My favourite theory about porn-site viruses is that they rely on the shame factor- you're far less likely to haul your laptop into PC World's Repair Centre and admit you got stung downloading embarrassing quantities of videos featuring men in nappies being ridden like a horse than you are if you got stung reading some cookery website.
What that says about people's opinion of religious websites I couldn't possibly comment.
That was my assumption on reading TFS. In my (admittedly limited) experience, there are an awful lot of religious sites out there that look like throw-backs to GeoCities and the golden age of MySpace profile pages. I can't imagine the well-meaning pensioners who are likely to set up their local bible study circle website is going to be that au fait with good e-security practices. You'd be lucky if they've even remembered to set an admin password.
If they can only get an expensive, high tax centre pegged to the Deutschmark, they'll just move to London, or York, or whatever.
Completely aside, it tickles me that you would pick York (pop. 200,000, 80th largest city in the UK) as second choice to London (pop. 8 to 14 million, depending what you're counting). Sometimes I think New York, New York has done more to raise the profile of that town to foreigners than a thousand Visit England advertising campaigns.
Closing off a major channel for pirate copies of Windows, at the same time as raising the price for legitimate copies of Windows. To paraphrase Bill Gates, the biggest competitor to Windows is pirated Windows.
Complete nonsense, I think, but that's what the GP was insinuating.
There's no magic formula for IPOs and share offerings. Something can seem like hot property at the IPO, and crash spectacularly months later. My bet is that Facebook is probably pretty much at its peak, with almost complete saturation in the western world, no foothold in non-western markets, and gradually being nibbled away at by competitors like Twitter. From the point of view of "by low sell high", I wouldn't be investing in them now. Indeed, why do you think the owners are selling now (which is what an IPO is)?
I'm obviously not a hotshot investor, so I could be wrong. But I'd have no sympathy for people who invest now if it all goes belly up; the warning signs are there.
Superman = invincible person who has magic powers for no other reason than accident of birth beats up people with advanced PhDs.
That's always been the big mystery of America superhero fiction to me. The heroes are usually powerful by complete accident (just born that way, bitten by a radioactive lab animal, etc.), while the villains have a strong work ethic, work hard, are very intelligent and highly qualified, etc. And the heroes always win. The moral of the story seems to be it doesn't matter if you work hard, you can't overcome dumb luck. And that intelligence and qualifications are something to be wary of.
Maybe it's time to do what all good FOSS fans know to do when times are tough- fork it?
Honestly, if someone set up a new Slashdot-clone, with the same functionality but with an absence of slashverts and marketing nonsense, I'd be a regular.
Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to claim Android was more profitable than Apple or anything daft like that. Apple have been phenomenally successful in the last few years, and are the most valuable company in the world not for no good reason.
But it's clearly ridiculous to claim Android is a "flop" and that "no-one is making money out of it". Samsung is a big business, and yet:
The firm said its IT and mobile communications division, which manufactures the smartphones, made an operating profit of 4.27tn won during the period, as revenues in the division surged 86% from a year earlier.
If Android's top manufacturer is making big profits out of it, in what way is it a flop?
Android is a flop. Hardly anybody is making any money from it and even Google has started to downplay it's significance to them (although this might just be for the sake of the judge in the Oracle lawsuit)....
The most successful Android device is probably the Kindle Fire and Amazon has done a good job of eradicating any signs of Android branding from the device. I suspect most owners have no idea that it's running an Android fork.
Lots of Android phones are sold, but no single Android handset has done particularly well. None have outsold any of the iPhone models (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong).
Give over. Samsung recently overtook Nokia to become the biggest mobile phone maker in the world, with their highest quarterly profits since the recession. It seems to be working out OK for them,
Although no "single handset" might have outsold any single Apple handset, that's a false comparison derived from the fact that Apple only sell one handset. Samsung don't care which of their phones you buy, as long as you're buying one of their phones.
Honestly, I don't see what's so great about Windows 7's GUI. It's fine and all, and I do actually like Windows 7- but it's only marginally different to the paradigm used in XP, 2000, NT, 98, 95...
