This is just a shakedown, pure and simple. They're tyring to charge more because they think they can. It has nothing to do with cost, just what their marketing people perceive the market value of their product to be (and wishfully, I might add).
Work may have been slowed or delayed at the home office, but that's only because they're contracting it out. Total spending on such projects has been increasing every year, especially lately. In fact, it's made a couple of my friends rich... or at least rich enough to buy a house, and keep working on what they love.
...like communication, being sensitive to the needs of others, etc. Doesn't that sound like the classic geek personality? Geeks are geeks because they're better able to relate to machines and things than people. It's not their technical knowledge that makes them geeks. It's their lack of social skills!
Like in Virginia! This is outrageous! We've always been told not to give out our SSN unless it's absolutely necessary. If I move to Vrginia, it will be plastered across my drivers' license, for every $5/hr lowlife to see.
The industry is talking out their asses when they put dollar figures on piracy. Two points- first, they're assuming people who copy music would have bought it otherwise. I wouldn't actually buy most of the stuff I listen to- I just don't like pissing away so much money on CDs. (Not that I care to spend time downloading either- I mostly just listen to the radio.) Second, they make no mention of the incredible promotional value of copying. It just increases the fan base, which increases sales of all kinds in the future.
The Grateful Dead encouraged pirating, which is what gave them their incredible fan base. This enabled them to make millions from touring. Maybe they didn't make as much money for the big labels as Michael Jackson or Mariah Carey, but they made more for themselves than most people can ever dream of having. Plus, they got to play in front of loving audiences for 30+ years. If the labels feel cut out of this picture, tough shit.
The real story is that the industry is waging a futile war to maintain control of the channels of distribution. They're losing, because they can no longer add value. Technology has made them irrelevent.
Whether or not Redhat is serious about this, their aggressive offer just points out MS' arrogant opportunism. MS is being what my grandfather used to call an "Indian giver," ie, one who buys off ignorant people with something of little monetary value, or worse. Kind of like buying Manhattan with a few glass beads, or as in this case, an entire prairie state with a few barrels of booze. The marginal cost of providing software is practically zero! And in this case, all it does is raise another generation of stupid alcoholics, er, Windows users. If the government accepts this one, they all ought to be scalped!
Re:This is excellent news
on
KDE 2.2.2
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· Score: 1
It's true that the lightweight window managers w/ Gnome apps are faster. However, on a reasonably modern machine, I have no complaints with the speed of KDE. It might not be quite as snappy as Windows, but that's really splitting hairs, and I so prefer KDE in every other way.
I'm with you all the way on Mandrake, it's the best. However, I'm leery of that i586 optimization. That means Pentium I, and on everything else, it would probably run slower than plain-old i386. Since most of us are running Pentium II/III systems now, what's the point?
About tweaking- the biggest difference will come from the really basic stuff, like making sure your hard drive has 32-bit access and DMA turned on, and that you're using a late version of XFree86, with the right video settings. A lot of distributions still flub this stuff on installation, and you have to fix it later. Mandrake 8.1 has given me no problems of this sort yet, though previous versions did. A couple of Redhat installs I did recently resulted in horribly slow systems. But rather than spend an hour messing with them, I just reinstalled- with Mandrake!
The only Linux I've seen that's 686(?) optimized is one called Gentoo, which has its own, offbeat packaging system. If processor optimization really means anything, it's high time Mandrake got on the PII/III bandwagon.
An even newer Pentium II/III system would be cheaper- by the time you put enough RAM in it to run KDE. RAM for Pentium I is really expensive- about $1/MB. To run KDE well, plus an app or two, you need 128MB. In fact the processor speed makes little difference, but the RAM sure will. That's really the problem with an older system. It probably doesn't have enough RAM, and it's not worth it to upgrade.
