be done on a home system, and that's true. Don't say it can't be done, though, because I've got several machines converting video to 50Mbps MPEG in realtime in the room with me at this very moment.
Slashdot Mirror
You have no one to blame but yourself.
Why the hell did you put him on Red Hat when you don't know anything about it? You should have put him on Debian if that's what you know.
Why are you doing everything for him instead of making him do it himself with your oversight, or just telling him to RTFM? How do you expect him to learn anything if you do everything for him? Buy him a good Linux book for christmas, or just teach him 'man'. Just because he's 13 doesn't mean he somehow has subhuman intelligence. He'll pick it up if that's what he needs to do to get what he wants.
What the hell are you talking about? Your comment makes very little sense at all.
This isn't a charity, or a church, or an after school thing. This is a BUSINESS and a former EMPLOYER, who laid him off 5 months ago. So now, suddenly, they're entitled to his services for free? Bullshit. There is no charitable obligation here! It's a professional relationship, and this guys ex-boss is abusing his good will by not offering payment for his services before he even asked for the favor.
Sorry, but any moral obligation lies squarely on the ex-boss here.
She didn't mind Linux when I was a newbie using KDE, but I found it a little too bloaty and unstable for my tastes so I switched to WindowMaker. She would probably like it if she took the time to learn it, but in her opinion one of the great advantages of being married to a geek is that she never has to worry about the computer, she can just sit down and use it and it will work, and Windows is what she knows.
Yeah, I could set her up with her own user account with a more familiar desktop, but then she would think I was trying to hide something from her.
On Windows I have installed OSS apps where possible. For the most part Mozilla covers all the wife's needs, since she pretty much just uses it for browsing and email. OpenOffice, PowerDVD, Nero, and Morrowind cover the rest of our Windows use.
Personally, I use Linux for everything except playing Morrowind and watching DVDs. DVDs I just haven't had the time to get working in Linux, and Morrowind taxes my system enough without the added overhead of WINE (assuming it runs on WINE at all, I haven't checked).
I am working toward the day when I can switch my wife over to Linux completely and my Windows partition will become nothing more than a dll repository for WINE.
Graphics.
Bigger does not mean better, and quite simply, TV resolution and refresh rate blows. That's the big thing that keeps me from getting into console gaming.
I was beginning to question that opinion recently, but then a couple weeks ago I played Halo at a friends house. It's a really good game, design wise, but the res/refresh kept on the edge of playable for me.
I'm not really an eye-candy junky, mind you. I generally play at 1024x768 at 16 bits. That gives me the detail level I want, and puts me in the 100+fps range for most first person shooters, which is my prefered genre. And yes, I can tell the difference with refresh rates up to around 90fps. Basically, that's the point where the default machinegun in Quake3 actually becomes a useful weapon.
What desktop/WM are you using? I used to think that X was slow and buggy as hell, too, until I ditched KDE for WindowMaker. It's blazing fast, elegant (IMO), and I haven't had a single lockup since I switched.
I agree that there are issues that the Linux graphical environment as a whole needs to overcome, but the all too common belief that X is to blame is simply wrong.
I've been using reiserfs exclusively since SuSE 7.1, and it's been great. I haven't had a single problem, even during power outages and such (no, I don't have a UPS).
That's about as annecdotal as it gets!
Anyway, I'm not going to recomend reiser over the others since I don't have any experience with them, but I will say that I've developed great confidence in reiser's reliability. If I had any old data that I really cared about and wanted to use the same drive, though, I would probably go with Ext3 for the non-destructive (or so I've heard) upgrade.
I used to get 20-50 days uptime regularly with Win98SE, back when I let it run 24/7. That was before I started downloading patches and such for it, though, which seems to have made it much less stable. I wonder if they do that on purpose, so people will be encouraged to upgrade for increased stability?
While these are both excellent suggestions, I would be a little wary of a road case. They're designed to protect equipment from shipping/roadies, and may not have adequate airflow. As a source of bracketry, though, they're an excellent choice.
I think I would probably hit the hardware store first, though. It'll likely be cheaper, and there will be a guy there who will tell you exactly what you need to do (asuming you adequately explain the problem to him). I've found that hardware store employees are some of the most helpful people in the world.
