How do you guys handle the GPS thing? I mean I really can't see a way of making a system that could tell the difference between driving through a tunnel/parking inside and wrapping a tin foil bag around the antennae.
From a quick reading he does hand wave quite a bit. Anything that's not a full scale commercial enterprise doesn't exist and never will.... research is pointless. For the uranium from seawater thing he talks about the cost of the experiment rather than any kind of estimated costs of large scale extraction.
It seems to boil down to "we're not getting much uranium out of the ground right now while prices are low and we have massive stockpiles keeping prices low.... hence somehow people won't start mining more as the price of uranium goes up again....."
first thing I tried. made it so I could see the network but actually connecting seems to be beyond it.
You can't blame Ubuntu or Linux in general for something like that.
blaming isn't the issue.the issue is that it just doesn't work. I'm a programmer, I like messing around with drivers, working out what's wrong with things etc but it's like a car which needs a mechanic to drive it. You can complain that the roads aren't smooth enough so it's the roads fault that the wheels come off, you can complain that the road builders favour people in another kind of car but at the end of the day you need to be able to just sit in and drive without knowing what's going on underneath and it needs to just work.
3) Did you try Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)?
I have not yet. Has there been much improvement in the support of wireless cards?
Oh gosh... This isn't a problem at all. You're making a mountain out of a shoebox; creating a problem where there isn't one, if that makes sense to you. Linux error messages are much more human-readable (at least on Ubuntu with it's Apport system).
Actually I was describing something that I liked about the Linux error messages. As for the general public I really do feel that errors scare people. just a random sample of the first thing kate popped out a second ago:
that may make a bit of sense to me and a lot of sense to someone who knows the code but to an average user? "huh, what's wrong there? have I broken something??" They haven't. I know they haven't. You know they haven't but to them it's just a little note of worry. Repeat for every program they run and everything they do and they either become a linux nerd or run away. MS turn error messages into a generic "bad thing happened" which is enough for most users. Apple pretend errors didn't happen. To the average arts student this is much less scary than half a page of process numbers, strange phrases and info telling them that the program has in fact started perfectly fine and is working.
it should be obvious for some programs
absolutely. but you seem to be missing the point that the average user is not a programmer. They don't see the point of bug reports and don't know what documentation is unless talking about that manual that came with the PC which they threw away because it was full of gibberish.
I like linux. I like messing with it. I like that it forces you to become more knowledgeable just to use it. but i can admit that it isn't perfect. that it isn't suitable for a lot of people.
Boring cheap wireless card in my new PC "just works" with vista but I've spent more hours than I really should trying to get it to work in unbuntu to no avail so I have to string a cable across the house when I want to use the net with linux.
I like linux, I like the philosophy, I just know damned well that it has more issues than a girl who starts sobbing for no apparent reason after a few beers.
Now the bright side of linux is that it tells you when something is wrong, it tells you even when nothing is wrong, it gives you all the details you need to figure out how to fix it, so many details that if you aren't equipped to understand them it worries you.
Which for me is better than the windows version (crash)"something went wrong.... it happened at memory address 3338127612945345345345" or the Mac version (crash)"nothing is wrong. program? what program? all is well" or if it's really bad *sad face*
but for most users they don't know how to fix a computer, they really don't want to know, they don't even want to know the full details of what's gone wrong because they dobn't read error messages anyway, they're not going to spend an hour reading documentation to get their sound to work again. And they shouldn't have to.
The problem being you can engineer your way round a patent on a specific innovative break design in a car. Trying to work around a patent with a flowchart with a note reading "slows car down" is pretty much impossible.
I was under the impression that crypto like PGP was based on stuff which would (in theory) take millions of years to crack even with every machine on earth dedicated to it?
Anonymous like a newspapers source. Anonymous like a whistleblower. If I want to alert people that I think/know something illegal or immoral is being done I shouldn't be required to put my neck on the block to do it. Now if I want to testify against them to get them punished in court sure but until that point why must I open myself up to physical danger in order to let people know about injustices.
what boggle my mind that slot machines are constructed to be more secure and more easily auditable(to make sure the settings conform to regulations) than voting machines.
if the program randomly chooses an IP address from a large internally stored list, then you just have to run the program over and over until you've found most of the IP address chosen by its random algorithm.
Fun until I as the app programmer include the 1000 highest traffic IP's like googles servers, Microsoft servers, and pretty much any random server I imagine people would want to access in glorious republic and set my app to keep trying until it gets a valid connection. They try to blacklist every server my app tries to connect to and... hey... where's the internet gone!
I went to visit the place a while back and that same thought kept striking me. I'd look up at the gold, the statues the figures with their genitals smashed off and all I could think was "how many lives did this cost". How many people over the years donated to that church thinking they were giving money to help the poor and the sick only for that money to be pissed away on an extra thick layer of gold leaf or yet another wall painting.