With all this hysteria about the WTC, naturally people are getting paranoid about the internet. But I don't believe the threat from hackers is any greater than usual. Where are they going to come from? Afghanistan? That's a laugh. I doubt they even have internet access over there. It takes talent, time, and readily available internet access for hackers to hone their skills. Citizens of unfriendly countries have none of these things. Sure, there could be the odd evil nitwit genius sent over here to go to college and learn computer crime, but that drastically narrows the pool. I simply don't believe that there are legions of enemy hackers out there- for the near future, at least. When the average Chinese or Syrian kid has a computer with internet access from the age of 4, I'll worry. But not 'til then.
Remember all the hype about Bevnet? Blacksburg was going to be the most wired town in the country. Well, a few apartment buildings and offices do have incredibly cheap ethernet, but the rest of the town can't get any broadband at all, except for the horribly oversold cable company, and a smidgen of DSL. Also, even if they did buy 4 OC-12s, what are they connected to? The backbone through the whole area isn't even that big.
VA Tech's "wiredness" is just a bunch of hype- and always has been.
The world is a better place because of him, but RMS is too fanatical for a job like this. Such a position requires a politician- not a guy who might cut off his organization's nose to spite its face.
JBuilder is OK... VAJ sucks!
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 1
I use JBuilder most of the time. Otherwise, I use a programmer's text editor, like Nedit, Ultraedit, or whatever.
JBuilder is definately slow- I bought a faster computer just to run it. It's still no speed demon, but 5 is a big improvement, speed wise. I'm running it on a 700MHz machine with 384MB now, and it's OK.
I tried VAJ, which is a huge industry standard. Most of the smarter people I know who program Java seem to use it (yes, this sentence was worded carefully). However, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. It has too many layers of stuff that are too hard to weed through, and too many weird new approaches and paradigms to learn and remember. Learning the program is more work than learning Java itself! So what's the point?
I tried writing a little program with VAJ last night. I couldn't get the debugger to work, so I tried opening my.java file with JBuilder. But I couldn't even find where the damned file was stored, so I had to copy and paste it in! It's embarassing! I could not find that damned file anywhere!
I suspect this is why many people don't like IDEs in general. Personally, I don't even use the visual tools in JBuilder- I just like the integrated compiler/debugger that snaps the cursor to where the problem is. I know it sounds silly, but that's what I like, and it's really all I ask for. Really.
I'm inclined to not bother trying Forte, since it's probably just more of the same, but with Sun's gobbledygook instead.
I've used JCreator, and it's OK, but it isn't much of an IDE.
Maybe I'll try Codewarrior, if someone can give me a compelling reason.
I'm really put off by this stuff too. I'm constantly arguing with colleagues over this- they have this knee-jerk reaction to stick a brand name or logo wherever they can fit it, but can never, ever show me evidence that it actually does any good.
In My Humble Opinion, all this does, most of the time, is add another layer of gobbledygook for consumers to weed through. And this certainly does not build brand identity- it just dilutes and obscures it.
Marketing people like to think of themselves as the creative ones. In fact, just the opposite is true. In no other branch of business do you find so much reliance on formulas and boilerplate, or just operating by the seat of the pants. Why? Because marketing executives are often not very well educated, or even very smart to begin with. They're the mouth breathers who work their way up through the sales ranks. Occasionally you'll find a Harvard or Wharton MBA who did their homework, learned their craft, and has their brain engageed. But glorified car salesmen are the general rule.
...and you are wrong. I spent 10 years travelling to China and southeast Asia. I experienced China before and after its "loosening up," or whatever you want to call it. The fact is that crappy labor conditions are the result of the backward, corrupt governments in these countries. The difference between now and 20 years ago is that now, an average worker *has* a choice: flipping burgers may not be the best career, but it beats stoop labor in a rice paddy, up to your knees in human shit (which they still use for fertilizer in China).
