Hey, I like rap. How about 95% of country music is trash? 95% of techno is trash? 95% of punk is trash? 99.99999996% of pop is trash?
Each one is probably true to someone (the latter being true to most people, I'd say). Suffice to say that we're lucky that YOUR personal tastes in music don't dictate the market.
Strangely enough, if you get out from behind your console and go to a bar or club, you'll find plenty of people listening to rap or hip hop, and *gasp* enjoying it!
Besides, what do the no name artists care if they get raped in the money department? They get their $800 a week for a month or two, and they get played. Strangely enough, if you make good music, people listen. I know people who've done a lot worse things just to get their music listened to - for free! (Ever see Airheads, eh? Ok, bad example, but it's true.)
And really. It's not about power. It's about money. So don't be a toff.
So true. But it gives you the skills you need to really get work done on real projects - especially on internships. Frankly, most interns don't know shit, and get stuck deleting cursewords from comments, and things like "/* Drunk now, will finish later. */", but if you show them you know your serious shit, it doesn't really matter where you picked it up.
Personally, I like to say, "Over 6 years experience programming in a large-project coordinated group environment." and then if they ask I can explain that I administer an online multiuser game, where I personally wrote upwards of 50% of the code in the 120,000 line mudlib.
...in a group environment, with schedules, deadlines, and 'clients', then save a dying breed and help code on a MUD.
I've got something like 6 years of experience coding for a MUD, and it's taught me several things. Not the least of which is this: 1) Your clients (players) are rarely, if ever, unanimously happy with your project. 2) Every other coder will try and avoid working, right up until the deadline. Sometimes after. 3) 99% of all code is boring, monotonous code. 4) If you really want something done, do it yourself.
Books had pretty good copy protection going for quite a while. No one wants to hand-copy 500 pages of a book to make $0.35 profit per copy. Except maybe monks, but they give it away anyway.
Hell, books would've had the perfect protection if it weren't for those damn libraries! Like Napsters of the past-- er... wait.
You want perfect copy protection for your songs? Label them all "Barbara Streisand", or, better yet, sing them in Kazbechiztanian. See if anyone bothers copying them then.
You've just barely missed the heart of the 'net. The heart of the 'net is the one guy sitting at a term directly on an OC-768 backbone trolling the web for Britney Spears pictures, eating cheetos, and chatting on AIM.
It's what we're all doing, but he's got the OC-768, and that makes all the difference.
So the answer should NOT be to steal the shareware, but to just download Free-as-in-Beer or Free-as-in-Speech software.
That's why I love Linux - So many of the programs I rely upon are Free with a big ole capital F. And then I don't feel guilty when I see that I've been using WinZip for 543 days without buying it, although that does make me chuckle still.
And the wonderful thing is that most of the Free software out there is every bit as good as the shareware versions of the same idea. Probably because the shareware guys make just about as much as the Free guys, e.g. nothing. But that's another argument altogether.
Hmm....
I wonder.
Do you think the Feds are profiling the passengers destined for the ISS too?
*grin*
Maybe they could work together? The Feds could profile the possible space tourists, and the NASA folks could drop big chunks of metal on unsuspecting FBI wanted persons. Imagine if the Waco holdout had ended with a
giant flaming piece of debris crashed into the compound at 30,000mph. Ah, the possibilities.
I think this has little to do with supporting corporate power, and more to do with people who have a reputation for distinctly arguing against the space station.
Personally, I'd rather not see the ISS crash into the atmosphere because a disgruntled green-peacer took a hammer to some of the control panels.
Would you want a known child molester watching your children at a day care?
Whoops, my mistake. I thought Adobe owned the PDF format (wouldn't put it past 'em, after that e-book crap), but I guess it makes sense since I can use xpdf for free (I just wasn't thinking in particular about it).
However, the point was: Why mention it's a PDF at all? It's not like it's relevant to a comparison of the relative complexity of setting up one or the other. If anything, a plain text version is *more* accessible than PDF - it might be a disadvantage.
And I have no problem learning how to set up one. One of the advantages of linux is precisely that: It's easy to teach yourself how to do things because there's loads of documentation out there on how to do it (apparently 230 pages in this case). I'm not saying that Macs don't have the same thing going for them. I don't use Macs, so I don't go looking for Mac documentation.
