> I can't imagine how it would be possible to fund anything through tax money and not expect the > outcome to be determined by the power elite who control that money.
Even better, I can't imagine any sane person who doesn't WANT the politicians making our laws over unelected, unfireable civil service drones. Should the government have 'scientists' (remember your Heinlein people, most 'scientists' are nothing more than button sorters and bottle washers) on staff to advise? Of course! Would I want to live in a country where they made the laws based on their supposed superior reasoning abilities and education? Hell no!
The final authority has to remain in the hands of those accountable to the political system, and there is a word for em, politicians. You can't vote out some pinhead GSA drone. You can't even blame the current administration for em, because most are unfirable without an act of Congress or God and have been slaving away in some cube farm for decades and will remain there for several more administrations. But the political appointees ARE subject to political pressure and that is a GOOD THING.
> It seems they are still buying Windows computers though...
Yup, just like they have for the last twenty years. 95% +/- a point or two of new machines sold have been preloaded with whatever Microsoft wants and that isn't likely to change until the Redmond Empire falls. This slow uptake of Vista looks like it is almost entirely being driven by the hardware replacement cycle. Actually this sounds slower than that cycle, makes me wonder just what percentage of new hardware is still being shipped with XP. That should be the headline but the author/publication is obviously a Microsoft Media Whore and they spun it into something positive.
Seriously, ALMOST beating OS X's 6% market share when you are a predatory monopolist who has been cramming Vista down vendor's throats for six+ months now isn't something to be proud of.
> Kind of like Windows 3.1 being 16bit when it wouldn't run on anything older than a 386 (32bit) anyway.
From your profile it is clear you are too young to remember it first hand so I'll educate instead of flaming ya.:)
Recall that there were versions of Windows prior to Windows 3.1, the first clue to which should have been the version number. Moving to Win32 was a major upheaval in the software world, keeping compatibility with Win16 and more importantly, DOS were the major selling features of Windows 3.1. By 3.1 a lot of major software was running in Windows 16-bit AND business depended on a lot of DOS code, home users depended on DOS for the majority of games, etc. Heck, most of the software people were actually running on WinNT was 16-bit code. And most games were DOS based well into the Win95/Win98 era. It wasn't until XP was looming and game makers saw sticking with DOS as a death sentence that they drank the DirectX Kool-Aid for any project not depending on 3D.
And there were a LOT of 286 based machines not only in the installed base but still being sold. For example on the day Win3.1 shipped I was working at a Radio Shack in the D/FW area and the only 386 class machine in the store was the SCO Xenix box in the stockroom running the store. To buy a 386 class machine from Tandy you had to go to a Business Computer Center.
And of course Windows 7 will finally be secure, stable and simple. Which is always what Microsoft promises their new operating system will be.... a few months after they release their current version and victims start realizing that it wasn't any of those things. And they fall for it every time.
Just watch, all discussion of the shortcomings of Vista will now be answered with, "yes but Windows 7 is going to address that issue."
For about two years that is, then will come the talk of features being dropped on the cutting room floor to make it to a shipping date. But never to fear, they will only be leaving out stuff you don't really need and Windows 7 is still going to finally be THE secure, stable and simple to use OS you have been waiting for.
Then it will ship, after a four year development cycle (see, we beat Vista's development time!) and it will be wash rinse and repeat as people actually see it and realize it is Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows Vista all over again. And somehow the masses will escape coming to a 'sad realization' or will and still rationalize not doing anything about it.
But there is one ray of hope in the announcement, not that anything they say at this point can be believed of course, but if they are still staying with a 32bit version it means they have pretty much given up on ramming Trusted Computing down our throats.
> If you or anyone else can't figure out how to use Open Office without "training" they've got to be dumb > as rocks. And I'm not writing flame-bait here. I dead serious about that.
By writing that you make it clear that you have never had to deal with 'normals'. Wish I worked where you work, but I don't live on a planet where everyone is computer literate[1], capable of independent learning and posseses above average intelligence and reasoning abilities. Thankfully we never allowed Microsoft in the front door though so we manage to get along with OO.o/FF/etc running on networked Linux workstations. We didn't have to deal with the whinging due an inability to deal with change but do training? What fantasy world are you living in. It can take sometimes take a week to get a new hire to learn that logging in with CAPS LOCK on won't work.
[1] I define 'computer literate' much the same way as I define 'literacy'. Literacy in the sense of the English Language means one able to read the language, speak it, reason in it and express thoughts in writing using it. Computer literacy means the ability to read and write PROGRAMS, even simple ones, understand the ideas underlying common applications i.e. understand what cut/paste DOES, not memorizing the keystroke. Know the IDEA behind a spreadsheet. Knowing every function isn't required, knowing enough to figure out the help system IS.
> 3) Thank you for your offer, Mr. Gates, but intercourse you, I'm buying a $1000 PC and installing Ubuntu.
Nice sentiment but take a moment to consider what the actual offer will be:
Option #1, the Dell M-Box, brought to you by Pepsi (this month, next month another sponsor....).
Plays mainstream media. Meaning everything on sale at Best Buy/Walmart in the movie, music and games depts. Cable TV will be delivered through it. Allowed to connect to the Internet and perform E-Commerce, required for E-Voting, filing your taxes and renewing your driver's license. Can run Microsoft Office, required to interchange documents via Microsoft Hotmail, the only approved mail service since they merged with the Postal Service. The only way to transfer content to your iPod. (Even in a total distopia I can't see the Zune beating the iPod at this point.)
Not allowed to run any unsigned binaries.
Option #2,
Buy a PC on the grey market and install Ubuntu. You can run anything you like but you won't connect to the Internet with it, at least legally. There will be hacks to allow basic IP access but no major website will allow you to connect because your browser won't bear the mark of the beast. Generate too much traffic out on the dark net and you will get noticed so P2P will be right out. Warez will of course not cease, just return to face to face exchange of really high capacity media, Linux will of course be part of that warez scene since after the Patent Wars any useful program will be in violation of at least one and therefore illegal to traffic in and also comply with the GPL.
Now, how many people will actually pick Option #2? They won't even have to police the gray market too hard, no more than they pretend to fight the War on Some Drugs. Just the social stigma of being outlaw will keep it safely contained to a ghetto.
> I mean, tftp isn't something you launch from a boot loader, is it?
Said by someone who thinks a PC BIOS is a boot loader. New World (iMac forward?) and newer Mac roms can do it, darned near every "workstation" can do it.
Even a lot of $30 routers have boot loaders that can do tftp... once you solder on the headers to get at the serial console port like was done to the iPhone Heck, even a PC's PXE net booting involves DHCP to get an address/etc and then followed by a tftp.
> I think if Bush was going to pardon him he would have done it now.
I suspect Libby asked NOT to be pardoned. He still has a pretty good chance of clearing his name once he can get outside the Beltway's reality distortion field. A pardon would leave a permanent taint, a whiff of 'did something wrong but Shrubbie covered for him." which we are seeing play out here anyway because most LLL types don't actually know very much about our political system and even less about the facts in the Plame affair.
The jury that convicted Libby was a crime against justice, hand picked from the craziest denizens of DC to "Get Rove". The plan was for Fitzgerald to roll Libby to get Karl Rove. But his case disintegrated so he settled for just screwing Libby over. That jury looked more like the Daily Kos than America.
