I use Usenet all the time (pun intended). While there is a good deal of spam in some groups others are pretty light on the spam. For me Usenet is the place to turn when I run into a problem in Linux because I've found there is a lower proliferation of idiots using it unlike IRC which is filled with 15 year olds blabbering about RTFM. It also has some pretty good discussions on several topics if you hunt around a bit.
So I get to the end of the article which is pretty much a scathing recount of why the writer likes KDE more than GNOME and think maybe there is going to be some good conclusion. I feel kind of let down now. Wow Ximian GNOME is different than KDE, it won't fit on a 720KB floppy disk, and worst of all a Dorito isn't a powerful enough chip to run it. Please. This is crap. Just looking at a screenshot of Nautilus ought to give you a clue it isn't going to run well on a 6502 with 512KB of RAM.
KDE takes longer to compile than it did a couple version ago, it is ten times more usable now than it was with the 1.0 release. It also packs more applications into the default installation than it used to. If you just want to use KDE apps just install the damn base libraries and don't mess with the DE. The same idea applies to GNOME. Trying to jam KDE 3 or Ximian GNOME 1.4 onto an old POS computer is a fools endeavor and it is dumb to expect all developers to keep the absolute lowest common denominator in mind. I don't think KDE or GNOME EVER ran on a 386 with 4MB of RAM. This argument pops up every once in a while when someone has trouble getting their old computer running some piece of software, to make people listen they whine about the children of third world countries who can't afford a new computer to run KDE or GNOME.
That being said, there is an amount of bloat when it comes to software, there always will be. Not everything can fit on a single floppy disk and saying everything ought to just because some people have older computers is counter productive. Coders with a schedule want it to work and get it out the door, making it elegant just costs you time and may only reduce your compiling time by a couple minutes or the binary size by a couple kilobytes. If you had to write to very constrained hardware it would make sense to save every extra kilobyte but there are simply too many fast computers in the hands of users today to make it worth while to scrimp on everything.
If you know you've got shitty hardware the onus is on you to use software on it that is going to have acceptable performance. You DO have the option with Linux specifically and OSS in general. Linux for the rest of us my ass. Why use KDE or GNOME at all? Are you gaining much from their use? Why not use something a bit lighter and frothy like WindowMaker or BlackBox? Why bitch and moan about the ripple applet in E not being smooth on your Commodore64? There are several lightweight distros around and the major distros also have lighter than usual schemes for you to install.
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Speed Reading?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Speed reading is based on patterns in a given language and a statistical analysis of said patterns. A good percentage of words in a paragraph are prepositions and articles either definite or indefinite. Can you assume they are there and not need to actually read them? Yes you can, in fact American sign language does away with most (AFAIK, someone with more experience with it might want to correct me) aticles and prepositions in English because it would add needless complexity to the language structure. Speed reading takes into account portions of English sentence structure is merely grammarical fluff and thus teaches you to skip over it reflexively. It usually suggests you scan for keywords like nouns and verbs and just let your brain fill in the rest. Speed readers also suggest reading based on visual ques rather than actual literary ques. Instead of reading a phrase or term that repeats in a paragraph you just remember what it looks like visually and whenever you see it you insert the meaning of it where that pattern is. I guess in a way speed reading is sort of like compressing text based on patterns. You create virtual tokens in your brain to represent certain patterns.
However speed reading has disadvantages, reading literature where the language actually has more meaning than what it says in context doesn't work well. I can usually use speed reading techniques on stuff like newspaper articles and novels which often times are getting more across contextually than dictively. Things with more figurative language like poems or more meaningful literary pieces I read in a normal fashion, same with technical documentation. Woe to he that skims over technical documentation. Though I find even reading in a normal fashion I can go pretty fast, I think it has to do with having shifty eyes. Anyways, look into speed reading if you want to get through the daily paper quickly or skim through a Tom Clancy book go for the speed reading, otherwise I'd say just set aside some spare time to get stuff read.
While the 22" display is indeed hugnormous the resolution isn't really much to write home about. I can display stuff side by side just like on a bigass Cinema display. While the screen itself is a giant the resolution didn't give you THAT much more space than a much cheaper 21" CRT. The 23" I think is a solution to the resolution problem. Now if they would just make 200 dpi flat screens like IBM made for LLNL that'd be really badass.