Don't be tempted by images of happy little peasants in coolie hats working happily in the fields, surrounded by loved ones, and singing tradtional songs. The reality was that they toiled for 20 hours a day then too, often under the "encouragement" of whip or rifle. Life was brutal, short, and cheap. Compared to the US, it still is, but it's getting better.
The only thing that will change this is the prosperity that more globalization will bring. More money for everyone, and even if it's just a tiny bit, the little that trickles down to the average guy. He might not make it himself, but maybe his kids willl have a computer and a few books.
So, instead of looking at the PRC or Indonesia, which are still in the early stages of redevelopment, and still under the control of oppressive dictatorships, look at Taiwan, or South Korea. Look at Japan now, compared to before WWII! That, and better, is the future that globalization, *and freedom* will bring, for everyone on earth, eventually.
And BTW, people in China LOVE us. In Indonesia too. As an American, you'll be swarmed by locals wanting to practice their English, and talk about their favorite movies.
So get *your* head out of the sand. Get away from your television, your stupid, sophomoric, hippie magazines, your nebbish academic "mentors," and your antisocial, shoegazer friends. Get on a plane. Take a walk through Shanghai, Manila, Bangalore, Taipei, or even Monterrey. Join the Peace Corp. Get a life.
If you are fighting against Microsoft, you are to a certain degree fighting against globalization. This is a much bigger and more complex picture than so quickly sketched above.
No, it's really a much smaller and simpler picture, and nothing to do with "globalism." I'm fighting against bad software, which Microsoft happens to make. If Toyota made crappy cars, I'd be fighting against them too.
You, pal, have your head up your vice-grip ass. The 10 year olds who visit the Skechers site aren't looking for specs and facts, they're looking for visual stimulation and inspiration. They wanna see pictures of shoes, and cool people doing cool things while wearing them. That's advertising, and it even works that way with anal-retentive jerkoffs like yourself- they just give you guys anal-retentive ads, and you lick them up just like the 10 year olds. Whether it's a twirling shoe with skate music playing in the background, or a picture of a BMW rolling through the Black Forest with Wagner playing in the background, it all works the same way. Image, and image association, is king. Information, my ass.
It's neat that Mozilla is doing this calendar. Unfortunately, using it to build a decent PIM will be impossible unless there's a decent address book and/or database to go with it. The only one that's really convenient to use is, I'm sorry to say, the address book for Outlook Express (Windows Address Book). Netscape/Mozilla's sucks, and so do similar efforts from KDE/Gnome.
What's worse, every PIM project for Linux seems to be a sorry copy of Outlook, which is a sorry PIM to begin with. It assumes we all work for big corporations, and our lives revolve around meetings- and email. Some of us have our own thing going, and we correspond with the rest of the world via regular letters, bills, brochures, etc. We make sales calls and service calls at other addresses, and need to print out our itineraries- addresses and all. None of these silly Outlook clones allow for this.
I'll give up Windows for good when they're able to pry Act 2000 from my cold, dead fingers. Maximizer and Goldmine are good, too. I can still find a phone number or email address faster with Windows Address Book than anything.
Re:The usability of Linux (is pretty good by now)
on
Red Hat 7.2 Released
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· Score: 1
If you have a chance sometime, watch someone who's never used a computer try to figure out Windows; it's very instructive to see that Windows itself is not more or less intuitive than any other windowing
system; once you've mastered the concepts and abstractions, it becomes easy. The so called usability advantange of Windows is mostly imprinting, inertia and FUD; the functional differences are starting to disappear or become neglegible.
This is true. There really is no practical difference anymore. I'd even argue that KDE is a bit easier to use than Windows. A few little things, like all apps saving documents and data to the "home" directory make Linux a bit *less* of a pain. The KDE browser has a better, easier to use bookmark system, moving files around is a lot easier, and having four or more desktops open is a lot easier than minimizing and maximizing apps. Where system administration is concerned, it's no contest- after using Mandrake for a couple of years, having to use Windows 2000 is a real pain in the ass. In a sense, Mandrake with KDE is "Windows done right."