If you want a perfect AB comparison of justice in DC, Libby was going to prison for, worst case, political ass covering of the sort that happens every minute of every day in DC (at bes for only having a bad memory) while Sandy "Pants Burgler" Berger walked after finally being cornered by the facts and CONFESSING to stealing classified documents by stuffing them into his pants/socks/etc to remove them from the National Archives for the purpose of destroying them. What they were we will of course never know, only that they were incriminating enough to somebody (Bill, Hillary?) to justify such an extreme effort to destroy them.
> It also makes a mockery of Bush's promise to punish the guilty.
Only problem is that nobody was guilty, especially Libby.
> Letting a guy obstruct justice is not "finding the leak" as he promissed.
There couldn't be any obstruction of justice because the fucking clown Fitzgerald knew all of the facts before he had his DC office up and running.... but that didn't stop the months and months of circus. Bush didn't sack anyone for leaking because the leak didn't come from the White House. It came from a disgruntled ex State Dept hack by the name of Richard Armitage. None of the facts I just cited are even in dispute, even the fact that Fitzgerald IS a "fucking clown" it is just that Democrats love him for being their fucking clown.
Now I certainly wouldn't want to stop Slashdot from it's daily hate ritual so carry on.....
This is true, 3D support is the only think Sony is holding out on and you don't need that for a media center. They do give you direct YUV video modes at all of the standard HD modes and that is probably good enough. Especially with all those Cell units available to do de-interlacing, upscaling, onscreen display overlays or whatever else needs doing.
$600 for a kick ass myth front end isn't unreasonable on it's own. Compare and contrast to putting together an EPIA and compare how useful each would be as a front end. The EPIA would be (almost) equally useless at 3D, have far far less CPU power and unless you spent serious coin on a case wouldn't look as good. On the other hand the EPIA is mostly x86 compatible, meaning it can run all of the plugins and external codecs and can actually run MythTV today. So today it is advantage EPIA, tomorrow....?
Last time I looked, the box had no onboard storage, no component, DVI or HDMI i/o and not nearly enough compute power to need HD outputs. In other words it is an SD device is an HD world, and an underspecced device for a lot of SD uses. The lack of even an S-Video output was when I stopped reading. USB1 is also pathetic these days.
Having brought out a product the manufacturer couldn't think of a use for they threw magic "Open Source" pixie dust on it hoping we could think of things to do with it. Which is better than nothing, but why not give us a slightly more commercially viable platform to work with?
> Of course, it helped that the enemy that we faced was morally bankrupt > and couldn't have possibly won the cold war.
Yup, but the genuis of RWR was in realizing that the way to defeat the Soviets was by breaking the taboo on SAYING that. Before Reagan 'all right thinking people' believed: (or were too afraid to disagree with in public)
1. That socialism was the future.
2. That the Cold War was either just a dick size contest between two 'great powers; equally bent on world domination' or just the death rattle of the West as we finally accepted the socialist future. Basically either a moral equivelence or the West as villian.
Reagan was having none of that crap, he pronounced the Soviets as "The focus of evil in the modern world", "destined for the dustbin of history" and summed up the Cold Was simply as "We win, they lose."
By actually saying these things it forced people to either accept it or argue against it. Because when the Cold War was just a dick size contest most of Europe could straddle the fence or even dangle their feet over the wall onto the Soviet side. But once Reagan called em 'Evil" those people had few choices. Argue that they weren't evil (a very hard argument to make) or admit it and say "yay evil!" Morally bankrupt people (the French come to mind) don't mind making a deal with the devil, so long as people don't KNOW they are making a deal with the devil, appearances matter.
So yes, SDI, the defense buildup, the 600 ship navy, etc. helped financially bankrupt the Soviets. Arming the Afgans and causing the 'invincibility' of the Soviet military machine to come into question helped defeat the Soviets. But the biggest weapon was the Will & the Word. Ronald reagan's having the courage and clarity of moral vision to speak truth to power forced Evil to retreat.
The current problem's solution is equally obvious.
> Does anyone know if I'd be able to connect a USB hard drive and a USB soundcard and run musicpd on it?
Probabaly not. Yes it has the plugs to connect a USB hdd and a USB sound device, and yes you could get power in through the USB plug fairly easy. But this device is clocked a wee bit slow (and has no FPU) to make OGG or FLAC playback very likely. Don't know about AAC. MP3 would probably be good to go though.
You need to climb the power curve just a wee bit. Go take a look at what gumstix.com has to offer. They can set you up wuth a wee little thing that clocks at up to 600Mhz and can attach a stereo audio output directly. It still doesn't have floating point but at up to 600Mhz and enough ram to waste on optimization out the wazoo you can probably power your way through OGG/FLAC/AAC anyway.
Although I do like the idea of this new device. Just need to think of a job it can handle.
> There is a reason the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, and it has nothing to do with government control.
Too bad that is mostly a myth in the US. Our rich don't tend to be inherited wealth, somebody earns it (usually by merit) and their desendents piss it away in a generation or two. And the poor don't get poorer, our standard of living is increasing in all social classes. Is it even fair to use the word 'poor' to describe teh less well off in the US when the #1 health problem for the 'poor' is obesiety? Go to the third world and get back to me once you see what poverty looks like.
You are making a common mistake, assuming people are 'poor' because they don't have much money. More often than not they don't have any money because they are poor. 'Poor' is a state of mind. Poor people don't value education, fail to plan for their future, manage money poorly, have expensive and destructive vices (drugs, booze, tobacco, gambling) that leave them unable to save/invest and other traits that lead to them occupying the lower positions on the social ladder. If you took a hundred people from all social strata and tossed them on an island with exactly equal resources, within a year the existing pecking order would re-emerge virtually unchanged. A couple of frat boy trust funders would be unable to reattain their old position and a couple of the less well off might react well to the stress and rise. But overall the majority would stay unchanged.
Yes it is offtopic but this sort of economic illiteracy is rampant on slashdot so every once in awhile I try to correct one of you government educated types.
> The market fails to allocate resources efficiently in the case of natural monopoly, imbalance of information, and externalities.
There are only a few 'natural monopolies' most ultimatly being trackable to government action. But yes, even the great free market economists agree that it is proper role of a legitimate government to protect against monopoly. Imbalance of information tends to sorrect itself, especially with this new fangled Internet thingie. And yes, externalities can be a proper role for the government of a Free People to regulate, within reason.
> There is a reason all countries gave up laissez faire: it didn't work, and led to horrible, horrible abuses.
Yes, 'all right thinking people' around the turn of the century fell into the delusion that socialism was the future. We still haven't counted all of the bodies resulting from that madness. Name one socialist country that, at a minimum, didn't turn into an economic basket case? Most ended up with mass graves and eventually a tyrant being deposed from his iron throne. Do I really need to enumerate the list? Even Europe is finally waking up and smelling the marketplace. A Free market is like a Representitive form of government, pretty much the worst system you can think of....with the exception of every other system tried.
That is until you actually understand them, then they are both beautiful. And inseperable. Eliminate one and the other will surely wither and die. Let one become well established and the other will follow. The Soviets learned this, China will soon enough. Free Markets are the only way for a Free People to deal with one another.
