I only read the first page, but this looked like a rant rather than a useful article. What sound card are we talking about? Something ancient and off the charts? Something really new with W95 drivers? Something Linux developers can't get specs for but comes with W95 drivers? What?
This isn't quite down to Wonkette's standards, but he seems to be trying.
Anyone who uses the words "Wonkette" and "journalism" or "integrity" or "accuracy" in the same sentence (other than one like this) must have lost their mind with their money in the dot bomb crash.
Once again, the NYT shows us just how foolish it is to mix drugs and newspaper publishing.
This was pretty much my experience. Both my children started out on Linux, but this was before there was a GNOME desktop. I gave them an easy to use environment based on a very customized tvtwm and.xinitrc.
Years later, as teenagers, they mad ethe switch to GNOME with no trouble. I'm sure KDE would have been as easy for them.
My wife, who loathes computers, has learned to use Linux as easily as Windows. She detests them both equally. 8^)
Once upon a time, it took a fair bit of work to make any *nix easily usable by those not coversant with *nix. Today it's every bit as easy as Windows. Some things are easier, and some harder. But speaking both as the goto guy at home and the IT manager of a 350+ system network running Linux, MacOS, Solaris, W2K and XP, and occasionally HP-UX, Linux is doing at least as well as anything else (with some Mac exceptions) on the user front, and as good as anything from the computer and network management perspective.
Let's see, we have two leading theories of how we got here, both of which assume we are better developed in most areas of mental activity than animals such as chimps.
So, either way, it seems rather silly.
If we really think this is a good idea, I vote we cut to the chase, and learn to communicate like, say, ticks. You don't mind if I bite you and squeeze ny head in under your epidermis, do you? That's how I communicate, "Hey! I'm surviving! And you have Lyme's disease now!"
... that we again had a "vibrant open source community around X Window System innovation".
We've had some innovation, but it was definitely slowing down. But vibrant community? More of a dysfunctional family. (Not that everyone was dysfunctional, by a long shot, but the leadership mix clearly wasn't working.) Having the sole focus be the PC community always worried me, too. (Yeah, I know it's the largets by orders of magnitude, but the cross-platform expertise and disciplines have a lot to offer.)
In the early days, anyone who wanted to contribute did, and it all worked rather well. X was one of the first *major* open source projects to really take off. I, for one, am glad to see it back in a form that has a chance to really start kicking some proprietary booty again.
For a while, 911 was the only number you could even *find* for some police/sherriff departments. That could be a chicken and egg situation, but nevertheless, it existed.
They haven't done a very good job around central Texas of telling folks about 311, either. Most people seem to find out by accident...
I miss my motorcycle. What I don't miss is having to worry about electronics in my tank bag or pack getting wet or dropped. I hope to have a new bike soon; at that point, one of these would be handy.
When you ride a bike, everything you take with you really should be waterproof, bulletproof, etc.
If it will relaly interoperate with the MicroSoft defacto standard formats as well as the OS world standards, and if the price is reasonable, and they can make it work on the version of Linux we run, we'll buy it. And it needs to replace the Outlook stuff, too.
With that and a rock solid, reasonably complete (meaning the vast majority of functionality) project management product that reads and writes MSProject files, I could dispense with Microsoft on all but a handful of specialized systems.
He gets arrested for not paying his taxes. This solves his room and board problem, at any rate.
I am a trained professional...
on
Death by Coffee?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
When I was working 80 - 100 hour weeks for months on end (averaging 4 hours of sleep a night), caffeine was a requirement to function. I got to the point I was drinking 4 pots a day - 40 cups. After a couple of *years* of this, my body was so dependent on caffeine that when I went on vacation and cut my coffee dosage to 2 cups a day, I literally couldn't even take a dump.
But it wasn't anywhere close to killing me, as far as I can tell, unless you count exploding in a nasty, stinking mess had I gone cold turkey from coffee.
Jagostini nailed it. Sometimes packages aren't available from sources I can trust. Simple as that.