I look at the giant monuments and wonder how many people died in their creation and how many more could have lived a longer happier life if the money had been spent on something worthwhile or better yet simply hadn't been tithed away from the people of Europe for centuries.
Even better. Here in Ireland I have no student loans. 3rd level education is regarded as similar to first and second level and everyone gets one 3rd level course covered by the government.
Putting "Jenny Smith of 123 Mockingboard Lane is a FAT CUNT" on a billboard would be a civil matter, not a criminal one. So actually this one of the cases where people are going "BUT THE INTERNET IS DIFFERENT!!!!!!"
I think the idea is that you can publish really fast. If you're only interested in the US market then you can publish in a really obscure manner, file for patents as fast as possible and then if your patent is accepted you just never tell anyone about your obscure publishing and file for patents abroad. If your patent is rejected or competitors get there first but you've already published you can pull out your obscure published document to invalidate their patent and kill their advantage.
US market: it's all win for you. Everywhere else: the more obscure the place you publish the better.
[quote]Not sure about the relevance of this...[/quote] It's extremely relevent, sure you could probably dig up some info on me that hints at my gender/race/anything at all from things I've said in the past but for all you know I could be a 15 year old jewish boy living in a european farming village who likes to create ficticious identities online.
The only thing stopping me from starting up my own FOSS project or joining one is my programming ability which as it stands I don't feel is quite up to par. Or do you really think that when I try to get my code into the repositories it's going to be rejected because someone thinks girls can't code. Or do you think when I ask questions about the API for some library I'm using my questions are going to be treated with derision until I convince them that I've got a penis?
I just finished scanning through that list of 54 "incidents" and I've come to the conclusion that that wiki is packed solid with poeple who get off on being offended. There were a few justified ones but the majority are trivial crap like someone not liking that a name for something was in the masculine form or more commonly sexuality of any kind be it male, female or both. Is there anything in the world that isn't offensive to these nutters?
What the hell. What sort persecution complex do you have to have to spend your life compiling lists of anonymous people offending you on the internet? http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Incidents It should be pointed out that your 54 examles of how the FOSS community is packed full of misogyny includes many shining examples of the FOSS community being sexist, just from a quick look....
Go daddies advertising campaign(nothing to do with FOSS) A video game about a Fat Princess(nothing to do with FOSS) Various companies employing "booth babes" because that's apparently evil(nothing to do with FOSS) some tripe about a comic strip at defcon which had an airhead female character.(nothing to do with FOSS) people getting sent copies of Maxim instead of some gaming mag(nothing to do with FOSS) Some summit which apparently didn't get many women turning up (at least it is actually related to FOSS) A shocking one about some guy in quebec killing a lot of women.(nothing to do with FOSS though) Feminists getting pissed because dell tried to market to the large female demographic that likes pink.(nothing to do with FOSS) Someone pissed that people didn't want to make a usenet group comp.women....because there's a comp.men group...(nothing to do with FOSS)
are we seeing a bit of a theme yet? There are some genuine "incidents" in there but they're swamped by bullshit.
I'm not even through a third of them and most seem to have little or nothing to do with FOSS or they amount someone getting offended because some pathetic young/old men drew penises on his presentations or had his desktop background set to some random scantily clad female which of course means he hates women and thinks women can't do anything(honestly that seems to be the logic).
One troll gets his own "incident" even though he appears to be nobody of any import or anything to do with FOSS.
If this kind of trivial crap is what's keeping women out of FOSS then all I can say is "Toughen up".
You'll see more misanthropy,misogyny,misandry, every flavor of "ism" etc etc in pretty much any community.
There is plenty of sexism in the world, there is plenty of discrimination in the world but a social group based around "show us the code" where people can choose everything about how they present themselves isn't exactly the best place to look if you really want to get your days worth of righteous indignation.
since when has downloading been illegal? If I listen to pirate radio am I breaking the law? If my local newspaper isn't paying the fees for using the strips in it's comic section am I liable? If I click on a youtube video and the uploader doesn't own the rights to distribute it in what way have I violated copyright law? If sky movies hasn't paid it's bills can the rights holders come after me?
I pay a subscription, it's the uploaders/hosting companies responsibility to make sure they have the right to distribute the material. I have no control of how they spend the money I pay any more than I can control how sky movies does spends the money I give them.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you guys handle the GPS thing?
I mean I really can't see a way of making a system that could tell the difference between driving through a tunnel/parking inside and wrapping a tin foil bag around the antennae.
From a quick reading he does hand wave quite a bit.
Anything that's not a full scale commercial enterprise doesn't exist and never will.... research is pointless.
For the uranium from seawater thing he talks about the cost of the experiment rather than any kind of estimated costs of large scale extraction.