A hundred years ago, when we had a more Newtonian mechanical view of the universe it was at least a defensible position to argue for a planned economy, safe in the delusion that a system as complex as a modern economy could be comprehended by any group of 'experts' well enough to make all of the decisions in an enlightened and efficient way. Hyack pretty much demolished all that back in the 1950's. And since his work we have learned a lot more about emergent systems, chaos theory, general economic theory, such that an educated, enlightened person can no more believe in socialsm than they can believe in the tooth fairy. That and the millions of bodies that resulted from every attempt at a planned economy should be enough to convince even the less mentally adept. Pretty simple actually, Socialism == mass graves, poverty and guards shooting people trying to flee tyranny. Liberty and Free Markets == prosperity, happiness and people trying to get INTO your country.
> The free market is a good thing... BUT it needs be controlled in order to stay free!
Exactly 180 degrees wrong. A Free Market must be UNControlled to reap it's advantages over state control. Which is why the ISP game is falling apart. You can call it a lot of things, but a Free Market is NOT one of them. What we have currently is just about everyone getting their Internet from one of two government granted/controlled/regulated monopolies. In one corner you have your Government controlled Telco monopoly. And in the other you have your government controlled cable monopoly. Did I hear someone in the back of the class say wireless? Yea... operated in most markets by the government controlled teleco monopoly and at any rate strangled by the ever changing whims of the FCC.
What we need is competition in the ISP game. Back when most people had dialup and most markets were served by a dozen dialup ISPs the idea of ad inserts might have been viable with the really cut rate ISPs serving the extremely value conscious customer but a premium service would have have known it would be suicide to even try something like this.
How to get it? It is really simple, so simple the government will of course never do it. Break up the phone company (and it IS 'the phone company' again in most of the US, Ma Bell has reassembled herself) and this time do it right. Break the phone company into two parts:
1) The phone company customers see. Sells local, long distance, DSL, whatever in a totally unregulated marketplace... along with anyone else who cares to join the fun.
2) The utility that owns the wire, rights of way and the building part of the CO. They are a highly regulated government utility with a monopoly. They sell access to their plant to all comers at rates established by the PUC. They operate the fleet of trucks and bill out the cost of maintaining the physical plant as part of the rate they charge telecom operators and bill the end customers (by passing the charge upstream) for inside wiring. Still a publicly traded stock, just like every other public utility,low growth but paying a nice dividend.
Give the cable companies a date certain when their fun also comes to an end, when they will be split into the same two parts and the physical plant will eventually be merged with the telco monopoly. Lots of fun getting the finances on the stock split/merger right, but it is a one time bump and if done right the shareholders will be happy.
> To have a man-in-the-middle, all you need is a certificate signed by an authority that your computer trusts. The ISP can surely get that.
Give this man a cookie, or at least a mod point.
Once they manage to get your browser loaded up with a CA they control it is game over. Imagine, you type www.chase.com into your browser. Remember, THEY also operate your DNS. They resolve www.chase.com to an address they control and generate a certificate linking www.chase.com to that IP. Meanwhile their proxy server connects to the real https://www.chase.com/ and retrieves the homepage. Then their faked out server reencrypts the content and their inserted ad and sends it on to your browser which displays it with the lock intact.
This is what the various secure DNS proposals are intended to address. DNS hijacking allows almost any abuse in the higher layers.
> Why is it that we support people who try to disprove our most well established theories in physics?
Because whether or not a cherished theory in physics gets confirmed or flames out doesn't involve trillions of dollars, the rise and fall of political dynasties and the great political question of our times. Yes physics depts have politics too, but in the end they are all physics geeks. Global warming got caught up in so much larger political movements that it is no longer possible to say ANYTHING on the subject without it being perceived in mzany quarters as more of a political argument than a scientific one. Worse, politicians, journalists, authors and pundits now have careers riding on the question, not just scientists. Doubt many Senators have anything riding on the question of black holes being disproved or validated.
> Hmmm...let's see: was there any such 9/11/01 attack prior to Bush taking office?
Oh God, I'm actually going to argue with an idiot "Truther." But this shit needs to be answered instead of ignored. When you morons first started spouting this nonsense sane people ignored you, but recent surveys show your sickness has now infected large segments of the socialist/left/netcrazies population.
Guess you forgot the first attempt to knock the WTC down during the Clinton Administration. Or the multitude of attacks on US interests outside the US going back to the Iran hostage incident. No, lets forget all that, because terrorism didn't exist until Bushitler invented it as a method of inducing fear amongst the sheeple so he could become dictator for life. And lets forget that you morons can't even agree whether Bushitler is the stupidist person ever to hold high office or the most cunning evil genius ever born.
No Occams Razor for you. You reject the simple plain Truth and invent wild conspiracy theories. But straight up, for a multitude of reasons there are now about a billion people who want us and our entire way of life wiped from the map and even the history books. Most aren't willing to actually do more than cheer on the few engaged in actual war with us at the moment but it gives the terrorists ample support and cover. If even 0.1% are potential combatants that gives a million foes, honoring no rule of civilized warfare, willing to use WMD the second they cab manufactire, buy or steal one and utterly devoted to our total destruction. They can't be reasoned with, they must be hunted down and killed. The sooner we face that and get serious about our task the better our odds of survival.
Next we have to find a way to drain the swamp that breeds these fanatics. It doesn't look like Bush's plan to do it by spreading the blessings of liberty is working out so we need a plan B. And I really hope we come up with one because in the end, if we don't find a better way, it will come down to us or them. And I'd hate to see the West have to massacre that many people.
> Hmmm.....so let's completely destablize the Middle East by attacking the one secular country not involved with > 9/11/01 attacks and which Osama (you might remember he's supposed to have something to do with that stuff) > considers his mortal enemies.
Considering what was passing for 'stable' in the Middle East, sure! Primitive 7th century theocracies and dictators who can only agree that killing jews and Americans is good thing? Blow that status quo right the hell up! We (unwisely in my humble opinion) turned a blind eye to the horrible conditions in the ME for decades in the interest of 'stability'. That might have had a certain logic during the Cold War but we are paying a terrible price now.
And no, Saddam was not directly involved in 9/11. But the guy WAS a direct sponsor of terrorism and was growing a relationship with Al Qaeda despite their differences, remember that agreement on killing jews and Americans tends to trump all of their other differences when it comes crunch time. Lets remember just how many known terrorists were publicly sheltered by Saddam. Lets remember that Saddam was openly sponsoring multiple terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East. Saddam was directly paying the families of suicide bombers to encourage more to kill civilians. Lets remember that the US (and UN endorsed Coalition) was still formally at War with Iraq. Until Saddam was certified as in compliance with the terms of the Cease Fire a formal state was War remained.
> Over 1/2 a trillion dollars spent - still no Osama and the Taliban are stronger than ever -
Not even in the same ballpark with objective reality. Before we invaded Afganistan the Taliban were the undisputed rulers, openly oppressing damn near everyone and giving Al Qaeda a free hand to run training camps, etc. No the Taliban are not defeated, operating now out of remote areas of Pakistan, but they no longer
Ok, an internal audit found a few (a couple dozen so this piece says) places where they probably crossed the line. They found a problem and will now see what policy changes can be made to reduce the chances of it happening again. The system worked as designed. Massive government operation makes mistakes, film at 11. Hello! It's a massive inefficient government operation changed with the almost impossible task of doing both law enforcement AND anti terrorism/counter insurgency operations while Democtats insist they do it with both hands tied behind their backs and hopping on one foot. The amazing thing is they have managed to keep anything from going FOOM! for almost six years and only having a few excersions from the insane rules imposed on them.