Some might argue that the fact that I have to look for documentation at all is indicative of the fact that it is hard to configure/setup/fix things. I would argue that it's pretty darned easy (e.g. ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.0.255 is as easy as going through the Windows GUI networking setup to do the same thing, with less pointing & clicking on the mouse, which personally gets annoying for me... keyboard to mouse to keyboard to mouse to back again.) The trick is finding out what the command is. And truthfully, I know people who couldn't setup their IP in Windows because they, quite simply, don't know where to look. It's the same problem.
And with the addition of 'nifty' tools like Drakconf, it becomes *exactly* the same problem.
Er... what was my point again? Oh yeah. If you give me 100 Linux boxen, I'll setup and admin the Beowulf for you.:)
And this is convincing because...?
on
Macintosh Clustering
·
· Score: 3, Informative
They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file.
Yes. Wonderful. This says nothing. This is one of "those" statistics. The Linux "how to" could be 230 pages because it not only tells you how to set it up, but gives you advice on customizing, creating optimized programs, hacking the kernel, and FAQs covering every single problem or question you might have.
The Mac PDF might be an almost blank page that says, "Call tech. support." Furthermore, why mention that it's a PDF at all? Are you saying that it's somehow better to use a proprietary document format (e.g. Proprietary Document Format - PDF, get it?) instead of plain text? Is the information somehow MORE relevant because it's in PDF?
Please. I've seen neither, but all this tells me is that someone wouldn't know a relevant comparison if it widdled on his shoes and stole his wallet.
...or one that would lead to a better answer, is thus: Why is Linus rejecting so many patches? Does he mail the contributer with a little message saying, "Hey, this would be great, except you need to clean up this, this, and this, and just resubmit it," or is there any response at all?
If the case is the former, then I'm willing to bet that so many of these patches are 'rejected' because they're never resubmitted. If it's the latter, then the problem might just be the threshold of what can be handled.
So what's the solution? Well, there's always the possibility of thinking along the lines of a community. If a group of people come up with a lot of patches, which together work towards a goal, e.g. making RtCW run better, then they could spend the time auditing each others' code, and submit it as one, larger, and certainly more worthwhile whole.
After all, if there was a patch that managed to get an extra 3 FPS out of RtCW, not many would bother. If there was a group of patches, or rather, one large patch, which resulted in an extra 30 FPS, with a step up in resolution, and a faster network throughput (damn you, high ping times!) then it would most certainly be worth while.
RtCW is just a hypothetical example, but I'm sure it can be applied to many other subjects... even the idea of collecting a slew of previously rejected bug-fixes, which still exist, would be more worthwhile than just fixing one, rare-to-occur bug. Right? Right. Glad we agree.
What if you run around, open the padlocks on people's sheds but never even open the door? There, you've used the skills to open a lock but was there a crime?
Of course it's a crime. Several crimes, probably. Not the least of which is tresspassing. You could probably get the "breaking" half of "breaking and entry", although I don't know if that's a crime in and of itself. What happens if you open those locks, don't get caught tresspassing, but someone notices you, and follows you around making off with all the power tools in all the sheds? Aiding and abetting? Accomplice before the fact?
But if it's *your* lock, and it's *your* shed, you can go and pick it all day long, and then you can invite a bunch of friends over for a BBQ, and entertain them by picking it, and then discuss the finer arts of picking it with them. *That's* not illegal.
Except he said the trailers looked pretty good - so the trailers didn't tell him that. The real question is why would anyone listen to Jon Katz instead of their buddy who saw it opening night?
So... you're saying that before you went to do this impartial review of the movie, you went and listened to how everyone else said it was really bad? Don't you think that might have clouded*cough* your judgement? I mean, people see what they expect to see, and if you were expecting crap, perhaps that's all you saw.
Personally, I haven't seen the movie. But what's the point of having the review at all if the first line of it simply says: I was very prejudiced against this movie before I even saw it, now here's my unbiased review. (Although, most of us recognise that Katz is rarely, if ever, approaching unbiased... but that's a small point).
That's not entirely true. Traits which allow a species to better itself in ways beyond reproduction would also allow it better chances of survival, and hence be a result of evolution. That's why species such as us, which have the trait of teaching our offspring techinques to help them survive (and later do much more things), can completely dominate their surrounding ecosystem.
Think of this: Apes which teach their children to 'fish' for insects with a stick in the ground have just provided their offspring with another source of food.
So what's the point of this, you say? Well, up until very recent times 'old people' were the repositories of collected knowledge of the world. If a tribe had an elder who had seen a particular disease before, or knew all the herbs of their locality, then the tribe as a whole would have a better chance of surviving, and evolution takes a part.