Unity, Gnome 3, KDE4, they're all very flashy and modern (to the point that it irritates me). Unity & Metro are both coming from the same stable of thought (and both get the same reaction from the/. crowd). Gnome 2, MATE, XFCE, they're all more or less the same as XP/Win7.
How I am even supposed to begin to recommend Linux for the average user when there are 100 different distros, each with its own quirks and issues?
The same way as you would recconmend, say, a car. There are literally hundreds of different models out there, but people don't seem to be baffled into inaction.
Because of the nature of Linux, it doesn't even really matter; the distros share most of the important bits anyway. Whether you use Ubuntu, Debian or Mint, you'll still get the same hardware drivers (which are Linux wide), the same GUIs, the same software (it's trivial to port software from Debian to Ubuntu), the ame everything. It wouldn't matter if every single consumer were using their very own personal distro, as long as they could maintain it.
If you're a Linux user, you'll probably have a favourite distro. If you're ever giving advice to a friend, alway advise they go for that one- if only so you know what they're getting into. Unless your favourite is Slackware, obviously.
That's pretty much it, for consumers. Your average consumer (say, your mum) goes to a shop and buys a computer. They might try it out first. They take it home and plug it in. They use it. They decide if they like it or not. They might let that change their purchase choice a few years down the line, if they care enough; which they probably won't.
At absolutely no point do they think "I should change the operating system on this machine". It just doesn't cross their mind. It no-more occurs to them than "I should change the enging in this car" does when they're driving a Ford Focus.
The only way Linux would ever get popular with home users would be if OEMs started selling polished, well supported machines with it pre-loaded (and no, Xandros on a cheap Asus netbook doesn't tick those boxes). It's basically what Android did/is doing with the phone/tablet market, and it's working fantastically for them.
I am sceptical that this will ever actually happen...
The cost of OS licenses is ridiculously small compared to everything else.
Where desktop workstation hardware might cost £300 a unit, a £100 licence is not "ridiculously small". It's 25% of the total cost. The fact that employee salaries and office rent might be hugely more is beside the point; if you could save 25% of your hardware purchasing budget, you would.
I'm saying this as a Linux cheerleader, but I'm not saying it in necessarily a good way. If saving a large proportion of 25% of the total cost is not an incentive for companies to choose a Linux OS, there must be something else putting them off.
I don't really believe the rest of your post explains it, either. I work for a big company. We pay lots of professionals to maintain our end-user infrastructure. We could easily pay lots of different proffessionals to maintain a different sort of end-user infrastructure. There's no evidence that it would take a team of Linux professionals any longer to do their job than it would a team of Windows professionals to do theirs. The argument is true of home users trying to get their new wireless dongle working or whatnot, but that's just not applicable in a controlled, project-driven, enterprise environment.
First, London is not in the US, so I'm not sure what the fuck any of your post has to do with anything.
He's called "Tom the Pom", so I'm going to guess that he's English. You may not have realised this, but the UK invaded Iraq (get the WMD!) & Afghanistan (get Al Qaeda!) too. We also "renditioned" people to be tortured (former FM Jack Straw is currently being sued for it), held people without trial (check out Abu Qatada, a thoroughly unpleasant man who we're deporting after a decade of imprisonment, despite the minor inconvenience that he's never been convicted of any crimes), and have TSA style airport madness (double the fun when visiting the US)
Unless you've been living in a cave for the last decade, you can get your own citations.
I believe it's September 11 fever again. Despite the fact that that was basically a one off, and (hopefully ) all the (incredibly inconvenient) airport security should be enough to prevent a repeat.
It's just security theatre again, of a different type. The government wants to be absolutely sure that if anything goes wrong, nobody can accuse them of not having done absolutely everything.
Incidentally, when Saddam Hussein stuck weapons emplacements on civilian buildings, we called it using a "human shield", which is a war crime (and rightly so). Not that this is exactly the same thing, but just putting that thought out there.