Listen up you primitive screwheads, I really think we should be playing to win, if we keep screwing around with these assholes, sooner or later they are going to get another major win and we will lose another major landmark. There is a difference between law enforcement against citizens and spying on foreign powers and their operatives inside our shores. So yes there should be strong safeguards to prevent intelligence data (collected with few rules) from crossing back into law enforcement activities, but spy vs spy stuff can't play under the same patticake rules we go after the mob under or we lose. Because the mob isn't out to KILL us, only sell us things we want anyway but the nanny state doesn't think we should have.
GNU is the ultimate goal of the FSF, one which it has never realized and probably never will. However the name GNU should be reserved for it's coming. Even if it will be sometime after the sequel to DNF hits. It is the delays in GNU which have lead to Linux supremancy and caused RMS to go off his nut and try to lay claim to things that aren't his to claim.
Look at it thusly. The FSF and the GNU project have released many parts of an OS, which have been adopted into many environments, including Linux but also including Solaris, Windows, *BSD and MacOS. None would try slapping the GNU label on any of those other platforms for using FSF tools. But mostly because the distro should get the right to name the collection. Redhat isn't trying to finish GNU, SuSE isn't trying to finish GNU.
Debian was originally trying to finish GNU and would have been correct to apply that name but were cast out of the FSF clubhouse for being too impure. Thus it is wrong for them to attempt to confuse people into thinking they are still GNU. And even if they patched things up with the FSF someday they should avoid the / because Linux is a registered trademark and eventually GNU probably will be. Trademarks are supposed to have whitespace around them and should not be mixed. On the other hand, since they have Debian with a variety of kernels it does make a bit more sense when they use the / because it is probably the least awkward way of saying it. But today they should be saying Debian / Linux, Debian / HURD, etc.
> Yeah but when you get into the real world you have to use microsoft products anyway.
As addressed in the article, had you bothered to RTFA, it doesn't matter. If you teach word processing instead of Word that is. And you had better be doing that because the version of Word you are teaching on (likely to be a version or two behind already) will almost certainly be obsolete by the times the kiddies enter the labor force. Software changes, see the Ribbon if you don't believe me. "Gotta teach what everyone else uses" is just a crutch to avoid change. By that logic everyone would still be using Word Perfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase.
No, the problem I hit is 'must have' software that has to have Windows. From the crappy Reader Rabbit level stuff in the lower grades to Accelerated Reader in the later ones to state mandated testing software that only works in IE on Windows, etc.
Even worse the schools here love to spend money on crap. Why would anyone spend for PC Anywhere when VNC is free and works? But they do. And yea, they get the licenses really cheap but new Netware servers everywhere? Yup. Supposedly it is some dependency on a mandated package somewhere.
Still no reason not to try infecting as many schools as we can with Free stuff that runs on Windows. Eventaully we might get a few of em adopted.
> So you're going to suggest the "low end" Mac to your web-surfing, pr0n-hording friends why?
I don't know about the original poster, you are right about him probably being a hopeless fanboi. But I also recommend Macs and I'm a Linux bigot. Why? There is method in my madness!
First lets be blunt a bout what it means when a friend/family asks me to recommend a machine. What they are really asking me to to is become their support person for life. Any geek who knows me well enough to be asking for advice will probably be ready for the Penguin, at least a dual boot. But for the rest I recommend they buy a Mac. Were they to actually do that I wouldn't mind providing them with support because they wouldn't need much. But I have yet to actually sell anyone on a Mac because a) there ins't anyplace within a hundred miles to actually see/buy one and b) they cost too much for people out here in flyover country... which kinda explains the first point.;) So why do I keep doing it? So they will bug someone else when they buy the piece of crap Dell and want someone to disinfect it every month or so.
> I used to be a hardware junkie. I could rattle off the 8086, 80286, 80386, 80386SX (no math coprocessor), > 486, and 486SX, in all the MHz flavors.
Nope, the 386SX was a 386 instruction set compatible processor with a 286 bus to allow easy reuse of existing motherboard designs. The 486SX was the one with the lobotomized mathco. Not nit picking ya, just using it as an example to confirm your proposition. If even us junkies have trouble telling the buzzwords and stats apart how the hell is joe average going to have a prayer? Answer: he doesn't. He does what you do and grab an emachines from Wallyworld or Best Buy... or more likely becomes one more dude with a Dell.
But one thing is certain, the trend is down. Unless we have another major round of software bloating the number of people who are happy with a minimal machine is growing. This means the magic place is >$1000 on a laptop and $500 for a desktop. Apple doesn't even try to compete in that space and I suspect Microsoft is going to have trouble with Vista if the bar lowers yet again. See the article on slashdot this week about Asus and their $200 laptop like device coming this summer to a store near you. That is the future, and adding $100 for the Microsoft tax at that price point ain't happening.
Try this experiment if you really want to see what could happen. Go to newegg.com (or any similar site) and see how much desktop you can get for $200. Any volume manufacturer could buy those same basic parts, apply some massive integration, cheap plastic case, etc and sell em on pallets to Walmart at a wholesale price low enough to allow Wallyworld to sell finished boxes for that same $200. To date that hasn't happened because of the question of what to load. Microsoft is too expensive to make the plan viable and they fear a bad reaction if they stick Linux on, probably[1] rightly. But the power of the market is powerful, so someone will eventually figure a way to tap it.
So in the end, both Apple and Microsoft are most likely to be defeated by an inability to readjust their pricing model quickly enough. And if Dell, etc. isn't careful they will go with em. Computers are about to become consumer electronics. That means high volume, low margin. Even Dell still gets amrgins most CE corps only dream of.
[1] Because most people don't even realize anything but Windows exists, especially the Walmart set. Thus when they can't load World of Warcrack, etc. many will try to return it and Walmart takes almost anything back.
> Admittedly, there are issues with not having any hardware warranty, but do we need to get so incendiary...
Yes. It isn't about the specific details, it is the attitude. They aren't treating Linux users like customers expect to be treated.
Some extra hoops because their support org isn't up to speed is understandable, especially if they are nice about it and explain what is going on. But refusing coverage without a drastic price cut (after sales support is a BIG chunk of the sticker price) just doesn't cut it.
Their problem is that, unlike Microsoft, they don't have a monopoly. IBM/Lenovo doesn't give me any problems with hardware failures. They are bright enough to know that the OS doesn't matter if the LCD cable goes bad, hinges fail, power connectors come loose from the MB, hard drives crap out, etc. They send the box, I stick the laptop in it and they make it right. Evenever I can I don't even send the hard drive in. They usually don't know and don't care what OS is loaded.
Since Dell is preloading, they really can't get away with voiding the warranty. There are laws against that sort fo thing.
> either get the bigger disks you want now, or plan on rebuilding the array down the road
Not at all, these days one does have better options than rebuilding a blank array. Read up on LVM, it is powerful stuff.
Replace the drives in the array one at a time, allowing time for the array to rebuild. Then you can grow the volume to make use of the extra capacity. Yes it will require some planning and will probably take a week to slowly merge in the new set of drives, but it sure beats a bare metal restore because you can still be recording and watching video while all this rebuilding and resizing is happening.
Don't really know how much of the above applies to Windows, haven't seriously used it in a decade; so sometone else will have to supply details on it's volume management flexibility.
Slashdot Mirror
> I can't imagine how it would be possible to fund anything through tax money and not expect the
> outcome to be determined by the power elite who control that money.