I signed up with a temp agency at the end of '99 and have worked through them for the majority of time since then. Honestly, the state of the economy hasn't really effected me that much. Yeah, companies are scrammbling to reduce headcount, but the work still needs to get done, and temps are expensed (meaning it's a cost hidden in with all the other costs, not something that's easily definable like payroll), so there's much less of a shareholder issue.
It's pretty dumb, really, since it's often more expensive to bring in a temp than it is to hire a regular employee, but it looks better on paper, and that's worked out well for me. I'd much rather have a regular job, to be perfectly honest, but I can appreciate the varied experience I'm getting, and I've yet to be out of work for more than a couple weeks a year.
Currently, I've got the next best thing to a regular job, and the cool thing is that my department manager actually planned it this way, since he really needed to hire another regular employee and his managers wouldn't let him; I'm a temp who is the sole holder (for the most part) of mission-critical knowledge. When they say "We can't extend his contract, we're laying off!" my manager can respond with "Do you want the work done or not?" It's a really strange position to be in, but nice at the same time.
Anyway, my advice to those of you who are having trouble finding work is: go sign up with a temp agency. There's nothing like having a dedicated team of professionals looking for work for you, especially in times like these. Another tip for those who decide to go that way: They work harder for people who want to work. If you call your temp agency every morning by 9am and ask them if they have anything for you, they will call you first if they get anything that's even vaguely near your field of expertise. Sometimes that presents some really interesting opportunities.
Ghostscript runs fine on Windows, and it isn't in any way a hack.
Hmmm, that wasn't the impression that I got when I was looking into it, but that was over a year ago. I might look into it again if I ever need to do that on Windows again. Thanks for the info.
there are so many C++ constructs not C++ should not be considered an "incremental improvement" anymore.
The ANSI C++ Standard, for example, is four times the size of the ANSI C Standard.
It was incrementally improved by extension, which is what I said if you read my entire comment. Naturally, a library or compiler that didn't include those extensions wouldn't work properly with source that required them. I don't think this invalidates my position in the slightest, and I'm not sure why one would expect otherwise.
Also, could you give an example of some valid C that isn't valid C++? I have yet to encounter any.
First of all, I was talking about TV, not broadband, since that's what the article is about.
Second, I got broadband for the same reasons you did, and I specifically chose DSL over Cable because of ATT's reputation (well earned, in my experience) for shitty customer service. My own personal experience with ATT has been so bad that if DSL were not available to me I still would not have gotten a Cable modem. I might have gotten ISDN, or I may have gone with Satalite if I could stomach the latency. More likely I would just annoyed my wife into letting me go to more LAN parties.
A meter long, and almost as tall and wide...there are definitely some serious questions remaining there
Yeah, like "how does it get through doors?"
If your management is willing to give up MS Office/Outlook/IE on Windows in favor of, say OpenOffice/Mozilla on thin clients, then the TCO picture is much prettier than if they want to stick with MS on the desktop.
You simply haven't given enough information for anyone here to give you a real answer, likely because you don't have enough information yourself.
You need to sit down with your management and determine exactly what functionality you're going to replace with OSS and over what period they expect to realize the savings. At that point the questions are fairly simple: (1) does an OSS app exist which can fill this functional need, and (2) will the costs of retraining be less than the costs of licensing over the time period given to you?
If you have that info, then you can answer the question yourself. If you don't, all you're going to get is a muddle of lies, anecdotes, and resounding maybes.
I suggest people contact their representatives to cancel the DMCA instead.
And how exactly do you intend for them to do that without introducing another bill?
Perhaps you should take some time to actually learn how the American legal system works before you start telling people how to operate within it.
You do not know
* what the standards are
* that the person who did the 'work' is the same person in front of you.
And you know these things WRT a non-online program how?
Someone who's going to cheat is going to cheat, regardless of the class medium. It's not like cheating was invented on the internet.
You know the standards, as well as who did the work, for an online course the same way you know it for any other type of course: by taking someones word for it. That's what accreditation is all about, and that's why the article specifically says "I'm not interested in something like University of Phoenix or one of the other schools like that".
So what you're saying is that a good Masters degree program is based on communication.
The internet is, primarily, a communication medium.
So, where exactly is the conflict here?
For the record, I used to scoff at Online courses as well. Now that I've taken one, though, I have to say there is potential for an online course to be much better than a "physical presence" course. Obviously that depends greatly on the instructor, but a poor instructor is not a problem that will be avoided simply by being in the same room with them. In fact, physical presence could easily exacerbate the problem, since online discussion (via newsgroups, chat, IM, IRC, mailing lists, whatever) facilitates in depth discussion much more than oral communication does.