I believe they're planning on using Starstreak missiles, which are a much newer toy. You could argue that they only hatched this plan because they're desperate to get some use out of the cold war throwbacks, and none of our recent war enemies have been sporting enough to field an airforce, the dastards.
To be fair to TFS (and we might as well do, for a change of pace) it doesn't say that they do manufacture Apple products. It says that it's "Foxconn Brazil workers" (which they are), and it says that Foxconn are Apple's manufacturing partner (which they are).
And Apple aren't completely off the hook even if these workers aren't working on their products- Foxconn have fast acquired a terrible reputation for mistreating workers, and companies are responsible for the companies they partner with. Just to straw-man it up a notch- if a company were killing orphans to make dogfood, it wouldn't be acceptable to buy beef mince from them; the defence "I'm not buying their murderous products so it's not my problem" doesn't really hold much weight.
Still, it's interesting to know that they make Xboxes. No company should be involved in mistreating workers, and knowing the perpetrators is a good thing.
Apple already sell servers, it's just that no-one wants to use them. And FreeBSD already does servers too, and people are already using it. Even companies that love Apple just don't tend to see it as a good server backbone. Must be an image thing; sort of the reverse of MS's problem in making their Windows products trendy.
And I can't see why Apple would want to license utilities to another software company when it would only undercut their own products. Presumably they would take a similarly dim view of it as they do "hackintoshes" and Mac clones.
So you consider having to wait 20 generations (it's a round trip, remember) to hear the answer to your question, if there is an answer, "communicating with" someone? You believe it's possible to "send an object" 200 light years, when it has taken almost 40 years to send an object around 3 light-HOURS away from earth (Voyager 1 is about 120 AU from us now).
No, not really. You are of course basically right.
The only real benefit of having something "near" like this would be for observation. You'd be far more likely to build a telescope that could resolve these potential exoplanets 200ly away than ones 20,000ly away. Ditto for trying to pick SETI radio signals out of the cosmic soup- nearer the better. Both of which would still be pretty exciting if alien life were involved, even if direct contact is impractical.
200ly is obviously absurdly far compared with, say, popping down the shops to buy a pint of milk. But if we're talking about communicating with, observing with a telescope, or sending objects to another solar system, 200ly is about as good as it gets.
If you could travel at 0.08c (which was one estimate of what Project Orion could have managed), it would take 2500 years to travel 200ly. Not exactly convenient, but not the millions of years you'd need to reach most places in the Galaxy.
Would you vote for him, over Romney, if he did so?
If so, write a very nice letter to him to that effect. And hopefully like minded people could do the same. Nothing focuses the mind of a democratically elected politician than the thought of pleasing swing voters in an election year.
If the answer is "no, I'll never vote for him on his current policy platform", then unfortunately it matters little whether you would "applaud him" or not. As is first-past-the-post, unfortunately.
You may notice that you've listed four parties there who have been "the top 2" at some time or another. They only became the "top 2" after getting a strong proportion of the vote.
If, theoretically, Rocky Anderson's Justice Party were to do better than the Republican Party in the next election, it would become a de facto "top 2" party. It's only "throwing your vote away" if you lose, and you only lose if a lot of people don't vote for it.
Not that I'm saying it would. I'd never even heard of them until this thread.
Here in the UK, we have a (slightly quaint) process for if an MP can't attend a vote. They contact someone who they know is going to vote the opposite way to them, and agree with them that they will both abstain (which has the same effect as if they had voted opposite ways and cancelled each other out). This is the trick usually used by the Prime Minister and senior Ministers (who are both members of the government and the legislature) when they need to go jetsetting around the world meeting foreign leaders and whatnot.
Could Ron Paul not have made similar arrangements?
Slashdot Mirror
My favourite theory about porn-site viruses is that they rely on the shame factor- you're far less likely to haul your laptop into PC World's Repair Centre and admit you got stung downloading embarrassing quantities of videos featuring men in nappies being ridden like a horse than you are if you got stung reading some cookery website.
