Protect them from subjects such as homosexuality, which is not, as far as I know harmful, since if you are born heterosexual, you cannot be turned into a homosexual by a few words on a page. What they really want is to prevent their children hearing an alternative view of life on the net. And BTW, rape and child abuse have existed since the dawn of man, pornography is not a cause it's a symptom of an illness. I worked for a firm that used Web(no)Sense as a filter and it blocked me from Salon.com. Why? Because it's not on the US religious mafia's list of approved sites (they have a Jewish lesbian journo - shock horror). What's next, burning hard disks?
Well, buying software isn't exactly popular among Linux users That's not true, it's paying for inferior software when something better is free that we disagree with. And no this applies to all software companies, not just the monopoly one. So kudos to Borland for giving people with few resources to learn C++ on Windows if they want to.
Because Microsoft did it to destroy Netscape (dumping), Borland is doing it to increase interest in C++Builder, and therefore to compete with VC++ (competition).
That's alright if you're the only maintainer. I have had to work with some horrendously shoddy code in my time, (including 25-year old non Y2k-compliant COBOL), and without a debugger I would have had real problems figuring out what the garbage did, without spending a few days trying to put it down on paper. And your boss is never interested in excuses, only results. It would be great if IT departments recognised the value of well-written, standardised code, but few do, so get used to it.
No, it sounds like socialism. Yes I know this is off-topic, but I'm tired of being called a supporter of mass-murdering regimes by dumb Americans. Get a clue - COMMUNISM and SOCIALISM are NOT the same thing.
Sometimes a debugger is required for those really hard to spot problems. If they have a command line debugger, they should have released that too, mind you they could be saving that for the next slashdot story.
I'm just referring to my first ever piece of spam, that was entitled, 'Do you have trouble attracting women?'. I don't know how they knew but I'm still not going to buy their product.
High-redshift quasars are very important for understanding one of the biggest mysteries confronting scientists: how the Universe went from the smooth uniformity of its youth to the clumpy, galaxy-strewn formations we observe today. Simple. God did it. I now accept the title of Defender of the Faith from the Pope, and will burn anyone at the stake who disagrees with me.
France isn't the whole of Europe but I get your point. A DVD here costs about $35 to $40. So I'm a victim of profiteering (yet again). But 4GB of hard drive space costs around $100, so it still isn't profitable for me to copy DVDs to my hard drive, and as for downloading from the internet, come on. I've got a 56Kbps link without any chance of ADSL or Cable coming along any time soon. Jack Valenti had a reasonable point that in 2 or 3 years it would be feasible to download from a website some where not controlled by the American Empire(tm), but to label us as pirates now is just ludicrous. In other words Mr Valenti, I'm saying please drop the lawsuit, give us a DVD player, and we'll behave more like you want us to. It will cost you very little and it's in your interest too. After all, declaring war on your customers is not sound business practice, however you look at it. Oh and guys, stop say 'F**k the MPAA' where it can be used as ammunition for the court case - see opendvd.org
Re:Definition of "forced" for the uninitated
on
A New DeCSS
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· Score: 1
I am not forced to buy DVDs it's true, but if I want to contribute to the profits of the MPAA by buying DVDs, they require me to pay $200 for a copy of Win98 in order to play them (yes that's how much Win98 costs here in Luxembourg) or $500 for a standalone DVD player. So if I buy DVDs I am 'forced' to buy a product I don't want in order to watch them. So I won't buy any DVDs until I can play them on Linux. And considering that I'm reasonably well off I would probably buy 2 or 3 DVDs a month. So the MPAA has lost money. What advantage have they gained? They get to prevent 'piracy' (which would cost more than buying the DVD) and they save money on a DVD player for Linux (which would reap them even more profits). Sound business sense - NOT!
Doesn't sound like you ever used it to me. Choose your resolution and depth, click done, it starts an X-Server to make sure it works, click OK, and then go into X. Not as simple as Windows perhaps, but close enough. As for Mandrake not having it, presumably they have something better.
So many people here are complaining about how hard it is to set up their X server, and how it doesn't work straight out of the box, you have to hand-hack XF86Config. Have any of you heard of XF86Setup which comes with XFree86? A very simple GUI that allows you to configure all the basics required for an X server, the mouse, the keyboard, the card, the monitor, and all the resolutions, colour depths, etc. It then fires up an X server to make sure you haven't screwed your config up. Not exactly difficult, even for a newbie, and the help screens are more helpful than windows ones. So try using that before hand-hacking a very complex text file, and stop complaining.