So why menopause? Well, up until recently childbirth was very, very dangerous for women. Some hypothesize that menopause may have evolved in part to avoid this older, more fragile ladies dying in childbirth, thus preserving the knowledge for the rest of their tribe, or family, or whatever social unit they had. So when these early humans started displaying menopausal traits, it makes sense that their offspring, benefitting from the elder's knowledge, had a higher survival rate, hence, evolution makes it happen.
That's just one theory anyhow.
As for cancer - some argue that it's as much a way of keeping the DNA clean as survival of the fittest itself. Apparently some recent studies have shown that cancer can be triggered by causing damage to the DNA in the cells, so when a species gets a high rate of 'bad' DNA, e.g. through inbreeding, small gene pool, or living next to a power plant, then the cancer rate increases. What's strange about this is that it comes towards the latter part of the average lifespan, most of the time... but hey, we don't understand everything anyway.
So how long is it before we start seeing amature holographic pornography? Oh sure, they'd have to stand there for a while, but wouldn't it be worth it?
Now, instead of knifing their way into the cockpit, they can hack into the plane and take over the autopilot, all across a wonderful high bandwidth connection, so they don't need to fret about losing packets.
Or even better, maybe they'll get lucky and the planes will pick some Windows variant to provide the routing, and then the terrorsts can just write worms to do their job for them. If you thought the idea of www.whitehouse.gov being flooded by hundreds of thousands of worms going off at the same time, wait until you suddenly see every single broadband-connected plane drop out of the sky at say, 8:00pm on a Friday evening.
I can't wait to see the sort of terrorism that ensues when *everything* is connected.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I like rap. How about 95% of country music is trash? 95% of techno is trash? 95% of punk is trash? 99.99999996% of pop is trash?
Each one is probably true to someone (the latter being true to most people, I'd say). Suffice to say that we're lucky that YOUR personal tastes in music don't dictate the market.
Strangely enough, if you get out from behind your console and go to a bar or club, you'll find plenty of people listening to rap or hip hop, and *gasp* enjoying it!
Besides, what do the no name artists care if they get raped in the money department? They get their $800 a week for a month or two, and they get played. Strangely enough, if you make good music, people listen. I know people who've done a lot worse things just to get their music listened to - for free! (Ever see Airheads, eh? Ok, bad example, but it's true.)
And really. It's not about power. It's about money. So don't be a toff.
So true. But it gives you the skills you need to really get work done on real projects - especially on internships. Frankly, most interns don't know shit, and get stuck deleting cursewords from comments, and things like "/* Drunk now, will finish later. */", but if you show them you know your serious shit, it doesn't really matter where you picked it up.
Personally, I like to say, "Over 6 years experience programming in a large-project coordinated group environment." and then if they ask I can explain that I administer an online multiuser game, where I personally wrote upwards of 50% of the code in the 120,000 line mudlib.
If you believe that, try writing an LPC mudlib from scratch.
^_^
...in a group environment, with schedules, deadlines, and 'clients', then save a dying breed and help code on a MUD.
I've got something like 6 years of experience coding for a MUD, and it's taught me several things. Not the least of which is this:
1) Your clients (players) are rarely, if ever, unanimously happy with your project.
2) Every other coder will try and avoid working, right up until the deadline. Sometimes after.
3) 99% of all code is boring, monotonous code.
4) If you really want something done, do it yourself.
You get what you pay for. And if you really don't like it, do it yourself. Isn't that the open source way?
Books had pretty good copy protection going for quite a while. No one wants to hand-copy 500 pages of a book to make $0.35 profit per copy. Except maybe monks, but they give it away anyway.
Hell, books would've had the perfect protection if it weren't for those damn libraries! Like Napsters of the past-- er... wait.
You want perfect copy protection for your songs? Label them all "Barbara Streisand", or, better yet, sing them in Kazbechiztanian. See if anyone bothers copying them then.
Hey, opera's had it since its inception. Good to see everyone else is catching on.
Me? I use XFCE, with Opera 5.01 (for Linux plugin support). Why? XFCE has everything I ever used in KDE, and Opera rocks.
And XFCE runs a lot lighter and has a lot better window docking support for non XFCE-specific apps (e.g. all of them).
Yarg.
I seem to remember that being a porno mag under that blanket... er... wait.