Even better, I can't imagine any sane person who doesn't WANT the politicians making our laws over unelected, unfireable civil service drones. Should the government have 'scientists' (remember your Heinlein people, most 'scientists' are nothing more than button sorters and bottle washers) on staff to advise? Of course! Would I want to live in a country where they made the laws based on their supposed superior reasoning abilities and education? Hell no!
The final authority has to remain in the hands of those accountable to the political system, and there is a word for em, politicians. You can't vote out some pinhead GSA drone. You can't even blame the current administration for em, because most are unfirable without an act of Congress or God and have been slaving away in some cube farm for decades and will remain there for several more administrations. But the political appointees ARE subject to political pressure and that is a GOOD THING.
> It seems they are still buying Windows computers though...
Yup, just like they have for the last twenty years. 95% +/- a point or two of new machines sold have been preloaded with whatever Microsoft wants and that isn't likely to change until the Redmond Empire falls. This slow uptake of Vista looks like it is almost entirely being driven by the hardware replacement cycle. Actually this sounds slower than that cycle, makes me wonder just what percentage of new hardware is still being shipped with XP. That should be the headline but the author/publication is obviously a Microsoft Media Whore and they spun it into something positive.
Seriously, ALMOST beating OS X's 6% market share when you are a predatory monopolist who has been cramming Vista down vendor's throats for six+ months now isn't something to be proud of.
Nothing to see here, move along.
> Kind of like Windows 3.1 being 16bit when it wouldn't run on anything older than a 386 (32bit) anyway.
:)
From your profile it is clear you are too young to remember it first hand so I'll educate instead of flaming ya.
Recall that there were versions of Windows prior to Windows 3.1, the first clue to which should have been the version number. Moving to Win32 was a major upheaval in the software world, keeping compatibility with Win16 and more importantly, DOS were the major selling features of Windows 3.1. By 3.1 a lot of major software was running in Windows 16-bit AND business depended on a lot of DOS code, home users depended on DOS for the majority of games, etc. Heck, most of the software people were actually running on WinNT was 16-bit code. And most games were DOS based well into the Win95/Win98 era. It wasn't until XP was looming and game makers saw sticking with DOS as a death sentence that they drank the DirectX Kool-Aid for any project not depending on 3D.
And there were a LOT of 286 based machines not only in the installed base but still being sold. For example on the day Win3.1 shipped I was working at a Radio Shack in the D/FW area and the only 386 class machine in the store was the SCO Xenix box in the stockroom running the store. To buy a 386 class machine from Tandy you had to go to a Business Computer Center.
And of course Windows 7 will finally be secure, stable and simple. Which is always what Microsoft promises their new operating system will be.... a few months after they release their current version and victims start realizing that it wasn't any of those things. And they fall for it every time.
Just watch, all discussion of the shortcomings of Vista will now be answered with, "yes but Windows 7 is going to address that issue."
For about two years that is, then will come the talk of features being dropped on the cutting room floor to make it to a shipping date. But never to fear, they will only be leaving out stuff you don't really need and Windows 7 is still going to finally be THE secure, stable and simple to use OS you have been waiting for.
Then it will ship, after a four year development cycle (see, we beat Vista's development time!) and it will be wash rinse and repeat as people actually see it and realize it is Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows Vista all over again. And somehow the masses will escape coming to a 'sad realization' or will and still rationalize not doing anything about it.
But there is one ray of hope in the announcement, not that anything they say at this point can be believed of course, but if they are still staying with a 32bit version it means they have pretty much given up on ramming Trusted Computing down our throats.
> If you or anyone else can't figure out how to use Open Office without "training" they've got to be dumb
> as rocks. And I'm not writing flame-bait here. I dead serious about that.
By writing that you make it clear that you have never had to deal with 'normals'. Wish I worked where you work, but I don't live on a planet where everyone is computer literate[1], capable of independent learning and posseses above average intelligence and reasoning abilities. Thankfully we never allowed Microsoft in the front door though so we manage to get along with OO.o/FF/etc running on networked Linux workstations. We didn't have to deal with the whinging due an inability to deal with change but do training? What fantasy world are you living in. It can take sometimes take a week to get a new hire to learn that logging in with CAPS LOCK on won't work.
[1] I define 'computer literate' much the same way as I define 'literacy'. Literacy in the sense of the English Language means one able to read the language, speak it, reason in it and express thoughts in writing using it. Computer literacy means the ability to read and write PROGRAMS, even simple ones, understand the ideas underlying common applications i.e. understand what cut/paste DOES, not memorizing the keystroke. Know the IDEA behind a spreadsheet. Knowing every function isn't required, knowing enough to figure out the help system IS.
> 3) Thank you for your offer, Mr. Gates, but intercourse you, I'm buying a $1000 PC and installing Ubuntu.
Nice sentiment but take a moment to consider what the actual offer will be:
Option #1, the Dell M-Box, brought to you by Pepsi (this month, next month another sponsor....).
Plays mainstream media. Meaning everything on sale at Best Buy/Walmart in the movie, music and games depts. Cable TV will be delivered through it. Allowed to connect to the Internet and perform E-Commerce, required for E-Voting, filing your taxes and renewing your driver's license. Can run Microsoft Office, required to interchange documents via Microsoft Hotmail, the only approved mail service since they merged with the Postal Service. The only way to transfer content to your iPod. (Even in a total distopia I can't see the Zune beating the iPod at this point.)
Not allowed to run any unsigned binaries.
Option #2,
Buy a PC on the grey market and install Ubuntu. You can run anything you like but you won't connect to the Internet with it, at least legally. There will be hacks to allow basic IP access but no major website will allow you to connect because your browser won't bear the mark of the beast. Generate too much traffic out on the dark net and you will get noticed so P2P will be right out. Warez will of course not cease, just return to face to face exchange of really high capacity media, Linux will of course be part of that warez scene since after the Patent Wars any useful program will be in violation of at least one and therefore illegal to traffic in and also comply with the GPL.
Now, how many people will actually pick Option #2? They won't even have to police the gray market too hard, no more than they pretend to fight the War on Some Drugs. Just the social stigma of being outlaw will keep it safely contained to a ghetto.
> I mean, tftp isn't something you launch from a boot loader, is it?
Said by someone who thinks a PC BIOS is a boot loader. New World (iMac forward?) and newer Mac roms can do it, darned near every "workstation" can do it.
Even a lot of $30 routers have boot loaders that can do tftp... once you solder on the headers to get at the serial console port like was done to the iPhone Heck, even a PC's PXE net booting involves DHCP to get an address/etc and then followed by a tftp.
> I think if Bush was going to pardon him he would have done it now.
I suspect Libby asked NOT to be pardoned. He still has a pretty good chance of clearing his name once he can get outside the Beltway's reality distortion field. A pardon would leave a permanent taint, a whiff of 'did something wrong but Shrubbie covered for him." which we are seeing play out here anyway because most LLL types don't actually know very much about our political system and even less about the facts in the Plame affair.
The jury that convicted Libby was a crime against justice, hand picked from the craziest denizens of DC to "Get Rove". The plan was for Fitzgerald to roll Libby to get Karl Rove. But his case disintegrated so he settled for just screwing Libby over. That jury looked more like the Daily Kos than America.