IIRC the Mass. offshore wind farm designs are based off of a design currently in use off the coast of England. I can't remember if it was this month's issue of Discovery or SciAm that mentioned these. I thought the idea was pretty cool because you don't have the obscene noise from the wind farm or the giant eyesore of it. You can also build downwind of the offshore farms with less worry than you could with a farm on land.
What is it with the Wintel retard demographic on slashdot. "How could this thing possibly cost money when I can find supposedly equivilent parts for much cheaper!" The iPod uses a firewire port, have you ever seen a cheap firewire controller worth buying? I haven't heard of any. It's also got one smooth looking screen with a pretty low dot pitch for a monochrome LCD. The battery isn't exactly some shit Energizer or Duracell. I also can't believe you said Apple is the only company to raise prices as time goes by. How much was RAM going for last spring and how much is it going for right now? It certainly isn't any fucking cheaper.
Well considering neither your standard MP3 player or USB 2.0 hard drive have a master bus controller or software, they can't talk to one another. You could carry both the MP3 player and hard drive around until you were blue in the face but you couldn't transfer any of the songs without a host system.
There's a funny thing about proxy votes. The more stock you own the more your vote means. Also, because this is a proxy vote the proxy has a mini vote and the majority choice is cast as a single vote from the proxy. If you've got 100 people behind a proxy and 40 vote against the merger, the proxy vote will be one for the merger. Add up enough proxies and you've got a sizable number of people voting against the merger. Fiorina is declaring victory far too soon in my opinion and according to most of the business papers I've been reading the opinion of many.
I don't get the projected numbers Fiorina has been throwing in everyone's faces. In all honesty she wants Compaq for production lines, some IP, and retail contracts with most notably Radio Shack. Between Radio Shack and WalMart Hewpaq would have a pretty big retail presence. Not everybody has a Best Buy, CompUSA, or Circuit City within an hour drive. They probably however have a RS or WalMart within an hour drive. If people are interested in a PC, retail chains are where they head to. However unlike the 2 + 2 = 5 numbers Fiorina is pulling out, HP and Compaq would not be expanding their markets. They would just consolodate shelf space. This doesn't lead to higher growth.
HP has gone from a company that actually progessed the state of technology to merely a competitor to Dell for presence on the desk. In the short term with decreased competition in retail space from Compaq, HP will do well. In the long run when the retail chains Hewpaq relies on start doing poorly they are going to suffer severly. In the said areas where HP and Compaq are prevelent, for some the only two choices, the market is going to become saturated very quickly due to the lack of demand. Sales of both companies' systems are already low, merging would just mean they would be collectively low even if their overall market penetration was greater than that of IBM. It's also funny how HP has twenty billion to spend on the Compaq merger yet needs to lay off 15,000 people. Next to go from HP will be their printer business at which point Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett will lead an army of zombies and demons out of Hell into Cupertino to make off with Carly and her minions.
No matter who cuases what where, it all comes down to dumbfucks and their curved lines. People like to see curved lines when it comes to statistical analysis "look a curved line we must have gotten the answer right!". When confronted with data that doesn't fit a curve of some sort people go completely batshit saying the world is going to end. There is no mean fucking temperature on the Earth, saying so is just ridiculous. It can't rise or fall if it isn't there. Even druing the bigger ice ages in history not every part of the Earth was covered in ice. If you measure the temperature at one point and then at another point a hundred miles away and say the average temperature if somewhere between the two values, what exactly does that REALLY say. All it means that somewhere between those two points, close to the middle you hope, the temperature will equal that "average" value. What good is that?
This isn't meant to say the BAS folks don't know what they're talking about, they know a whole lot more than I do about this ice sheet. However the folks at Greenpeace and their incessant dumbfuckery have concluded the Earth is going to Hell in a neatly wrapped package. Whether humans are ruining the planet doesn't matter much, we can either fix it or cannot, even if we can an asteroid might crash into the planet making it a moot point. Nuke all the fucking unborn baby grey whales.
Yeah, I know two people who've gotten the student discount. Of course the thing to remember is it is a one time discount, both people that used the student discount got the most ultra top of the line Mac they could build and then applied their discount to it. The stipulation of the student membership is that you have to be enrolled at the school you say you are and when applying for a hardware discount they most likely will run a check.