It seems to boil down to "we're not getting much uranium out of the ground right now while prices are low and we have massive stockpiles keeping prices low.... hence somehow people won't start mining more as the price of uranium goes up again....."
I'll get back to you when I'm next home and can check.
1) Did you try ndiswrapper?
first thing I tried. made it so I could see the network but actually connecting seems to be beyond it.
You can't blame Ubuntu or Linux in general for something like that.
blaming isn't the issue.the issue is that it just doesn't work. I'm a programmer, I like messing around with drivers, working out what's wrong with things etc but it's like a car which needs a mechanic to drive it. You can complain that the roads aren't smooth enough so it's the roads fault that the wheels come off, you can complain that the road builders favour people in another kind of car but at the end of the day you need to be able to just sit in and drive without knowing what's going on underneath and it needs to just work.
3) Did you try Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)?
I have not yet. Has there been much improvement in the support of wireless cards?
Oh gosh... This isn't a problem at all. You're making a mountain out of a shoebox; creating a problem where there isn't one, if that makes sense to you. Linux error messages are much more human-readable (at least on Ubuntu with it's Apport system).
Actually I was describing something that I liked about the Linux error messages.
As for the general public I really do feel that errors scare people.
just a random sample of the first thing kate popped out a second ago:
"kate(6956) KProtocolManager::slaveProtocol: slaveProtocol: "http""
that may make a bit of sense to me and a lot of sense to someone who knows the code but to an average user? "huh, what's wrong there? have I broken something??"
They haven't. I know they haven't. You know they haven't but to them it's just a little note of worry. Repeat for every program they run and everything they do and they either become a linux nerd or run away.
MS turn error messages into a generic "bad thing happened" which is enough for most users. Apple pretend errors didn't happen. To the average arts student this is much less scary than half a page of process numbers, strange phrases and info telling them that the program has in fact started perfectly fine and is working.
it should be obvious for some programs
absolutely. but you seem to be missing the point that the average user is not a programmer. They don't see the point of bug reports and don't know what documentation is unless talking about that manual that came with the PC which they threw away because it was full of gibberish.
I like linux. I like messing with it. I like that it forces you to become more knowledgeable just to use it. but i can admit that it isn't perfect. that it isn't suitable for a lot of people.
and this is why the general public isn't using linux.
Boring cheap wireless card in my new PC "just works" with vista but I've spent more hours than I really should trying to get it to work in unbuntu to no avail so I have to string a cable across the house when I want to use the net with linux.
I like linux, I like the philosophy, I just know damned well that it has more issues than a girl who starts sobbing for no apparent reason after a few beers.
Now the bright side of linux is that it tells you when something is wrong, it tells you even when nothing is wrong, it gives you all the details you need to figure out how to fix it, so many details that if you aren't equipped to understand them it worries you.
Which for me is better than the windows version (crash)"something went wrong.... it happened at memory address 3338127612945345345345"
or the Mac version (crash)"nothing is wrong. program? what program? all is well" or if it's really bad *sad face*
but for most users they don't know how to fix a computer, they really don't want to know, they don't even want to know the full details of what's gone wrong because they dobn't read error messages anyway, they're not going to spend an hour reading documentation to get their sound to work again.
And they shouldn't have to.
The problem being you can engineer your way round a patent on a specific innovative break design in a car.
Trying to work around a patent with a flowchart with a note reading "slows car down" is pretty much impossible.
Hence it kills innovation, not encourages it.
This would make no difference since cats are already the dominant species on this planet.
I was under the impression that crypto like PGP was based on stuff which would (in theory) take millions of years to crack even with every machine on earth dedicated to it?
Anonymous like a newspapers source. Anonymous like a whistleblower.
If I want to alert people that I think/know something illegal or immoral is being done I shouldn't be required to put my neck on the block to do it.
Now if I want to testify against them to get them punished in court sure but until that point why must I open myself up to physical danger in order to let people know about injustices.
what boggle my mind that slot machines are constructed to be more secure and more easily auditable(to make sure the settings conform to regulations) than voting machines.
Zero width spaces are great for that by the way.
(CS undergrad who's had to deal with the problem)
if the program randomly chooses an IP address from a large internally stored list, then you just have to run the program over and over until you've found most of the IP address chosen by its random algorithm.
Fun until I as the app programmer include the 1000 highest traffic IP's like googles servers, Microsoft servers, and pretty much any random server I imagine people would want to access in glorious republic and set my app to keep trying until it gets a valid connection. ... hey... where's the internet gone!
They try to blacklist every server my app tries to connect to and
ah so you're saying that access to decent education for poor people is a bad thing?
I went to visit the place a while back and that same thought kept striking me. I'd look up at the gold, the statues the figures with their genitals smashed off and all I could think was "how many lives did this cost".