The reason why you had so many problems is that RedHat have effectively broken KDE/QT in order to push GNOME as a better alternative. I have real problems compiling apps I download from the KDE site, which require the complete removal of QT-2.0, and even then they sometimes don't compile. I am quite frankly furious with RedHat over this, and am seriously considering Caldera or SuSe as an immediate replacement. Why couldn't they have installed the basic KDE 1.1.2 with QT-1.44? Now they have lost a customer (OK so I haven't paid for it, but I won't be recommending RedHat to anyone who is planning to buy it). The worrying thing is that to many people RedHat is Linux, and a broken version of KDE is not going to impress new users. I could use GNOME, but I am happy with KDE and don't feel a need to change just to suit RedHat's agenda.
I've been a mainframe programmer for 10 years now, and I'm heartily sick of the poor project management inherent in my industry. It's time there was a more successful model based on quality and functionality, rather than the CEO's latest whizzbang idea. Remember the rush to client-server by large organisations. It was a dumb, badly-implemented idea, where middle-managers were put under enormous pressure to deliver something that didn't work, and then took the blame when their boss's dumb idea didn't work out. As for documentation in large projects, there is very little, and programmers end up acting as a help desk whenever the user is confused (which is a regular thing). No, the bazaar is a far better idea, giving the users early input into the system they'll have to use, and everybody involved having a say without clueless individuals being in control. Of course the bazaar will never catch on, because a lot of the people in charge will have their shortcomings shown to many more people.
I have just been fired from a merchant bank for abuse of my internet account. I made the mistake of downloading a LOPHT program out of boredom to see what it was. Next thing I know security phone my manager and demand that I be sacked immediately. So here I am at 4.00am CET typing on slashdot instead of getting a good night's sleep before joining the corporate treadmill. Companies can do what they like to you, because we all made the mistake of electing too many pro-business governments. Remember that the people that really run the world are highly-paid corporate dictators and view democracy and labour rights as an obstruction to making money, so why should their political stooges be any more interested in this. Just my little whinge about absolute power.
An investment did help save Apply [sic]. Jobs has done a wonderful job revitalising it, but it still would be in trouble without the financial and applications support of Microsoft.
Microchannel is a specious argument, that was years ago when IBM were still trying to cling to their monopoly.
You still haven't answered the question of why the major PC manufacturers offer an 'unviable' OS preinstalled on their desktop PCs, or why so many other major vendors have invested so much time and money helping out the OSS community if it is unviable.
I don't 'demand' that Microsoft do anything. My argument is against you dismissing Linux as an unviable OS, despite the fact that most of the industry considers it to be important enough to invest in. WordPerfect Office has failed, not because there is no market for it, but because it is no better than StarOffice which is free.
As for Quake 3, you're selectively quoting what the sales director said. You failed to mention that shops weren't stocking it because it wasn't the Windows version (a problem that Mac software also encounters). That isn't a fault of Linux, as much as a fault of the salespeople not convincing the shops and the shops being overly conservative.
Linux is no more an 'unviable' platform than the Mac, it has it's strengths and weaknesses, but don't try to pretend that Microsoft has continued Mac Office for any other real reason than as evidence in the anti-trust trial. If Apple had gone bust, that would be all the more Windows Office customers available.
But as you said, there arent enough hours in the day to do all the exta stuff. It costs extra to do this work, especially in the same time the work can be done with out it.
Perhaps, but adhering to good standards and writing clear and concise code should be drummed into trainee programmers until it becomes second nature. Then maintenance of old code becomes less of a trial because it has been written properly. Code reviews should be done fairly regularly for new coders to ensure that they are doing the work correctly. This saves a fortune in the short-to-medium term, never mind the long-term, as anyone coming to modify this code doesn't have to spend loads of time figuring out an appalling hack. When IT people realise this, our job will become a great deal easier.
I should have said Office for Mac would not still exist had it not been for the anti-trust trial. Microsoft face little OS competition at the moment, despite the explosion of Linux interest, because it's hard to compete against an entrenched monopoly. I still don't see how Linux is an unviable platform as you say when most of the industry big-hitters are getting behind it. There must be something there for IBM to throw a billion dollars at.