The sad part here in the movie mention with no mention at all of the book. If he movie was so mediocre how come you know the scene so well? Did it cross your mind that the idea in the book was based off of an idea someone already had?
Oh please, the GPL states you can charge a reasonable fee for source based on the price of the binary. If you sell the binary for 20$ you can't charge 3000$ for the source code. What the original poster was bitching about was the act of charging for the source code. It isn't some given right that source code ought to have zero cost like I fucking said. How the fuck did this get modded up to 4?
You are the one that doesn't get it. He charges for the source code, this in no way removes the GPL definition of freedom from the software. Don't fucking bitch because you can't download the source code for zero dollars. Can you get the source and change it under the terms of the GPL? Yes you can. No GPL endowed freedom is removes. What part of that don't you get? The Free Software community isn't necessarily a community that gives their code away for zero dollars.
This confusion and retarded statement is a direct result of RMS and his dumbfuckery using recursive definitions. The free as in beer free as in speech crap has caused more needless confusion than LSD. The GPL goes into the fact you can charge money for your source code. The provisions for the "free" software are source code must be available. It doesn't say I you can't require someone to reimburse you for your work.
Hot flames most certainly are ionized which is why this experiment doesn't work well with candles because the flame is too cool. The ionized carbon from the toothpick burning is what is causing the light in this shmoo. Another experiment is to ionize water and spray it out of a mister, if you light a match or other moderately hot flame and put a paper card between the mist nozzle and flame the water will go under the card and extinguish the flame. There's a sprinkler system designed for data centers which instead of normal sprinklers uses ionized misting nozzles to spray a sort of ionized fog which is attracted to the flame and snuffs it out.
It isn't about overproduced its just if you're just singing and playing guitar, shitty equipment is going to make it sound like you've got your nuts in a vice. You don't NEED 100,000 equipment, Alanis Morisette's Jagged Little Pill was produced on a 50,000$ set-up was pretty well acclaimed. Then of course 50 grand isn't exactly chump change to a dude wanting to make an album.
Some of the equipment to do good mastering is cheap but for a really high quality set-up it is going to cost a pretty penny. The talent for doing recording work isn't exactly cheap either. I could buy 100,000$ worth of equipment but it won't make me a better recording engineer. However if I'm a great engineer I can charge beaucoup cash to anyone wanting my services. This comes back to the record company business model actually, the smaller number of people with equipment and talent to do work musicians don't have the equipment or talent (sometimes) to do themselves can base their business around provider services to said musicians. Moby does his recording and whatnot at home but he's a pretty damn talented guy and isn't exactly using a Playskool My First Sound Studio to do his recording.
U-N-I-V-E-R-S-I-T-Y. This guy is talking community college like I was. CS courses in CCs are going to be much more focused on what people are going to see after leaving school rather than focusing on true CS theories or some such. Universities teaching CS theory can easily make Unix centric courses because they are supposed to be spittingo ut people with BS degrees rather than merely spitting out people with some sort of application certification. There's a big difference between a BS in computer science and getting an MCSE or CNA.
What the fuck do you think excessive use is? If you've got X total bandwidth and are using 90% of it all the time that will probably be construed at excessive bandwidth usage. You're in college and can't figure this out? The letter says bandwidth utilization has increased to 94% which you can pretty much assume means a good deal of people are using that percentage of their personal bandwidth. Students running file servers on the school's network cost them money, so do students running their Windows 2000 laptops with Nimda worms on them DDoSing some poor sap somewhere.
I can understand you not wanting to plunk down the 100$ for Visual Studio and it being crappy your professor won't help you with your compiler. However on the converse if you decided you wanted a different text book than the one required for the class would you expect the professor to find problems in it for you to do that were comparable to the standard book? For a computer class the software is part of the course materials.
I think a lot of schools would like to offer non-Windows courses but you've got to remember community colleges aren't exactly getting the same sort of endowments as a university. You also don't have resident professors that need to fullfil a quota of classroom hours so come out with some elective course that is more fun than work. I don't think Linux would make sense to your school's Board of Trustees either. They'd ask your CS department chair next to Windows is the next most likely environment which they'd probably reply with Macintosh and then proceed to mention Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. I don't mention Novell because most CS departments have Novell classes already. Linux would probably not be mentioned in actuality. For Office alternatives the next option would be Lotus Smart Suite and MAYBE if you were lucky StarOffice.