If you want a perfect AB comparison of justice in DC, Libby was going to prison for, worst case, political ass covering of the sort that happens every minute of every day in DC (at bes for only having a bad memory) while Sandy "Pants Burgler" Berger walked after finally being cornered by the facts and CONFESSING to stealing classified documents by stuffing them into his pants/socks/etc to remove them from the National Archives for the purpose of destroying them. What they were we will of course never know, only that they were incriminating enough to somebody (Bill, Hillary?) to justify such an extreme effort to destroy them.
> It also makes a mockery of Bush's promise to punish the guilty.
Only problem is that nobody was guilty, especially Libby.
> Letting a guy obstruct justice is not "finding the leak" as he promissed.
There couldn't be any obstruction of justice because the fucking clown Fitzgerald knew all of the facts before he had his DC office up and running.... but that didn't stop the months and months of circus. Bush didn't sack anyone for leaking because the leak didn't come from the White House. It came from a disgruntled ex State Dept hack by the name of Richard Armitage. None of the facts I just cited are even in dispute, even the fact that Fitzgerald IS a "fucking clown" it is just that Democrats love him for being their fucking clown.
Now I certainly wouldn't want to stop Slashdot from it's daily hate ritual so carry on.....
> Yes, the RSX can't be used in ps3 linux...
This is true, 3D support is the only think Sony is holding out on and you don't need that for a media center. They do give you direct YUV video modes at all of the standard HD modes and that is probably good enough. Especially with all those Cell units available to do de-interlacing, upscaling, onscreen display overlays or whatever else needs doing.
$600 for a kick ass myth front end isn't unreasonable on it's own. Compare and contrast to putting together an EPIA and compare how useful each would be as a front end. The EPIA would be (almost) equally useless at 3D, have far far less CPU power and unless you spent serious coin on a case wouldn't look as good. On the other hand the EPIA is mostly x86 compatible, meaning it can run all of the plugins and external codecs and can actually run MythTV today. So today it is advantage EPIA, tomorrow....?
Last time I looked, the box had no onboard storage, no component, DVI or HDMI i/o and not nearly enough compute power to need HD outputs. In other words it is an SD device is an HD world, and an underspecced device for a lot of SD uses. The lack of even an S-Video output was when I stopped reading. USB1 is also pathetic these days.
Having brought out a product the manufacturer couldn't think of a use for they threw magic "Open Source" pixie dust on it hoping we could think of things to do with it. Which is better than nothing, but why not give us a slightly more commercially viable platform to work with?
> Of course, it helped that the enemy that we faced was morally bankrupt
> and couldn't have possibly won the cold war.
Yup, but the genuis of RWR was in realizing that the way to defeat the Soviets was by breaking the taboo on SAYING that. Before Reagan 'all right thinking people' believed: (or were too afraid to disagree with in public)
1. That socialism was the future.
2. That the Cold War was either just a dick size contest between two 'great powers; equally bent on world domination' or just the death rattle of the West as we finally accepted the socialist future. Basically either a moral equivelence or the West as villian.
Reagan was having none of that crap, he pronounced the Soviets as "The focus of evil in the modern world", "destined for the dustbin of history" and summed up the Cold Was simply as "We win, they lose."
By actually saying these things it forced people to either accept it or argue against it. Because when the Cold War was just a dick size contest most of Europe could straddle the fence or even dangle their feet over the wall onto the Soviet side. But once Reagan called em 'Evil" those people had few choices. Argue that they weren't evil (a very hard argument to make) or admit it and say "yay evil!" Morally bankrupt people (the French come to mind) don't mind making a deal with the devil, so long as people don't KNOW they are making a deal with the devil, appearances matter.
So yes, SDI, the defense buildup, the 600 ship navy, etc. helped financially bankrupt the Soviets. Arming the Afgans and causing the 'invincibility' of the Soviet military machine to come into question helped defeat the Soviets. But the biggest weapon was the Will & the Word. Ronald reagan's having the courage and clarity of moral vision to speak truth to power forced Evil to retreat.
The current problem's solution is equally obvious.
> Does anyone know if I'd be able to connect a USB hard drive and a USB soundcard and run musicpd on it?
Probabaly not. Yes it has the plugs to connect a USB hdd and a USB sound device, and yes you could get power in through the USB plug fairly easy. But this device is clocked a wee bit slow (and has no FPU) to make OGG or FLAC playback very likely. Don't know about AAC. MP3 would probably be good to go though.
You need to climb the power curve just a wee bit. Go take a look at what gumstix.com has to offer. They can set you up wuth a wee little thing that clocks at up to 600Mhz and can attach a stereo audio output directly. It still doesn't have floating point but at up to 600Mhz and enough ram to waste on optimization out the wazoo you can probably power your way through OGG/FLAC/AAC anyway.
Although I do like the idea of this new device. Just need to think of a job it can handle.
> There is a reason the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, and it has nothing to do with government control.
Too bad that is mostly a myth in the US. Our rich don't tend to be inherited wealth, somebody earns it (usually by merit) and their desendents piss it away in a generation or two. And the poor don't get poorer, our standard of living is increasing in all social classes. Is it even fair to use the word 'poor' to describe teh less well off in the US when the #1 health problem for the 'poor' is obesiety? Go to the third world and get back to me once you see what poverty looks like.
You are making a common mistake, assuming people are 'poor' because they don't have much money. More often than not they don't have any money because they are poor. 'Poor' is a state of mind. Poor people don't value education, fail to plan for their future, manage money poorly, have expensive and destructive vices (drugs, booze, tobacco, gambling) that leave them unable to save/invest and other traits that lead to them occupying the lower positions on the social ladder. If you took a hundred people from all social strata and tossed them on an island with exactly equal resources, within a year the existing pecking order would re-emerge virtually unchanged. A couple of frat boy trust funders would be unable to reattain their old position and a couple of the less well off might react well to the stress and rise. But overall the majority would stay unchanged.
Yes it is offtopic but this sort of economic illiteracy is rampant on slashdot so every once in awhile I try to correct one of you government educated types.
> The market fails to allocate resources efficiently in the case of natural monopoly, imbalance of information, and externalities.
There are only a few 'natural monopolies' most ultimatly being trackable to government action. But yes, even the great free market economists agree that it is proper role of a legitimate government to protect against monopoly. Imbalance of information tends to sorrect itself, especially with this new fangled Internet thingie. And yes, externalities can be a proper role for the government of a Free People to regulate, within reason.
> There is a reason all countries gave up laissez faire: it didn't work, and led to horrible, horrible abuses.
Yes, 'all right thinking people' around the turn of the century fell into the delusion that socialism was the future. We still haven't counted all of the bodies resulting from that madness. Name one socialist country that, at a minimum, didn't turn into an economic basket case? Most ended up with mass graves and eventually a tyrant being deposed from his iron throne. Do I really need to enumerate the list? Even Europe is finally waking up and smelling the marketplace. A Free market is like a Representitive form of government, pretty much the worst system you can think of....with the exception of every other system tried.
That is until you actually understand them, then they are both beautiful. And inseperable. Eliminate one and the other will surely wither and die. Let one become well established and the other will follow. The Soviets learned this, China will soon enough. Free Markets are the only way for a Free People to deal with one another.