For the record, we have 225 or so Linux systems in a production environment, about 80% servers. Another 20 Solaris servers. We're interested in security, reliability, maintainability and uptime. I'd assume the professor is interested in the same issues. 8^/
I agree. What the professor wants is a readily supportable, production environment, and tat's what you should supply. That means packages wherever possible. IFF there is a clear need, build from source- a 5% speed optimization may not be worth it (that's the prof's call). A 50% speed improvement (unlikely, but possible) would probably be worth it (prof's call). Otherwise, I'd only build from source when there was not a trustworthy package available, or to add features, fix bugs, etc.
I've been in both your and the prof's position, and this is generally the best bet. It'll make the prof's life a lot easier when you're gone, too.
Then I would suggest that you have no idea what the term, "entrenched culture", means in this case. "Miltary-industrial complex" has become pretty much just a buzzword, but it fits this situation.
Trying to buck such behemoths can be like trying to push a small neutron star up Mt. Everest. In your boxers. It's not for the faint of heart, and even then, the odds are low you'll even get started.
The really cool part is that the military is helping do an end-run around the MIC (k e y - m o u s e)...
They should have kept it similar to PayPal. Like SPaceBuddy. Then they could have Saturday morning cartons, and sell lots of plush toys and action figures and DVDs, maybe make some movies. Lots of parents buy their kids all the latest fad garbage, anyway; let them help fund the future!
``No, mom! I NEED that SpaceBuddy! I don't have them all now!''
Re:Ayn Rand strikes again
on
Free Culture
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· Score: 1
``Why don't we have a national black-out day? One where no one gets on the net for 24 hours!''
Millions of geeks in withdrawal, foaming at the mouth...
``Nobody answers the phone.''
Tens of millions of anxious teenagers in withdrawal...
My daughter, who grew up on vi, abiword, gnumeric and SO/OO, spent over a year interning at a non-profit organization with at leats a thousand users, and hundreds of computers. They had older versions of Office. They didn't have the money or inclination to upgrade. They'd considered switching to Linux, but didn't want to retrain users all the time (they have several hundred new interns a year, plus shorter term help more frequently).
She introduced them to AbiWord, Gnumeric and OpenOffice. WIthin two weeks, they had completely switched to OO. The IT department loved her after that, and I thought a couple of them were going to kiss me when I met them. They have far less problems with OpenOffice than they had with MSOffice. User training hasn't been an issue!
They interchange documents with people all over the world. Occasionally they have to ask someone to regenerate something with an older format, but overall they are as happy as the proverbial clams.
My favorite bits in the MSO/OO "comparison" document were:
In the OO features they listed database user tools, but later stated that OO included no database client support. Say what?
A user may incur additional costs by having to buy a mail client. Even if one can't get by using Mozilla or one of the other free mail clients, there are several good, solid solutions for a lot less than the cost of MS Office!
Wow. While I've always like the Macs, I've never tried to build much of my career on them. And yet, between hobby and career, I have used nearly every version that saw the light of day, and read voraciously about the others.
A couple of tidbits he left off.
Secure A/UX. I forget what it was called, but a DOD-compliant (I forget the Orange Book classification) version of A/UX was developed by an Atlanta company called SecureWare, later bought by HP. It was one of the first (if not the first) Unix variant to get that classification.
X11 for NEXTSTEP. An Austin company called Pencom Software (later PSW Technologies) developed a version of X11 for NEXTSTEP, called co-Xist. It was never blindingly fast, but then a lot of things were that way on NeXT platforms. As more of the server was ported to a lower level, performance got better. Steve Jobs hated X11. It didn't fit in with his vision of the "perfect OS". I suspect he felt it sullied his beloved DPS. So NeXT never was interested in bundling co-Xist with NS. (There were a couple of other NS X companies as well, but co-Xist was the better product in my admittedly biase view. 8^)
Alas, the only Mac I personally own is a dead one I keep in my cube for visitors to sit on. No idea what the OS is on it, but the rounded top is more comfy than the typical, flat PC. 8^)
Slashdot Mirror
Would it be a good tool for pub;lishing a 75 page book with some photos in the middle?