Uh, you're wondering why a programming instructor ad a community college won't help you compile on a non-Microsoft system? I know you're looking for Linux geek teachers but that is a silly assumption. Community colleges in most cases are a step above a trade school and in some fields are little better than a trade school. Computer Science is one of these fields. Most of your instructors are going to have adjuct positions which means they need to hold a regular job as well as teach at your CC. They teach you Microsoft because that is what 99% of CS students exiting a community college work with when they're out of school. They might like or even use Linux personally but unless your course is "not quite Unix operating systems" don't expect a heavy dosage of Linux in a community college outside of the ACM club.
It wasn't about a cabinet maker coming up with the solution it was the Board of Longitude being top heavy with astronomers who were looking to solve the same problem by another means. The astronomical society was pitching hard for their method because it gave them some clout when asking for grant money to stare at things in a telescope. At the time academia familiar with the longitude problem were classified as Mechanics or Lunars depending on the particular method they supported to solve the problem.
ISPs should not be forced to operate under the same guidelines as common carriers because they are not carriers. ISPs do not carry traffic, telecom companies carry traffic. An ISP just provides a POP, a transition point between the virtual and real, for the customer. Almost all of an ISP's service is virtual and thus cannot carry traffic which would make regulating them as a carrier ridiculous.
Saying the status of "delivery" is contingent on the bidirectional nature of the data path is ludicrous. The cable companies provide the carrier equipment for data. Actually carrying the data makes them a delivery service.
I bought my Powerbook from a CompUSA and this is the EXACT feeling I got at the time. None of the sales people knew anything about it, the person who had to get the box from the back of the store didn't even know where the Macs were at. They tried to sell me a Sony VAIO because they got a higher commission on it.
It's how it is done. They get them for the same rate as other VARs, instead of giving you a free printer they jam the components into a rackmount case. They even come with the Radeons in them like the G4 tower. They probably even make a few extra bucks ltting Apple have the cases back for use in refurbishing.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Usenet all the time (pun intended). While there is a good deal of spam in some groups others are pretty light on the spam. For me Usenet is the place to turn when I run into a problem in Linux because I've found there is a lower proliferation of idiots using it unlike IRC which is filled with 15 year olds blabbering about RTFM. It also has some pretty good discussions on several topics if you hunt around a bit.
I love you.
So I get to the end of the article which is pretty much a scathing recount of why the writer likes KDE more than GNOME and think maybe there is going to be some good conclusion. I feel kind of let down now. Wow Ximian GNOME is different than KDE, it won't fit on a 720KB floppy disk, and worst of all a Dorito isn't a powerful enough chip to run it. Please. This is crap. Just looking at a screenshot of Nautilus ought to give you a clue it isn't going to run well on a 6502 with 512KB of RAM.
KDE takes longer to compile than it did a couple version ago, it is ten times more usable now than it was with the 1.0 release. It also packs more applications into the default installation than it used to. If you just want to use KDE apps just install the damn base libraries and don't mess with the DE. The same idea applies to GNOME. Trying to jam KDE 3 or Ximian GNOME 1.4 onto an old POS computer is a fools endeavor and it is dumb to expect all developers to keep the absolute lowest common denominator in mind. I don't think KDE or GNOME EVER ran on a 386 with 4MB of RAM. This argument pops up every once in a while when someone has trouble getting their old computer running some piece of software, to make people listen they whine about the children of third world countries who can't afford a new computer to run KDE or GNOME.
That being said, there is an amount of bloat when it comes to software, there always will be. Not everything can fit on a single floppy disk and saying everything ought to just because some people have older computers is counter productive. Coders with a schedule want it to work and get it out the door, making it elegant just costs you time and may only reduce your compiling time by a couple minutes or the binary size by a couple kilobytes. If you had to write to very constrained hardware it would make sense to save every extra kilobyte but there are simply too many fast computers in the hands of users today to make it worth while to scrimp on everything.