A hundred years ago, when we had a more Newtonian mechanical view of the universe it was at least a defensible position to argue for a planned economy, safe in the delusion that a system as complex as a modern economy could be comprehended by any group of 'experts' well enough to make all of the decisions in an enlightened and efficient way. Hyack pretty much demolished all that back in the 1950's. And since his work we have learned a lot more about emergent systems, chaos theory, general economic theory, such that an educated, enlightened person can no more believe in socialsm than they can believe in the tooth fairy. That and the millions of bodies that resulted from every attempt at a planned economy should be enough to convince even the less mentally adept. Pretty simple actually, Socialism == mass graves, poverty and guards shooting people trying to flee tyranny. Liberty and Free Markets == prosperity, happiness and people trying to get INTO your country.
> The free market is a good thing... BUT it needs be controlled in order to stay free!
Exactly 180 degrees wrong. A Free Market must be UNControlled to reap it's advantages over state control. Which is why the ISP game is falling apart. You can call it a lot of things, but a Free Market is NOT one of them. What we have currently is just about everyone getting their Internet from one of two government granted/controlled/regulated monopolies. In one corner you have your Government controlled Telco monopoly. And in the other you have your government controlled cable monopoly. Did I hear someone in the back of the class say wireless? Yea... operated in most markets by the government controlled teleco monopoly and at any rate strangled by the ever changing whims of the FCC.
What we need is competition in the ISP game. Back when most people had dialup and most markets were served by a dozen dialup ISPs the idea of ad inserts might have been viable with the really cut rate ISPs serving the extremely value conscious customer but a premium service would have have known it would be suicide to even try something like this.
How to get it? It is really simple, so simple the government will of course never do it. Break up the phone company (and it IS 'the phone company' again in most of the US, Ma Bell has reassembled herself) and this time do it right. Break the phone company into two parts:
1) The phone company customers see. Sells local, long distance, DSL, whatever in a totally unregulated marketplace... along with anyone else who cares to join the fun.
2) The utility that owns the wire, rights of way and the building part of the CO. They are a highly regulated government utility with a monopoly. They sell access to their plant to all comers at rates established by the PUC. They operate the fleet of trucks and bill out the cost of maintaining the physical plant as part of the rate they charge telecom operators and bill the end customers (by passing the charge upstream) for inside wiring. Still a publicly traded stock, just like every other public utility,low growth but paying a nice dividend.
Give the cable companies a date certain when their fun also comes to an end, when they will be split into the same two parts and the physical plant will eventually be merged with the telco monopoly. Lots of fun getting the finances on the stock split/merger right, but it is a one time bump and if done right the shareholders will be happy.
> To have a man-in-the-middle, all you need is a certificate signed by an authority that your computer trusts. The ISP can surely get that.
Give this man a cookie, or at least a mod point.
Once they manage to get your browser loaded up with a CA they control it is game over. Imagine, you type www.chase.com into your browser. Remember, THEY also operate your DNS. They resolve www.chase.com to an address they control and generate a certificate linking www.chase.com to that IP. Meanwhile their proxy server connects to the real https://www.chase.com/ and retrieves the homepage. Then their faked out server reencrypts the content and their inserted ad and sends it on to your browser which displays it with the lock intact.
This is what the various secure DNS proposals are intended to address. DNS hijacking allows almost any abuse in the higher layers.
> Why is it that we support people who try to disprove our most well established theories in physics?
Because whether or not a cherished theory in physics gets confirmed or flames out doesn't involve trillions of dollars, the rise and fall of political dynasties and the great political question of our times. Yes physics depts have politics too, but in the end they are all physics geeks. Global warming got caught up in so much larger political movements that it is no longer possible to say ANYTHING on the subject without it being perceived in mzany quarters as more of a political argument than a scientific one. Worse, politicians, journalists, authors and pundits now have careers riding on the question, not just scientists. Doubt many Senators have anything riding on the question of black holes being disproved or validated.
> Hmmm...let's see: was there any such 9/11/01 attack prior to Bush taking office?
Oh God, I'm actually going to argue with an idiot "Truther." But this shit needs to be answered instead of ignored. When you morons first started spouting this nonsense sane people ignored you, but recent surveys show your sickness has now infected large segments of the socialist/left/netcrazies population.
Guess you forgot the first attempt to knock the WTC down during the Clinton Administration. Or the multitude of attacks on US interests outside the US going back to the Iran hostage incident. No, lets forget all that, because terrorism didn't exist until Bushitler invented it as a method of inducing fear amongst the sheeple so he could become dictator for life. And lets forget that you morons can't even agree whether Bushitler is the stupidist person ever to hold high office or the most cunning evil genius ever born.
No Occams Razor for you. You reject the simple plain Truth and invent wild conspiracy theories. But straight up, for a multitude of reasons there are now about a billion people who want us and our entire way of life wiped from the map and even the history books. Most aren't willing to actually do more than cheer on the few engaged in actual war with us at the moment but it gives the terrorists ample support and cover. If even 0.1% are potential combatants that gives a million foes, honoring no rule of civilized warfare, willing to use WMD the second they cab manufactire, buy or steal one and utterly devoted to our total destruction. They can't be reasoned with, they must be hunted down and killed. The sooner we face that and get serious about our task the better our odds of survival.
Next we have to find a way to drain the swamp that breeds these fanatics. It doesn't look like Bush's plan to do it by spreading the blessings of liberty is working out so we need a plan B. And I really hope we come up with one because in the end, if we don't find a better way, it will come down to us or them. And I'd hate to see the West have to massacre that many people.
> Hmmm.....so let's completely destablize the Middle East by attacking the one secular country not involved with
> 9/11/01 attacks and which Osama (you might remember he's supposed to have something to do with that stuff)
> considers his mortal enemies.
Considering what was passing for 'stable' in the Middle East, sure! Primitive 7th century theocracies and dictators who can only agree that killing jews and Americans is good thing? Blow that status quo right the hell up! We (unwisely in my humble opinion) turned a blind eye to the horrible conditions in the ME for decades in the interest of 'stability'. That might have had a certain logic during the Cold War but we are paying a terrible price now.
And no, Saddam was not directly involved in 9/11. But the guy WAS a direct sponsor of terrorism and was growing a relationship with Al Qaeda despite their differences, remember that agreement on killing jews and Americans tends to trump all of their other differences when it comes crunch time. Lets remember just how many known terrorists were publicly sheltered by Saddam. Lets remember that Saddam was openly sponsoring multiple terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East. Saddam was directly paying the families of suicide bombers to encourage more to kill civilians. Lets remember that the US (and UN endorsed Coalition) was still formally at War with Iraq. Until Saddam was certified as in compliance with the terms of the Cease Fire a formal state was War remained.
> Over 1/2 a trillion dollars spent - still no Osama and the Taliban are stronger than ever -
Not even in the same ballpark with objective reality. Before we invaded Afganistan the Taliban were the undisputed rulers, openly oppressing damn near everyone and giving Al Qaeda a free hand to run training camps, etc. No the Taliban are not defeated, operating now out of remote areas of Pakistan, but they no longer
Ok, an internal audit found a few (a couple dozen so this piece says) places where they probably crossed the line. They found a problem and will now see what policy changes can be made to reduce the chances of it happening again. The system worked as designed. Massive government operation makes mistakes, film at 11. Hello! It's a massive inefficient government operation changed with the almost impossible task of doing both law enforcement AND anti terrorism/counter insurgency operations while Democtats insist they do it with both hands tied behind their backs and hopping on one foot. The amazing thing is they have managed to keep anything from going FOOM! for almost six years and only having a few excersions from the insane rules imposed on them.