What that says about people's opinion of religious websites I couldn't possibly comment.
That was my assumption on reading TFS. In my (admittedly limited) experience, there are an awful lot of religious sites out there that look like throw-backs to GeoCities and the golden age of MySpace profile pages. I can't imagine the well-meaning pensioners who are likely to set up their local bible study circle website is going to be that au fait with good e-security practices. You'd be lucky if they've even remembered to set an admin password.
If they can only get an expensive, high tax centre pegged to the Deutschmark, they'll just move to London, or York, or whatever.
Completely aside, it tickles me that you would pick York (pop. 200,000, 80th largest city in the UK) as second choice to London (pop. 8 to 14 million, depending what you're counting). Sometimes I think New York, New York has done more to raise the profile of that town to foreigners than a thousand Visit England advertising campaigns.
Closing off a major channel for pirate copies of Windows, at the same time as raising the price for legitimate copies of Windows. To paraphrase Bill Gates, the biggest competitor to Windows is pirated Windows.
Complete nonsense, I think, but that's what the GP was insinuating.
Or you could be one of those lucky folk who bought Groupon shares ($18 at IPO, $10 and falling now).
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/grpn/interactive-chart?timeframe=1y&charttype=line
There's no magic formula for IPOs and share offerings. Something can seem like hot property at the IPO, and crash spectacularly months later. My bet is that Facebook is probably pretty much at its peak, with almost complete saturation in the western world, no foothold in non-western markets, and gradually being nibbled away at by competitors like Twitter. From the point of view of "by low sell high", I wouldn't be investing in them now. Indeed, why do you think the owners are selling now (which is what an IPO is)?
I'm obviously not a hotshot investor, so I could be wrong. But I'd have no sympathy for people who invest now if it all goes belly up; the warning signs are there.
Superman = invincible person who has magic powers for no other reason than accident of birth beats up people with advanced PhDs.
That's always been the big mystery of America superhero fiction to me. The heroes are usually powerful by complete accident (just born that way, bitten by a radioactive lab animal, etc.), while the villains have a strong work ethic, work hard, are very intelligent and highly qualified, etc. And the heroes always win. The moral of the story seems to be it doesn't matter if you work hard, you can't overcome dumb luck. And that intelligence and qualifications are something to be wary of.
Don't worry, the patent almost certainly has "on the internet" at the end. Unless your mattress includes A USB wireless dongle, you're probably safe.
The "previous musical context" would be the musical pun- C Sharp as in the note. I prefer it to C Hash, which is fairly meaningless,
Maybe it's time to do what all good FOSS fans know to do when times are tough- fork it?
Honestly, if someone set up a new Slashdot-clone, with the same functionality but with an absence of slashverts and marketing nonsense, I'd be a regular.
Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to claim Android was more profitable than Apple or anything daft like that. Apple have been phenomenally successful in the last few years, and are the most valuable company in the world not for no good reason.
But it's clearly ridiculous to claim Android is a "flop" and that "no-one is making money out of it". Samsung is a big business, and yet:
The firm said its IT and mobile communications division, which manufactures the smartphones, made an operating profit of 4.27tn won during the period, as revenues in the division surged 86% from a year earlier.
If Android's top manufacturer is making big profits out of it, in what way is it a flop?
Android is a flop. Hardly anybody is making any money from it and even Google has started to downplay it's significance to them (although this might just be for the sake of the judge in the Oracle lawsuit). ...
The most successful Android device is probably the Kindle Fire and Amazon has done a good job of eradicating any signs of Android branding from the device. I suspect most owners have no idea that it's running an Android fork.
Lots of Android phones are sold, but no single Android handset has done particularly well. None have outsold any of the iPhone models (AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong).
Give over. Samsung recently overtook Nokia to become the biggest mobile phone maker in the world, with their highest quarterly profits since the recession. It seems to be working out OK for them,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17865117
Although no "single handset" might have outsold any single Apple handset, that's a false comparison derived from the fact that Apple only sell one handset. Samsung don't care which of their phones you buy, as long as you're buying one of their phones.