If you know you've got shitty hardware the onus is on you to use software on it that is going to have acceptable performance. You DO have the option with Linux specifically and OSS in general. Linux for the rest of us my ass. Why use KDE or GNOME at all? Are you gaining much from their use? Why not use something a bit lighter and frothy like WindowMaker or BlackBox? Why bitch and moan about the ripple applet in E not being smooth on your Commodore64? There are several lightweight distros around and the major distros also have lighter than usual schemes for you to install.
Speed reading is based on patterns in a given language and a statistical analysis of said patterns. A good percentage of words in a paragraph are prepositions and articles either definite or indefinite. Can you assume they are there and not need to actually read them? Yes you can, in fact American sign language does away with most (AFAIK, someone with more experience with it might want to correct me) aticles and prepositions in English because it would add needless complexity to the language structure. Speed reading takes into account portions of English sentence structure is merely grammarical fluff and thus teaches you to skip over it reflexively. It usually suggests you scan for keywords like nouns and verbs and just let your brain fill in the rest. Speed readers also suggest reading based on visual ques rather than actual literary ques. Instead of reading a phrase or term that repeats in a paragraph you just remember what it looks like visually and whenever you see it you insert the meaning of it where that pattern is. I guess in a way speed reading is sort of like compressing text based on patterns. You create virtual tokens in your brain to represent certain patterns.
However speed reading has disadvantages, reading literature where the language actually has more meaning than what it says in context doesn't work well. I can usually use speed reading techniques on stuff like newspaper articles and novels which often times are getting more across contextually than dictively. Things with more figurative language like poems or more meaningful literary pieces I read in a normal fashion, same with technical documentation. Woe to he that skims over technical documentation. Though I find even reading in a normal fashion I can go pretty fast, I think it has to do with having shifty eyes. Anyways, look into speed reading if you want to get through the daily paper quickly or skim through a Tom Clancy book go for the speed reading, otherwise I'd say just set aside some spare time to get stuff read.
While the 22" display is indeed hugnormous the resolution isn't really much to write home about. I can display stuff side by side just like on a bigass Cinema display. While the screen itself is a giant the resolution didn't give you THAT much more space than a much cheaper 21" CRT. The 23" I think is a solution to the resolution problem. Now if they would just make 200 dpi flat screens like IBM made for LLNL that'd be really badass.
IIRC the Mass. offshore wind farm designs are based off of a design currently in use off the coast of England. I can't remember if it was this month's issue of Discovery or SciAm that mentioned these. I thought the idea was pretty cool because you don't have the obscene noise from the wind farm or the giant eyesore of it. You can also build downwind of the offshore farms with less worry than you could with a farm on land.
What is it with the Wintel retard demographic on slashdot. "How could this thing possibly cost money when I can find supposedly equivilent parts for much cheaper!" The iPod uses a firewire port, have you ever seen a cheap firewire controller worth buying? I haven't heard of any. It's also got one smooth looking screen with a pretty low dot pitch for a monochrome LCD. The battery isn't exactly some shit Energizer or Duracell. I also can't believe you said Apple is the only company to raise prices as time goes by. How much was RAM going for last spring and how much is it going for right now? It certainly isn't any fucking cheaper.
Well considering neither your standard MP3 player or USB 2.0 hard drive have a master bus controller or software, they can't talk to one another. You could carry both the MP3 player and hard drive around until you were blue in the face but you couldn't transfer any of the songs without a host system.
There's a funny thing about proxy votes. The more stock you own the more your vote means. Also, because this is a proxy vote the proxy has a mini vote and the majority choice is cast as a single vote from the proxy. If you've got 100 people behind a proxy and 40 vote against the merger, the proxy vote will be one for the merger. Add up enough proxies and you've got a sizable number of people voting against the merger. Fiorina is declaring victory far too soon in my opinion and according to most of the business papers I've been reading the opinion of many.
I don't get the projected numbers Fiorina has been throwing in everyone's faces. In all honesty she wants Compaq for production lines, some IP, and retail contracts with most notably Radio Shack. Between Radio Shack and WalMart Hewpaq would have a pretty big retail presence. Not everybody has a Best Buy, CompUSA, or Circuit City within an hour drive. They probably however have a RS or WalMart within an hour drive. If people are interested in a PC, retail chains are where they head to. However unlike the 2 + 2 = 5 numbers Fiorina is pulling out, HP and Compaq would not be expanding their markets. They would just consolodate shelf space. This doesn't lead to higher growth.