...Silly Putty , but presumably it's hard to impregnate Kevlar with it.
I really don't want to know how this works.
Don't tell the military! They'll really be annoyed they wasted all that money when they could have just used cornstarch.
I only read the first page, but this looked like a rant rather than a useful article. What sound card are we talking about? Something ancient and off the charts? Something really new with W95 drivers? Something Linux developers can't get specs for but comes with W95 drivers? What?
This isn't quite down to Wonkette's standards, but he seems to be trying.
Anyone who uses the words "Wonkette" and "journalism" or "integrity" or "accuracy" in the same sentence (other than one like this) must have lost their mind with their money in the dot bomb crash.
Once again, the NYT shows us just how foolish it is to mix drugs and newspaper publishing.
This was pretty much my experience. Both my children started out on Linux, but this was before there was a GNOME desktop. I gave them an easy to use environment based on a very customized tvtwm and .xinitrc.
Years later, as teenagers, they mad ethe switch to GNOME with no trouble. I'm sure KDE would have been as easy for them.
My wife, who loathes computers, has learned to use Linux as easily as Windows. She detests them both equally. 8^)
Once upon a time, it took a fair bit of work to make any *nix easily usable by those not coversant with *nix. Today it's every bit as easy as Windows. Some things are easier, and some harder. But speaking both as the goto guy at home and the IT manager of a 350+ system network running Linux, MacOS, Solaris, W2K and XP, and occasionally HP-UX, Linux is doing at least as well as anything else (with some Mac exceptions) on the user front, and as good as anything from the computer and network management perspective.
Let's see, we have two leading theories of how we got here, both of which assume we are better developed in most areas of mental activity than animals such as chimps.
So, either way, it seems rather silly.
If we really think this is a good idea, I vote we cut to the chase, and learn to communicate like, say, ticks. You don't mind if I bite you and squeeze ny head in under your epidermis, do you? That's how I communicate, "Hey! I'm surviving! And you have Lyme's disease now!"
... that we again had a "vibrant open source community around X Window System innovation".
We've had some innovation, but it was definitely slowing down. But vibrant community? More of a dysfunctional family. (Not that everyone was dysfunctional, by a long shot, but the leadership mix clearly wasn't working.) Having the sole focus be the PC community always worried me, too. (Yeah, I know it's the largets by orders of magnitude, but the cross-platform expertise and disciplines have a lot to offer.)
In the early days, anyone who wanted to contribute did, and it all worked rather well. X was one of the first *major* open source projects to really take off. I, for one, am glad to see it back in a form that has a chance to really start kicking some proprietary booty again.
For a while, 911 was the only number you could even *find* for some police/sherriff departments. That could be a chicken and egg situation, but nevertheless, it existed.
They haven't done a very good job around central Texas of telling folks about 311, either. Most people seem to find out by accident...
I miss my motorcycle. What I don't miss is having to worry about electronics in my tank bag or pack getting wet or dropped. I hope to have a new bike soon; at that point, one of these would be handy.
When you ride a bike, everything you take with you really should be waterproof, bulletproof, etc.
If it will relaly interoperate with the MicroSoft defacto standard formats as well as the OS world standards, and if the price is reasonable, and they can make it work on the version of Linux we run, we'll buy it. And it needs to replace the Outlook stuff, too.
With that and a rock solid, reasonably complete (meaning the vast majority of functionality) project management product that reads and writes MSProject files, I could dispense with Microsoft on all but a handful of specialized systems.
My life as IT Manager would get a lot easier.
I thought VD already was open source.
(As well as open sores.)
He gets arrested for not paying his taxes. This solves his room and board problem, at any rate.
When I was working 80 - 100 hour weeks for months on end (averaging 4 hours of sleep a night), caffeine was a requirement to function. I got to the point I was drinking 4 pots a day - 40 cups. After a couple of *years* of this, my body was so dependent on caffeine that when I went on vacation and cut my coffee dosage to 2 cups a day, I literally couldn't even take a dump.