So you like Metro then?
Honestly, I don't see what's so great about Windows 7's GUI. It's fine and all, and I do actually like Windows 7- but it's only marginally different to the paradigm used in XP, 2000, NT, 98, 95...
Unity, Gnome 3, KDE4, they're all very flashy and modern (to the point that it irritates me). Unity & Metro are both coming from the same stable of thought (and both get the same reaction from the /. crowd). Gnome 2, MATE, XFCE, they're all more or less the same as XP/Win7.
How I am even supposed to begin to recommend Linux for the average user when there are 100 different distros, each with its own quirks and issues?
The same way as you would recconmend, say, a car. There are literally hundreds of different models out there, but people don't seem to be baffled into inaction.
Because of the nature of Linux, it doesn't even really matter; the distros share most of the important bits anyway. Whether you use Ubuntu, Debian or Mint, you'll still get the same hardware drivers (which are Linux wide), the same GUIs, the same software (it's trivial to port software from Debian to Ubuntu), the ame everything. It wouldn't matter if every single consumer were using their very own personal distro, as long as they could maintain it.
If you're a Linux user, you'll probably have a favourite distro. If you're ever giving advice to a friend, alway advise they go for that one- if only so you know what they're getting into. Unless your favourite is Slackware, obviously.
That's pretty much it, for consumers. Your average consumer (say, your mum) goes to a shop and buys a computer. They might try it out first. They take it home and plug it in. They use it. They decide if they like it or not. They might let that change their purchase choice a few years down the line, if they care enough; which they probably won't.
At absolutely no point do they think "I should change the operating system on this machine". It just doesn't cross their mind. It no-more occurs to them than "I should change the enging in this car" does when they're driving a Ford Focus.
The only way Linux would ever get popular with home users would be if OEMs started selling polished, well supported machines with it pre-loaded (and no, Xandros on a cheap Asus netbook doesn't tick those boxes). It's basically what Android did/is doing with the phone/tablet market, and it's working fantastically for them.
I am sceptical that this will ever actually happen...
The cost of OS licenses is ridiculously small compared to everything else.
Where desktop workstation hardware might cost £300 a unit, a £100 licence is not "ridiculously small". It's 25% of the total cost. The fact that employee salaries and office rent might be hugely more is beside the point; if you could save 25% of your hardware purchasing budget, you would.
I'm saying this as a Linux cheerleader, but I'm not saying it in necessarily a good way. If saving a large proportion of 25% of the total cost is not an incentive for companies to choose a Linux OS, there must be something else putting them off.
I don't really believe the rest of your post explains it, either. I work for a big company. We pay lots of professionals to maintain our end-user infrastructure. We could easily pay lots of different proffessionals to maintain a different sort of end-user infrastructure. There's no evidence that it would take a team of Linux professionals any longer to do their job than it would a team of Windows professionals to do theirs. The argument is true of home users trying to get their new wireless dongle working or whatnot, but that's just not applicable in a controlled, project-driven, enterprise environment.
First, London is not in the US, so I'm not sure what the fuck any of your post has to do with anything.
He's called "Tom the Pom", so I'm going to guess that he's English. You may not have realised this, but the UK invaded Iraq (get the WMD!) & Afghanistan (get Al Qaeda!) too. We also "renditioned" people to be tortured (former FM Jack Straw is currently being sued for it), held people without trial (check out Abu Qatada, a thoroughly unpleasant man who we're deporting after a decade of imprisonment, despite the minor inconvenience that he's never been convicted of any crimes), and have TSA style airport madness (double the fun when visiting the US)
Unless you've been living in a cave for the last decade, you can get your own citations.
I believe it's September 11 fever again. Despite the fact that that was basically a one off, and (hopefully ) all the (incredibly inconvenient) airport security should be enough to prevent a repeat.