My brother is a definate non-computer guy. He much prefers the Mandrake system I set up for him than the Windows system he uses at work.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just a shakedown, pure and simple. They're tyring to charge more because they think they can. It has nothing to do with cost, just what their marketing people perceive the market value of their product to be (and wishfully, I might add).
Work may have been slowed or delayed at the home office, but that's only because they're contracting it out. Total spending on such projects has been increasing every year, especially lately. In fact, it's made a couple of my friends rich... or at least rich enough to buy a house, and keep working on what they love.
That's where all the work is in restoring a system. What do you do about that? It ain't always all in /etc...
Your point is well taken, though. And Debian in particular is organized in a way that it's easier to restore all the configuration stuff.
...like communication, being sensitive to the needs of others, etc. Doesn't that sound like the classic geek personality? Geeks are geeks because they're better able to relate to machines and things than people. It's not their technical knowledge that makes them geeks. It's their lack of social skills!
...and how do they make money at it?
The line lengths and lack of white space make me dizzy. If anyone wonders why websites don't get read...
Like in Virginia! This is outrageous! We've always been told not to give out our SSN unless it's absolutely necessary. If I move to Vrginia, it will be plastered across my drivers' license, for every $5/hr lowlife to see.
The industry is talking out their asses when they put dollar figures on piracy. Two points- first, they're assuming people who copy music would have bought it otherwise. I wouldn't actually buy most of the stuff I listen to- I just don't like pissing away so much money on CDs. (Not that I care to spend time downloading either- I mostly just listen to the radio.) Second, they make no mention of the incredible promotional value of copying. It just increases the fan base, which increases sales of all kinds in the future.
The Grateful Dead encouraged pirating, which is what gave them their incredible fan base. This enabled them to make millions from touring. Maybe they didn't make as much money for the big labels as Michael Jackson or Mariah Carey, but they made more for themselves than most people can ever dream of having. Plus, they got to play in front of loving audiences for 30+ years. If the labels feel cut out of this picture, tough shit.
The real story is that the industry is waging a futile war to maintain control of the channels of distribution. They're losing, because they can no longer add value. Technology has made them irrelevent.
Whether or not Redhat is serious about this, their aggressive offer just points out MS' arrogant opportunism. MS is being what my grandfather used to call an "Indian giver," ie, one who buys off ignorant people with something of little monetary value, or worse. Kind of like buying Manhattan with a few glass beads, or as in this case, an entire prairie state with a few barrels of booze. The marginal cost of providing software is practically zero! And in this case, all it does is raise another generation of stupid alcoholics, er, Windows users. If the government accepts this one, they all ought to be scalped!
It's true that the lightweight window managers w/ Gnome apps are faster. However, on a reasonably modern machine, I have no complaints with the speed of KDE. It might not be quite as snappy as Windows, but that's really splitting hairs, and I so prefer KDE in every other way.
I'm with you all the way on Mandrake, it's the best. However, I'm leery of that i586 optimization. That means Pentium I, and on everything else, it would probably run slower than plain-old i386. Since most of us are running Pentium II/III systems now, what's the point?
About tweaking- the biggest difference will come from the really basic stuff, like making sure your hard drive has 32-bit access and DMA turned on, and that you're using a late version of XFree86, with the right video settings. A lot of distributions still flub this stuff on installation, and you have to fix it later. Mandrake 8.1 has given me no problems of this sort yet, though previous versions did. A couple of Redhat installs I did recently resulted in horribly slow systems. But rather than spend an hour messing with them, I just reinstalled- with Mandrake!
The only Linux I've seen that's 686(?) optimized is one called Gentoo, which has its own, offbeat packaging system. If processor optimization really means anything, it's high time Mandrake got on the PII/III bandwagon.