Listen up you primitive screwheads, I really think we should be playing to win, if we keep screwing around with these assholes, sooner or later they are going to get another major win and we will lose another major landmark. There is a difference between law enforcement against citizens and spying on foreign powers and their operatives inside our shores. So yes there should be strong safeguards to prevent intelligence data (collected with few rules) from crossing back into law enforcement activities, but spy vs spy stuff can't play under the same patticake rules we go after the mob under or we lose. Because the mob isn't out to KILL us, only sell us things we want anyway but the nanny state doesn't think we should have.
No. There is no GNU operating system.... yet.
GNU is the ultimate goal of the FSF, one which it has never realized and probably never will. However the name GNU should be reserved for it's coming. Even if it will be sometime after the sequel to DNF hits. It is the delays in GNU which have lead to Linux supremancy and caused RMS to go off his nut and try to lay claim to things that aren't his to claim.
Look at it thusly. The FSF and the GNU project have released many parts of an OS, which have been adopted into many environments, including Linux but also including Solaris, Windows, *BSD and MacOS. None would try slapping the GNU label on any of those other platforms for using FSF tools. But mostly because the distro should get the right to name the collection. Redhat isn't trying to finish GNU, SuSE isn't trying to finish GNU.
Debian was originally trying to finish GNU and would have been correct to apply that name but were cast out of the FSF clubhouse for being too impure. Thus it is wrong for them to attempt to confuse people into thinking they are still GNU. And even if they patched things up with the FSF someday they should avoid the / because Linux is a registered trademark and eventually GNU probably will be. Trademarks are supposed to have whitespace around them and should not be mixed. On the other hand, since they have Debian with a variety of kernels it does make a bit more sense when they use the / because it is probably the least awkward way of saying it. But today they should be saying Debian / Linux, Debian / HURD, etc.
> Yeah but when you get into the real world you have to use microsoft products anyway.
As addressed in the article, had you bothered to RTFA, it doesn't matter. If you teach word processing instead of Word that is. And you had better be doing that because the version of Word you are teaching on (likely to be a version or two behind already) will almost certainly be obsolete by the times the kiddies enter the labor force. Software changes, see the Ribbon if you don't believe me. "Gotta teach what everyone else uses" is just a crutch to avoid change. By that logic everyone would still be using Word Perfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase.
No, the problem I hit is 'must have' software that has to have Windows. From the crappy Reader Rabbit level stuff in the lower grades to Accelerated Reader in the later ones to state mandated testing software that only works in IE on Windows, etc.
Even worse the schools here love to spend money on crap. Why would anyone spend for PC Anywhere when VNC is free and works? But they do. And yea, they get the licenses really cheap but new Netware servers everywhere? Yup. Supposedly it is some dependency on a mandated package somewhere.
Still no reason not to try infecting as many schools as we can with Free stuff that runs on Windows. Eventaully we might get a few of em adopted.
> So you're going to suggest the "low end" Mac to your web-surfing, pr0n-hording friends why?
;) So why do I keep doing it? So they will bug someone else when they buy the piece of crap Dell and want someone to disinfect it every month or so.
I don't know about the original poster, you are right about him probably being a hopeless fanboi. But I also recommend Macs and I'm a Linux bigot. Why? There is method in my madness!
First lets be blunt a bout what it means when a friend/family asks me to recommend a machine. What they are really asking me to to is become their support person for life. Any geek who knows me well enough to be asking for advice will probably be ready for the Penguin, at least a dual boot. But for the rest I recommend they buy a Mac. Were they to actually do that I wouldn't mind providing them with support because they wouldn't need much. But I have yet to actually sell anyone on a Mac because a) there ins't anyplace within a hundred miles to actually see/buy one and b) they cost too much for people out here in flyover country... which kinda explains the first point.
> I used to be a hardware junkie. I could rattle off the 8086, 80286, 80386, 80386SX (no math coprocessor),
> 486, and 486SX, in all the MHz flavors.
Nope, the 386SX was a 386 instruction set compatible processor with a 286 bus to allow easy reuse of existing motherboard designs. The 486SX was the one with the lobotomized mathco. Not nit picking ya, just using it as an example to confirm your proposition. If even us junkies have trouble telling the buzzwords and stats apart how the hell is joe average going to have a prayer? Answer: he doesn't. He does what you do and grab an emachines from Wallyworld or Best Buy... or more likely becomes one more dude with a Dell.
But one thing is certain, the trend is down. Unless we have another major round of software bloating the number of people who are happy with a minimal machine is growing. This means the magic place is >$1000 on a laptop and $500 for a desktop. Apple doesn't even try to compete in that space and I suspect Microsoft is going to have trouble with Vista if the bar lowers yet again. See the article on slashdot this week about Asus and their $200 laptop like device coming this summer to a store near you. That is the future, and adding $100 for the Microsoft tax at that price point ain't happening.
Try this experiment if you really want to see what could happen. Go to newegg.com (or any similar site) and see how much desktop you can get for $200. Any volume manufacturer could buy those same basic parts, apply some massive integration, cheap plastic case, etc and sell em on pallets to Walmart at a wholesale price low enough to allow Wallyworld to sell finished boxes for that same $200. To date that hasn't happened because of the question of what to load. Microsoft is too expensive to make the plan viable and they fear a bad reaction if they stick Linux on, probably[1] rightly. But the power of the market is powerful, so someone will eventually figure a way to tap it.
So in the end, both Apple and Microsoft are most likely to be defeated by an inability to readjust their pricing model quickly enough. And if Dell, etc. isn't careful they will go with em. Computers are about to become consumer electronics. That means high volume, low margin. Even Dell still gets amrgins most CE corps only dream of.
[1] Because most people don't even realize anything but Windows exists, especially the Walmart set. Thus when they can't load World of Warcrack, etc. many will try to return it and Walmart takes almost anything back.
> Admittedly, there are issues with not having any hardware warranty, but do we need to get so incendiary...
Yes. It isn't about the specific details, it is the attitude. They aren't treating Linux users like customers expect to be treated.
Some extra hoops because their support org isn't up to speed is understandable, especially if they are nice about it and explain what is going on. But refusing coverage without a drastic price cut (after sales support is a BIG chunk of the sticker price) just doesn't cut it.
Their problem is that, unlike Microsoft, they don't have a monopoly. IBM/Lenovo doesn't give me any problems with hardware failures. They are bright enough to know that the OS doesn't matter if the LCD cable goes bad, hinges fail, power connectors come loose from the MB, hard drives crap out, etc. They send the box, I stick the laptop in it and they make it right. Evenever I can I don't even send the hard drive in. They usually don't know and don't care what OS is loaded.
Since Dell is preloading, they really can't get away with voiding the warranty. There are laws against that sort fo thing.
> either get the bigger disks you want now, or plan on rebuilding the array down the road
Not at all, these days one does have better options than rebuilding a blank array. Read up on LVM, it is powerful stuff.
Replace the drives in the array one at a time, allowing time for the array to rebuild. Then you can grow the volume to make use of the extra capacity. Yes it will require some planning and will probably take a week to slowly merge in the new set of drives, but it sure beats a bare metal restore because you can still be recording and watching video while all this rebuilding and resizing is happening.
Don't really know how much of the above applies to Windows, haven't seriously used it in a decade; so sometone else will have to supply details on it's volume management flexibility.