But it wasn't anywhere close to killing me, as far as I can tell, unless you count exploding in a nasty, stinking mess had I gone cold turkey from coffee.
And no, this is not an April Fools joke!
Jagostini nailed it. Sometimes packages aren't available from sources I can trust. Simple as that.
For the record, we have 225 or so Linux systems in a production environment, about 80% servers. Another 20 Solaris servers. We're interested in security, reliability, maintainability and uptime. I'd assume the professor is interested in the same issues. 8^/
I agree. What the professor wants is a readily supportable, production environment, and tat's what you should supply. That means packages wherever possible. IFF there is a clear need, build from source- a 5% speed optimization may not be worth it (that's the prof's call). A 50% speed improvement (unlikely, but possible) would probably be worth it (prof's call). Otherwise, I'd only build from source when there was not a trustworthy package available, or to add features, fix bugs, etc.
I've been in both your and the prof's position, and this is generally the best bet. It'll make the prof's life a lot easier when you're gone, too.
Then I would suggest that you have no idea what the term, "entrenched culture", means in this case. "Miltary-industrial complex" has become pretty much just a buzzword, but it fits this situation.
Trying to buck such behemoths can be like trying to push a small neutron star up Mt. Everest. In your boxers. It's not for the faint of heart, and even then, the odds are low you'll even get started.
The really cool part is that the military is helping do an end-run around the MIC (k e y - m o u s e)...
And I wonder how much the Repo Man got paid for hauling that off...
They should have kept it similar to PayPal. Like SPaceBuddy. Then they could have Saturday morning cartons, and sell lots of plush toys and action figures and DVDs, maybe make some movies. Lots of parents buy their kids all the latest fad garbage, anyway; let them help fund the future!
``No, mom! I NEED that SpaceBuddy! I don't have them all now!''
``Why don't we have a national black-out day? One where no one gets on the net for 24 hours!''
Millions of geeks in withdrawal, foaming at the mouth...
``Nobody answers the phone.''
Tens of millions of anxious teenagers in withdrawal...
Scaring big business? You're terrifying me!
She introduced them to AbiWord, Gnumeric and OpenOffice. WIthin two weeks, they had completely switched to OO. The IT department loved her after that, and I thought a couple of them were going to kiss me when I met them. They have far less problems with OpenOffice than they had with MSOffice. User training hasn't been an issue!
They interchange documents with people all over the world. Occasionally they have to ask someone to regenerate something with an older format, but overall they are as happy as the proverbial clams.
My favorite bits in the MSO/OO "comparison" document were:
So, how long til Jackie Chan fights one?
Wow. While I've always like the Macs, I've never tried to build much of my career on them. And yet, between hobby and career, I have used nearly every version that saw the light of day, and read voraciously about the others.
A couple of tidbits he left off.
Secure A/UX. I forget what it was called, but a DOD-compliant (I forget the Orange Book classification) version of A/UX was developed by an Atlanta company called SecureWare, later bought by HP. It was one of the first (if not the first) Unix variant to get that classification.
X11 for NEXTSTEP. An Austin company called Pencom Software (later PSW Technologies) developed a version of X11 for NEXTSTEP, called co-Xist. It was never blindingly fast, but then a lot of things were that way on NeXT platforms. As more of the server was ported to a lower level, performance got better. Steve Jobs hated X11. It didn't fit in with his vision of the "perfect OS". I suspect he felt it sullied his beloved DPS. So NeXT never was interested in bundling co-Xist with NS. (There were a couple of other NS X companies as well, but co-Xist was the better product in my admittedly biase view. 8^)
Alas, the only Mac I personally own is a dead one I keep in my cube for visitors to sit on. No idea what the OS is on it, but the rounded top is more comfy than the typical, flat PC. 8^)
Bill bought the digital rights to every possible movie title a few years back.