An even newer Pentium II/III system would be cheaper- by the time you put enough RAM in it to run KDE. RAM for Pentium I is really expensive- about $1/MB. To run KDE well, plus an app or two, you need 128MB. In fact the processor speed makes little difference, but the RAM sure will. That's really the problem with an older system. It probably doesn't have enough RAM, and it's not worth it to upgrade.
With all this hysteria about the WTC, naturally people are getting paranoid about the internet. But I don't believe the threat from hackers is any greater than usual. Where are they going to come from? Afghanistan? That's a laugh. I doubt they even have internet access over there. It takes talent, time, and readily available internet access for hackers to hone their skills. Citizens of unfriendly countries have none of these things. Sure, there could be the odd evil nitwit genius sent over here to go to college and learn computer crime, but that drastically narrows the pool. I simply don't believe that there are legions of enemy hackers out there- for the near future, at least. When the average Chinese or Syrian kid has a computer with internet access from the age of 4, I'll worry. But not 'til then.
...which is why they call it "C++."
Enough said. I'll stick to my T20.
Remember all the hype about Bevnet? Blacksburg was going to be the most wired town in the country. Well, a few apartment buildings and offices do have incredibly cheap ethernet, but the rest of the town can't get any broadband at all, except for the horribly oversold cable company, and a smidgen of DSL. Also, even if they did buy 4 OC-12s, what are they connected to? The backbone through the whole area isn't even that big.
VA Tech's "wiredness" is just a bunch of hype- and always has been.
The world is a better place because of him, but RMS is too fanatical for a job like this. Such a position requires a politician- not a guy who might cut off his organization's nose to spite its face.
Whoopie. Now, how about some fresh thinking?
I use JBuilder most of the time. Otherwise, I use a programmer's text editor, like Nedit, Ultraedit, or whatever.
.java file with JBuilder. But I couldn't even find where the damned file was stored, so I had to copy and paste it in! It's embarassing! I could not find that damned file anywhere!
JBuilder is definately slow- I bought a faster computer just to run it. It's still no speed demon, but 5 is a big improvement, speed wise. I'm running it on a 700MHz machine with 384MB now, and it's OK.
I tried VAJ, which is a huge industry standard. Most of the smarter people I know who program Java seem to use it (yes, this sentence was worded carefully). However, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. It has too many layers of stuff that are too hard to weed through, and too many weird new approaches and paradigms to learn and remember. Learning the program is more work than learning Java itself! So what's the point?
I tried writing a little program with VAJ last night. I couldn't get the debugger to work, so I tried opening my
I suspect this is why many people don't like IDEs in general. Personally, I don't even use the visual tools in JBuilder- I just like the integrated compiler/debugger that snaps the cursor to where the problem is. I know it sounds silly, but that's what I like, and it's really all I ask for. Really.
I'm inclined to not bother trying Forte, since it's probably just more of the same, but with Sun's gobbledygook instead.
I've used JCreator, and it's OK, but it isn't much of an IDE.
Maybe I'll try Codewarrior, if someone can give me a compelling reason.
I'm really put off by this stuff too. I'm constantly arguing with colleagues over this- they have this knee-jerk reaction to stick a brand name or logo wherever they can fit it, but can never, ever show me evidence that it actually does any good.
In My Humble Opinion, all this does, most of the time, is add another layer of gobbledygook for consumers to weed through. And this certainly does not build brand identity- it just dilutes and obscures it.
Marketing people like to think of themselves as the creative ones. In fact, just the opposite is true. In no other branch of business do you find so much reliance on formulas and boilerplate, or just operating by the seat of the pants. Why? Because marketing executives are often not very well educated, or even very smart to begin with. They're the mouth breathers who work their way up through the sales ranks. Occasionally you'll find a Harvard or Wharton MBA who did their homework, learned their craft, and has their brain engageed. But glorified car salesmen are the general rule.