Anyway, isn't it more likely that kids these days will have a handheld 3" TV before they'll have a book under the covers?
Do kids even read any more these days, or have they all gone illiterate?
...for my bedroom, so I can identify the girl when I wake up in the morning.
Hey, yeah, you're wrong. I like seeing them here. I get them when I see them here. Sod off.
You've just barely missed the heart of the 'net. The heart of the 'net is the one guy sitting at a term directly on an OC-768 backbone trolling the web for Britney Spears pictures, eating cheetos, and chatting on AIM.
It's what we're all doing, but he's got the OC-768, and that makes all the difference.
First post? Yeah. It's lame.
So the answer should NOT be to steal the shareware, but to just download Free-as-in-Beer or Free-as-in-Speech software.
That's why I love Linux - So many of the programs I rely upon are Free with a big ole capital F. And then I don't feel guilty when I see that I've been using WinZip for 543 days without buying it, although that does make me chuckle still.
And the wonderful thing is that most of the Free software out there is every bit as good as the shareware versions of the same idea. Probably because the shareware guys make just about as much as the Free guys, e.g. nothing. But that's another argument altogether.
Hmm....
I wonder.
Do you think the Feds are profiling the passengers destined for the ISS too?
*grin*
Maybe they could work together? The Feds could profile the possible space tourists, and the NASA folks could drop big chunks of metal on unsuspecting FBI wanted persons. Imagine if the Waco holdout had ended with a
giant flaming piece of debris crashed into the compound at 30,000mph. Ah, the possibilities.
I think this has little to do with supporting corporate power, and more to do with people who have a reputation for distinctly arguing against the space station.
Personally, I'd rather not see the ISS crash into the atmosphere because a disgruntled green-peacer took a hammer to some of the control panels.
Would you want a known child molester watching your children at a day care?
Whoops, my mistake. I thought Adobe owned the PDF format (wouldn't put it past 'em, after that e-book crap), but I guess it makes sense since I can use xpdf for free (I just wasn't thinking in particular about it).
:)
However, the point was: Why mention it's a PDF at all? It's not like it's relevant to a comparison of the relative complexity of setting up one or the other. If anything, a plain text version is *more* accessible than PDF - it might be a disadvantage.
And I have no problem learning how to set up one. One of the advantages of linux is precisely that: It's easy to teach yourself how to do things because there's loads of documentation out there on how to do it (apparently 230 pages in this case). I'm not saying that Macs don't have the same thing going for them. I don't use Macs, so I don't go looking for Mac documentation.
Some might argue that the fact that I have to look for documentation at all is indicative of the fact that it is hard to configure/setup/fix things. I would argue that it's pretty darned easy (e.g. ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.0.255 is as easy as going through the Windows GUI networking setup to do the same thing, with less pointing & clicking on the mouse, which personally gets annoying for me... keyboard to mouse to keyboard to mouse to back again.) The trick is finding out what the command is. And truthfully, I know people who couldn't setup their IP in Windows because they, quite simply, don't know where to look. It's the same problem.
And with the addition of 'nifty' tools like Drakconf, it becomes *exactly* the same problem.
Er... what was my point again? Oh yeah. If you give me 100 Linux boxen, I'll setup and admin the Beowulf for you.
They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file.
Yes. Wonderful. This says nothing. This is one of "those" statistics. The Linux "how to" could be 230 pages because it not only tells you how to set it up, but gives you advice on customizing, creating optimized programs, hacking the kernel, and FAQs covering every single problem or question you might have.
The Mac PDF might be an almost blank page that says, "Call tech. support." Furthermore, why mention that it's a PDF at all? Are you saying that it's somehow better to use a proprietary document format (e.g. Proprietary Document Format - PDF, get it?) instead of plain text? Is the information somehow MORE relevant because it's in PDF?
Please. I've seen neither, but all this tells me is that someone wouldn't know a relevant comparison if it widdled on his shoes and stole his wallet.
...or one that would lead to a better answer, is thus: Why is Linus rejecting so many patches? Does he mail the contributer with a little message saying, "Hey, this would be great, except you need to clean up this, this, and this, and just resubmit it," or is there any response at all?
If the case is the former, then I'm willing to bet that so many of these patches are 'rejected' because they're never resubmitted. If it's the latter, then the problem might just be the threshold of what can be handled.
So what's the solution? Well, there's always the possibility of thinking along the lines of a community. If a group of people come up with a lot of patches, which together work towards a goal, e.g. making RtCW run better, then they could spend the time auditing each others' code, and submit it as one, larger, and certainly more worthwhile whole.