It's just security theatre again, of a different type. The government wants to be absolutely sure that if anything goes wrong, nobody can accuse them of not having done absolutely everything.
Incidentally, when Saddam Hussein stuck weapons emplacements on civilian buildings, we called it using a "human shield", which is a war crime (and rightly so). Not that this is exactly the same thing, but just putting that thought out there.
I believe they're planning on using Starstreak missiles, which are a much newer toy. You could argue that they only hatched this plan because they're desperate to get some use out of the cold war throwbacks, and none of our recent war enemies have been sporting enough to field an airforce, the dastards.
To be fair to TFS (and we might as well do, for a change of pace) it doesn't say that they do manufacture Apple products. It says that it's "Foxconn Brazil workers" (which they are), and it says that Foxconn are Apple's manufacturing partner (which they are).
And Apple aren't completely off the hook even if these workers aren't working on their products- Foxconn have fast acquired a terrible reputation for mistreating workers, and companies are responsible for the companies they partner with. Just to straw-man it up a notch- if a company were killing orphans to make dogfood, it wouldn't be acceptable to buy beef mince from them; the defence "I'm not buying their murderous products so it's not my problem" doesn't really hold much weight.
Still, it's interesting to know that they make Xboxes. No company should be involved in mistreating workers, and knowing the perpetrators is a good thing.
Apple already sell servers, it's just that no-one wants to use them. And FreeBSD already does servers too, and people are already using it. Even companies that love Apple just don't tend to see it as a good server backbone. Must be an image thing; sort of the reverse of MS's problem in making their Windows products trendy.
And I can't see why Apple would want to license utilities to another software company when it would only undercut their own products. Presumably they would take a similarly dim view of it as they do "hackintoshes" and Mac clones.
So you consider having to wait 20 generations (it's a round trip, remember) to hear the answer to your question, if there is an answer, "communicating with" someone? You believe it's possible to "send an object" 200 light years, when it has taken almost 40 years to send an object around 3 light-HOURS away from earth (Voyager 1 is about 120 AU from us now).
No, not really. You are of course basically right.
The only real benefit of having something "near" like this would be for observation. You'd be far more likely to build a telescope that could resolve these potential exoplanets 200ly away than ones 20,000ly away. Ditto for trying to pick SETI radio signals out of the cosmic soup- nearer the better. Both of which would still be pretty exciting if alien life were involved, even if direct contact is impractical.
200ly is obviously absurdly far compared with, say, popping down the shops to buy a pint of milk. But if we're talking about communicating with, observing with a telescope, or sending objects to another solar system, 200ly is about as good as it gets.
If you could travel at 0.08c (which was one estimate of what Project Orion could have managed), it would take 2500 years to travel 200ly. Not exactly convenient, but not the millions of years you'd need to reach most places in the Galaxy.
Would you vote for him, over Romney, if he did so?
If so, write a very nice letter to him to that effect. And hopefully like minded people could do the same. Nothing focuses the mind of a democratically elected politician than the thought of pleasing swing voters in an election year.
If the answer is "no, I'll never vote for him on his current policy platform", then unfortunately it matters little whether you would "applaud him" or not. As is first-past-the-post, unfortunately.
You may notice that you've listed four parties there who have been "the top 2" at some time or another. They only became the "top 2" after getting a strong proportion of the vote.
If, theoretically, Rocky Anderson's Justice Party were to do better than the Republican Party in the next election, it would become a de facto "top 2" party. It's only "throwing your vote away" if you lose, and you only lose if a lot of people don't vote for it.
Not that I'm saying it would. I'd never even heard of them until this thread.
Here in the UK, we have a (slightly quaint) process for if an MP can't attend a vote. They contact someone who they know is going to vote the opposite way to them, and agree with them that they will both abstain (which has the same effect as if they had voted opposite ways and cancelled each other out). This is the trick usually used by the Prime Minister and senior Ministers (who are both members of the government and the legislature) when they need to go jetsetting around the world meeting foreign leaders and whatnot.
Could Ron Paul not have made similar arrangements?