...and you are wrong. I spent 10 years travelling to China and southeast Asia. I experienced China before and after its "loosening up," or whatever you want to call it. The fact is that crappy labor conditions are the result of the backward, corrupt governments in these countries. The difference between now and 20 years ago is that now, an average worker *has* a choice: flipping burgers may not be the best career, but it beats stoop labor in a rice paddy, up to your knees in human shit (which they still use for fertilizer in China).
Don't be tempted by images of happy little peasants in coolie hats working happily in the fields, surrounded by loved ones, and singing tradtional songs. The reality was that they toiled for 20 hours a day then too, often under the "encouragement" of whip or rifle. Life was brutal, short, and cheap. Compared to the US, it still is, but it's getting better.
The only thing that will change this is the prosperity that more globalization will bring. More money for everyone, and even if it's just a tiny bit, the little that trickles down to the average guy. He might not make it himself, but maybe his kids willl have a computer and a few books.
So, instead of looking at the PRC or Indonesia, which are still in the early stages of redevelopment, and still under the control of oppressive dictatorships, look at Taiwan, or South Korea. Look at Japan now, compared to before WWII! That, and better, is the future that globalization, *and freedom* will bring, for everyone on earth, eventually.
And BTW, people in China LOVE us. In Indonesia too. As an American, you'll be swarmed by locals wanting to practice their English, and talk about their favorite movies.
So get *your* head out of the sand. Get away from your television, your stupid, sophomoric, hippie magazines, your nebbish academic "mentors," and your antisocial, shoegazer friends. Get on a plane. Take a walk through Shanghai, Manila, Bangalore, Taipei, or even Monterrey. Join the Peace Corp. Get a life.
No, it's really a much smaller and simpler picture, and nothing to do with "globalism." I'm fighting against bad software, which Microsoft happens to make. If Toyota made crappy cars, I'd be fighting against them too.
You, pal, have your head up your vice-grip ass. The 10 year olds who visit the Skechers site aren't looking for specs and facts, they're looking for visual stimulation and inspiration. They wanna see pictures of shoes, and cool people doing cool things while wearing them. That's advertising, and it even works that way with anal-retentive jerkoffs like yourself- they just give you guys anal-retentive ads, and you lick them up just like the 10 year olds. Whether it's a twirling shoe with skate music playing in the background, or a picture of a BMW rolling through the Black Forest with Wagner playing in the background, it all works the same way. Image, and image association, is king. Information, my ass.
It's neat that Mozilla is doing this calendar. Unfortunately, using it to build a decent PIM will be impossible unless there's a decent address book and/or database to go with it. The only one that's really convenient to use is, I'm sorry to say, the address book for Outlook Express (Windows Address Book). Netscape/Mozilla's sucks, and so do similar efforts from KDE/Gnome.
What's worse, every PIM project for Linux seems to be a sorry copy of Outlook, which is a sorry PIM to begin with. It assumes we all work for big corporations, and our lives revolve around meetings- and email. Some of us have our own thing going, and we correspond with the rest of the world via regular letters, bills, brochures, etc. We make sales calls and service calls at other addresses, and need to print out our itineraries- addresses and all. None of these silly Outlook clones allow for this.
I'll give up Windows for good when they're able to pry Act 2000 from my cold, dead fingers. Maximizer and Goldmine are good, too. I can still find a phone number or email address faster with Windows Address Book than anything.
Fuckin' A, man.
This is true. There really is no practical difference anymore. I'd even argue that KDE is a bit easier to use than Windows. A few little things, like all apps saving documents and data to the "home" directory make Linux a bit *less* of a pain. The KDE browser has a better, easier to use bookmark system, moving files around is a lot easier, and having four or more desktops open is a lot easier than minimizing and maximizing apps. Where system administration is concerned, it's no contest- after using Mandrake for a couple of years, having to use Windows 2000 is a real pain in the ass. In a sense, Mandrake with KDE is "Windows done right."
My brother is a definate non-computer guy. He much prefers the Mandrake system I set up for him than the Windows system he uses at work.