How many people over the years donated to that church thinking they were giving money to help the poor and the sick only for that money to be pissed away on an extra thick layer of gold leaf or yet another wall painting.
I look at the giant monuments and wonder how many people died in their creation and how many more could have lived a longer happier life if the money had been spent on something worthwhile or better yet simply hadn't been tithed away from the people of Europe for centuries.
Even better.
Here in Ireland I have no student loans.
3rd level education is regarded as similar to first and second level and everyone gets one 3rd level course covered by the government.
Putting "Jenny Smith of 123 Mockingboard Lane is a FAT CUNT" on a billboard would be a civil matter, not a criminal one. So actually this one of the cases where people are going "BUT THE INTERNET IS DIFFERENT!!!!!!"
This is also why there's almost no interest in coming up with drugs to treat diseases which primarily effect poor people in the 3rd world.
I think the idea is that you can publish really fast. If you're only interested in the US market then you can publish in a really obscure manner, file for patents as fast as possible and then if your patent is accepted you just never tell anyone about your obscure publishing and file for patents abroad.
If your patent is rejected or competitors get there first but you've already published you can pull out your obscure published document to invalidate their patent and kill their advantage.
US market: it's all win for you.
Everywhere else: the more obscure the place you publish the better.
They need to stop calling it a black hole or the ignorant masses will decide it's going to end the world.
[quote]Not sure about the relevance of this...[/quote]
It's extremely relevent, sure you could probably dig up some info on me that hints at my gender/race/anything at all from things I've said in the past but for all you know I could be a 15 year old jewish boy living in a european farming village who likes to create ficticious identities online.
The only thing stopping me from starting up my own FOSS project or joining one is my programming ability which as it stands I don't feel is quite up to par.
Or do you really think that when I try to get my code into the repositories it's going to be rejected because someone thinks girls can't code.
Or do you think when I ask questions about the API for some library I'm using my questions are going to be treated with derision until I convince them that I've got a penis?
My god.
I just finished scanning through that list of 54 "incidents" and I've come to the conclusion that that wiki is packed solid with poeple who get off on being offended.
There were a few justified ones but the majority are trivial crap like someone not liking that a name for something was in the masculine form or more commonly sexuality of any kind be it male, female or both.
Is there anything in the world that isn't offensive to these nutters?
What the hell.
What sort persecution complex do you have to have to spend your life compiling lists of anonymous people offending you on the internet?
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Incidents
It should be pointed out that your 54 examles of how the FOSS community is packed full of misogyny includes many shining examples of the FOSS community being sexist, just from a quick look....
Go daddies advertising campaign(nothing to do with FOSS)
A video game about a Fat Princess(nothing to do with FOSS)
Various companies employing "booth babes" because that's apparently evil(nothing to do with FOSS)
some tripe about a comic strip at defcon which had an airhead female character.(nothing to do with FOSS)
people getting sent copies of Maxim instead of some gaming mag(nothing to do with FOSS)
Some summit which apparently didn't get many women turning up (at least it is actually related to FOSS)
A shocking one about some guy in quebec killing a lot of women.(nothing to do with FOSS though)
Feminists getting pissed because dell tried to market to the large female demographic that likes pink.(nothing to do with FOSS)
Someone pissed that people didn't want to make a usenet group comp.women....because there's a comp.men group...(nothing to do with FOSS)
are we seeing a bit of a theme yet?
There are some genuine "incidents" in there but they're swamped by bullshit.
I'm not even through a third of them and most seem to have little or nothing to do with FOSS or they amount someone getting offended because some pathetic young/old men drew penises on his presentations or had his desktop background set to some random scantily clad female which of course means he hates women and thinks women can't do anything(honestly that seems to be the logic).
One troll gets his own "incident" even though he appears to be nobody of any import or anything to do with FOSS.
If this kind of trivial crap is what's keeping women out of FOSS then all I can say is "Toughen up".
You'll see more misanthropy,misogyny,misandry, every flavor of "ism" etc etc in pretty much any community.
There is plenty of sexism in the world, there is plenty of discrimination in the world but a social group based around "show us the code" where people can choose everything about how they present themselves isn't exactly the best place to look if you really want to get your days worth of righteous indignation.
since when has downloading been illegal?
If I listen to pirate radio am I breaking the law?
If my local newspaper isn't paying the fees for using the strips in it's comic section am I liable?
If I click on a youtube video and the uploader doesn't own the rights to distribute it in what way have I violated copyright law?
If sky movies hasn't paid it's bills can the rights holders come after me?
I pay a subscription, it's the uploaders/hosting companies responsibility to make sure they have the right to distribute the material. I have no control of how they spend the money I pay any more than I can control how sky movies does spends the money I give them.
Please. Explain it to me.
nah, it's a pretty good explanation of why monopolies are not good.