I think it's much simpler than that, and it's pretty clearly stated above.
Microsoft has demonstarted that it wants to own DRM. Sony and Philips have acted defensively to prevent MS from owning DRM completely.
Thomson (parent of Philips) makes most of its money from patents. The example given in a recent Thomson company newsletter was a DVD player: Most manufacturers get a net profit of about $2 per unit, whereas Thomson makes about $5 per unit in patent royalties, or $7 if they actually make it themselves. (When I say Thomson, I also mean (judging from experience and evidence available on the company store site) Philips, RCA, and GE.)
It does seem, from recent articles, that Thomson/Philips is as pro-consumer, at least WRT DRM, as one could expect from a giant corporation. It's important to realize that they produce equipment involved in all phases of content production, delivery, and consumption, so where they will end up on these issues eventually is hard to say. They are not a content company, though, so it is profitable for them to be able to offer the consumer as much flexibility as possible. People want to be able to use the stuff they buy, and are willing to pay for that, we just aren't willing to pay the inflated prices the content companies are asking.
Disclaimer (if you haven't already guessed): I am currently employed (contract) at Thomson Grass Valley, where I service Philips broadcast equipment (which is being rebranded as Thomson MultiMedia, if you care).
There are all sorts of ways to create PDFs on Linux, usually via Ghostscript. For Windows, though, last time I looked there was Distiller and that was about it. I saw rumors that you could hack Ghostscript to run on Windows, but I was never able to find any reliable information in that regard.
Summary: yes there are free PDF tools, but not for Windows.
In my experience, Distiller is OK, but can be difficult to work with. There is a better way, which is included with the full version of Acrobat, which allows you to print to PDF. It uses a dummy postscript printer (you have to have a postscript printer driver installed) and then converts the postscript to PDF, which introduces a lot less errors than Distiller does. I believe that's what is done with Ghostscript, which is actually a postscript tool.
Distiller is usually fine for text documents, but generally sucks for things like CAD drawings, which comprises most of my PDF experience. It's probably worth it to spring the $250 for the full version of Acrobat, especially if you can just set it up on one machine as a shared printer (never tried it, so I don't know if it can be done). If you're looking at buying a license for every workstation, though, you probably want to at least look into the Ghostscript thing.
I definately agree about RTF for text documents, but PDF does more than just text.
even assembler is an abstraction
I have to disagree. Every assembly instruction directly maps to a machine code instruction, so there is absolutely nothing hidden or being done behind the scenes.
Assembly is just mnemonics for machine code. There is no abstraction in assembly since it doesn't hide anything, it simply makes it easier for humans to read through direct substitution. You might as well say that binary is an abstraction; you'd be equally correct.
Also, there is no such thing as an "assembly compiler". There are assemblers, which are not compilers.
That is exactly right, but for the wrong reasons.
There is a common misconception that permeates your statement. C++ is not a seperate language from C, it is merely an incremental improvement, an add-on basically. That's why it's called C++ and not D (and yes, the name is an intentional joke).
So, "backwards compatability" is really the wrong term, since C++ is just an extension of C, not a seperate language.
If you're curious, yes, there was a B, but there was not actually an A (or rather, there was, but it was called ALGOL).
PayPal is what happened to digital cash. They're the best (only?) option out there for micropayments and such, but I've heard enough PayPal horror stories that I'm not about to trust them with my money.
Maybe if a bank comes up with a viable micropayment method, or maybe if PayPal admits that they are acting as a bank and submit to regulation, then maybe digital cash will happen. It's all about trust, and nobody trustworthy is making digital cash happen.
Even for those of us where cable is available Satalite is the only way to go, since cable company service tends to be, at best, unresponsive. I know plenty of people who have decided to pay extra to DircTV for local channels just so they wouldn't have to deal with AT&T "customer service" anymore.
High quality MPEG encoding can't be done in real time.
Yes it can, and it has been done for a few years on a regular basis. Perhaps you mean it can't be done on a home system, and that's true. Don't say it can't be done, though, because I've got several machines converting video to 50Mbps MPEG in realtime in the room with me at this very moment.
A security advisement regarding telnet and rlogin does seem kind of redundant, doesn't it?