After all, if there was a patch that managed to get an extra 3 FPS out of RtCW, not many would bother. If there was a group of patches, or rather, one large patch, which resulted in an extra 30 FPS, with a step up in resolution, and a faster network throughput (damn you, high ping times!) then it would most certainly be worth while.
RtCW is just a hypothetical example, but I'm sure it can be applied to many other subjects... even the idea of collecting a slew of previously rejected bug-fixes, which still exist, would be more worthwhile than just fixing one, rare-to-occur bug. Right? Right. Glad we agree.
What if you run around, open the padlocks on people's sheds but never even open the door? There, you've used the skills to open a lock but was there a crime?
Of course it's a crime. Several crimes, probably. Not the least of which is tresspassing. You could probably get the "breaking" half of "breaking and entry", although I don't know if that's a crime in and of itself. What happens if you open those locks, don't get caught tresspassing, but someone notices you, and follows you around making off with all the power tools in all the sheds? Aiding and abetting? Accomplice before the fact?
But if it's *your* lock, and it's *your* shed, you can go and pick it all day long, and then you can invite a bunch of friends over for a BBQ, and entertain them by picking it, and then discuss the finer arts of picking it with them. *That's* not illegal.
Except he said the trailers looked pretty good - so the trailers didn't tell him that. The real question is why would anyone listen to Jon Katz instead of their buddy who saw it opening night?
But why would anyone listen to Jon Katz at all?
Actually, I believe you can pay eBay more to insure it even higher... but you wouldn't want to do that, would you?
Well, some of you warned me, and you were right.
So... you're saying that before you went to do this impartial review of the movie, you went and listened to how everyone else said it was really bad? Don't you think that might have clouded*cough* your judgement? I mean, people see what they expect to see, and if you were expecting crap, perhaps that's all you saw.
Personally, I haven't seen the movie. But what's the point of having the review at all if the first line of it simply says: I was very prejudiced against this movie before I even saw it, now here's my unbiased review. (Although, most of us recognise that Katz is rarely, if ever, approaching unbiased... but that's a small point).
That's not entirely true. Traits which allow a species to better itself in ways beyond reproduction would also allow it better chances of survival, and hence be a result of evolution. That's why species such as us, which have the trait of teaching our offspring techinques to help them survive (and later do much more things), can completely dominate their surrounding ecosystem.
Think of this: Apes which teach their children to 'fish' for insects with a stick in the ground have just provided their offspring with another source of food.
So what's the point of this, you say? Well, up until very recent times 'old people' were the repositories of collected knowledge of the world. If a tribe had an elder who had seen a particular disease before, or knew all the herbs of their locality, then the tribe as a whole would have a better chance of surviving, and evolution takes a part.
So why menopause? Well, up until recently childbirth was very, very dangerous for women. Some hypothesize that menopause may have evolved in part to avoid this older, more fragile ladies dying in childbirth, thus preserving the knowledge for the rest of their tribe, or family, or whatever social unit they had. So when these early humans started displaying menopausal traits, it makes sense that their offspring, benefitting from the elder's knowledge, had a higher survival rate, hence, evolution makes it happen.
That's just one theory anyhow.
As for cancer - some argue that it's as much a way of keeping the DNA clean as survival of the fittest itself. Apparently some recent studies have shown that cancer can be triggered by causing damage to the DNA in the cells, so when a species gets a high rate of 'bad' DNA, e.g. through inbreeding, small gene pool, or living next to a power plant, then the cancer rate increases. What's strange about this is that it comes towards the latter part of the average lifespan, most of the time... but hey, we don't understand everything anyway.
So how long is it before we start seeing amature holographic pornography? Oh sure, they'd have to stand there for a while, but wouldn't it be worth it?
Now, instead of knifing their way into the cockpit, they can hack into the plane and take over the autopilot, all across a wonderful high bandwidth connection, so they don't need to fret about losing packets.
Or even better, maybe they'll get lucky and the planes will pick some Windows variant to provide the routing, and then the terrorsts can just write worms to do their job for them. If you thought the idea of www.whitehouse.gov being flooded by hundreds of thousands of worms going off at the same time, wait until you suddenly see every single broadband-connected plane drop out of the sky at say, 8:00pm on a Friday evening.
I can't wait to see the sort of terrorism that ensues when *everything* is connected.