HP has gone from a company that actually progessed the state of technology to merely a competitor to Dell for presence on the desk. In the short term with decreased competition in retail space from Compaq, HP will do well. In the long run when the retail chains Hewpaq relies on start doing poorly they are going to suffer severly. In the said areas where HP and Compaq are prevelent, for some the only two choices, the market is going to become saturated very quickly due to the lack of demand. Sales of both companies' systems are already low, merging would just mean they would be collectively low even if their overall market penetration was greater than that of IBM. It's also funny how HP has twenty billion to spend on the Compaq merger yet needs to lay off 15,000 people. Next to go from HP will be their printer business at which point Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett will lead an army of zombies and demons out of Hell into Cupertino to make off with Carly and her minions.
No matter who cuases what where, it all comes down to dumbfucks and their curved lines. People like to see curved lines when it comes to statistical analysis "look a curved line we must have gotten the answer right!". When confronted with data that doesn't fit a curve of some sort people go completely batshit saying the world is going to end. There is no mean fucking temperature on the Earth, saying so is just ridiculous. It can't rise or fall if it isn't there. Even druing the bigger ice ages in history not every part of the Earth was covered in ice. If you measure the temperature at one point and then at another point a hundred miles away and say the average temperature if somewhere between the two values, what exactly does that REALLY say. All it means that somewhere between those two points, close to the middle you hope, the temperature will equal that "average" value. What good is that?
This isn't meant to say the BAS folks don't know what they're talking about, they know a whole lot more than I do about this ice sheet. However the folks at Greenpeace and their incessant dumbfuckery have concluded the Earth is going to Hell in a neatly wrapped package. Whether humans are ruining the planet doesn't matter much, we can either fix it or cannot, even if we can an asteroid might crash into the planet making it a moot point. Nuke all the fucking unborn baby grey whales.
Yeah, I know two people who've gotten the student discount. Of course the thing to remember is it is a one time discount, both people that used the student discount got the most ultra top of the line Mac they could build and then applied their discount to it. The stipulation of the student membership is that you have to be enrolled at the school you say you are and when applying for a hardware discount they most likely will run a check.
The sad part here in the movie mention with no mention at all of the book. If he movie was so mediocre how come you know the scene so well? Did it cross your mind that the idea in the book was based off of an idea someone already had?
Oh please, the GPL states you can charge a reasonable fee for source based on the price of the binary. If you sell the binary for 20$ you can't charge 3000$ for the source code. What the original poster was bitching about was the act of charging for the source code. It isn't some given right that source code ought to have zero cost like I fucking said. How the fuck did this get modded up to 4?
You are the one that doesn't get it. He charges for the source code, this in no way removes the GPL definition of freedom from the software. Don't fucking bitch because you can't download the source code for zero dollars. Can you get the source and change it under the terms of the GPL? Yes you can. No GPL endowed freedom is removes. What part of that don't you get? The Free Software community isn't necessarily a community that gives their code away for zero dollars.
This confusion and retarded statement is a direct result of RMS and his dumbfuckery using recursive definitions. The free as in beer free as in speech crap has caused more needless confusion than LSD. The GPL goes into the fact you can charge money for your source code. The provisions for the "free" software are source code must be available. It doesn't say I you can't require someone to reimburse you for your work.
Hot flames most certainly are ionized which is why this experiment doesn't work well with candles because the flame is too cool. The ionized carbon from the toothpick burning is what is causing the light in this shmoo. Another experiment is to ionize water and spray it out of a mister, if you light a match or other moderately hot flame and put a paper card between the mist nozzle and flame the water will go under the card and extinguish the flame. There's a sprinkler system designed for data centers which instead of normal sprinklers uses ionized misting nozzles to spray a sort of ionized fog which is attracted to the flame and snuffs it out.
It isn't about overproduced its just if you're just singing and playing guitar, shitty equipment is going to make it sound like you've got your nuts in a vice. You don't NEED 100,000 equipment, Alanis Morisette's Jagged Little Pill was produced on a 50,000$ set-up was pretty well acclaimed. Then of course 50 grand isn't exactly chump change to a dude wanting to make an album.
Some of the equipment to do good mastering is cheap but for a really high quality set-up it is going to cost a pretty penny. The talent for doing recording work isn't exactly cheap either. I could buy 100,000$ worth of equipment but it won't make me a better recording engineer. However if I'm a great engineer I can charge beaucoup cash to anyone wanting my services. This comes back to the record company business model actually, the smaller number of people with equipment and talent to do work musicians don't have the equipment or talent (sometimes) to do themselves can base their business around provider services to said musicians. Moby does his recording and whatnot at home but he's a pretty damn talented guy and isn't exactly using a Playskool My First Sound Studio to do his recording.
U-N-I-V-E-R-S-I-T-Y. This guy is talking community college like I was. CS courses in CCs are going to be much more focused on what people are going to see after leaving school rather than focusing on true CS theories or some such. Universities teaching CS theory can easily make Unix centric courses because they are supposed to be spittingo ut people with BS degrees rather than merely spitting out people with some sort of application certification. There's a big difference between a BS in computer science and getting an MCSE or CNA.
What the fuck do you think excessive use is? If you've got X total bandwidth and are using 90% of it all the time that will probably be construed at excessive bandwidth usage. You're in college and can't figure this out? The letter says bandwidth utilization has increased to 94% which you can pretty much assume means a good deal of people are using that percentage of their personal bandwidth. Students running file servers on the school's network cost them money, so do students running their Windows 2000 laptops with Nimda worms on them DDoSing some poor sap somewhere.
I can understand you not wanting to plunk down the 100$ for Visual Studio and it being crappy your professor won't help you with your compiler. However on the converse if you decided you wanted a different text book than the one required for the class would you expect the professor to find problems in it for you to do that were comparable to the standard book? For a computer class the software is part of the course materials.
I think a lot of schools would like to offer non-Windows courses but you've got to remember community colleges aren't exactly getting the same sort of endowments as a university. You also don't have resident professors that need to fullfil a quota of classroom hours so come out with some elective course that is more fun than work. I don't think Linux would make sense to your school's Board of Trustees either. They'd ask your CS department chair next to Windows is the next most likely environment which they'd probably reply with Macintosh and then proceed to mention Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. I don't mention Novell because most CS departments have Novell classes already. Linux would probably not be mentioned in actuality. For Office alternatives the next option would be Lotus Smart Suite and MAYBE if you were lucky StarOffice.
Uh, you're wondering why a programming instructor ad a community college won't help you compile on a non-Microsoft system? I know you're looking for Linux geek teachers but that is a silly assumption. Community colleges in most cases are a step above a trade school and in some fields are little better than a trade school. Computer Science is one of these fields. Most of your instructors are going to have adjuct positions which means they need to hold a regular job as well as teach at your CC. They teach you Microsoft because that is what 99% of CS students exiting a community college work with when they're out of school. They might like or even use Linux personally but unless your course is "not quite Unix operating systems" don't expect a heavy dosage of Linux in a community college outside of the ACM club.
It wasn't about a cabinet maker coming up with the solution it was the Board of Longitude being top heavy with astronomers who were looking to solve the same problem by another means. The astronomical society was pitching hard for their method because it gave them some clout when asking for grant money to stare at things in a telescope. At the time academia familiar with the longitude problem were classified as Mechanics or Lunars depending on the particular method they supported to solve the problem.
ISPs should not be forced to operate under the same guidelines as common carriers because they are not carriers. ISPs do not carry traffic, telecom companies carry traffic. An ISP just provides a POP, a transition point between the virtual and real, for the customer. Almost all of an ISP's service is virtual and thus cannot carry traffic which would make regulating them as a carrier ridiculous.
Saying the status of "delivery" is contingent on the bidirectional nature of the data path is ludicrous. The cable companies provide the carrier equipment for data. Actually carrying the data makes them a delivery service.
I bought my Powerbook from a CompUSA and this is the EXACT feeling I got at the time. None of the sales people knew anything about it, the person who had to get the box from the back of the store didn't even know where the Macs were at. They tried to sell me a Sony VAIO because they got a higher commission on it.
It's how it is done. They get them for the same rate as other VARs, instead of giving you a free printer they jam the components into a rackmount case. They even come with the Radeons in them like the G4 tower. They probably even make a few extra bucks ltting Apple have the cases back for use in refurbishing.