The bizarre belief that the Microsoft investment was irrelevant and it was the genius of Steve Jobs that turned Apple around shows how truly out of touch you are.
SuSE, the only profitable Linux vendor, is very focused on the desktop. RedHat may be the major vendor in the US, but I live in Europe, where SuSE is the major vendor.
Your banging on about Corel failing, when Corel have tried to latch on to every new fad going (remember WordPerfect Office for Java) fails to demonstrate that Linux is failing any more than Microsoft's recent profit warning indicates that Windows is dying.
Does it really? Do you have any evidence to back this up? And it still doesn't fix the problem for everyone unless Microsoft sees it as a serious problem.
The reality has nothing to do with Corel, the great bandwagon jumper. Why are IBM investing a billion dollars in a 'non-viable' platform? Why are all the other industry heavyweights getting into Linux if there's nothing there. Microsoft will never build Office for Linux while their business depends on their OS monopoly.
I think you're the one out of touch with reality. You really think that Microsoft would have bailed out Apple without the anti-trust trial. Apple were in serious shit before Microsoft came along, so don't try and pretend that MacOS, no matter how good it is, would have been any less a fringe OS than Linux had Microsoft Legal not needed someone to point to and say 'see - we're not a monopoly'. Linux is already the number 2 choice on Intel servers, and it's not far behind MacOS on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
Protect them from subjects such as homosexuality, which is not, as far as I know harmful, since if you are born heterosexual, you cannot be turned into a homosexual by a few words on a page. What they really want is to prevent their children hearing an alternative view of life on the net. And BTW, rape and child abuse have existed since the dawn of man, pornography is not a cause it's a symptom of an illness. I worked for a firm that used Web(no)Sense as a filter and it blocked me from Salon.com. Why? Because it's not on the US religious mafia's list of approved sites (they have a Jewish lesbian journo - shock horror). What's next, burning hard disks?
Well, buying software isn't exactly popular among Linux users That's not true, it's paying for inferior software when something better is free that we disagree with. And no this applies to all software companies, not just the monopoly one. So kudos to Borland for giving people with few resources to learn C++ on Windows if they want to.
Because Microsoft did it to destroy Netscape (dumping), Borland is doing it to increase interest in C++Builder, and therefore to compete with VC++ (competition).
That's alright if you're the only maintainer. I have had to work with some horrendously shoddy code in my time, (including 25-year old non Y2k-compliant COBOL), and without a debugger I would have had real problems figuring out what the garbage did, without spending a few days trying to put it down on paper. And your boss is never interested in excuses, only results. It would be great if IT departments recognised the value of well-written, standardised code, but few do, so get used to it.
No, it sounds like socialism. Yes I know this is off-topic, but I'm tired of being called a supporter of mass-murdering regimes by dumb Americans. Get a clue - COMMUNISM and SOCIALISM are NOT the same thing.
Sometimes a debugger is required for those really hard to spot problems. If they have a command line debugger, they should have released that too, mind you they could be saving that for the next slashdot story.
I'm just referring to my first ever piece of spam, that was entitled, 'Do you have trouble attracting women?'. I don't know how they knew but I'm still not going to buy their product.
High-redshift quasars are very important for understanding one of the biggest mysteries confronting scientists: how the Universe went from the smooth uniformity of its youth to the clumpy, galaxy-strewn formations we observe today. Simple. God did it. I now accept the title of Defender of the Faith from the Pope, and will burn anyone at the stake who disagrees with me.
You can run it from the command line and it starts up in X.
France isn't the whole of Europe but I get your point. A DVD here costs about $35 to $40. So I'm a victim of profiteering (yet again). But 4GB of hard drive space costs around $100, so it still isn't profitable for me to copy DVDs to my hard drive, and as for downloading from the internet, come on. I've got a 56Kbps link without any chance of ADSL or Cable coming along any time soon. Jack Valenti had a reasonable point that in 2 or 3 years it would be feasible to download from a website some where not controlled by the American Empire(tm), but to label us as pirates now is just ludicrous. In other words Mr Valenti, I'm saying please drop the lawsuit, give us a DVD player, and we'll behave more like you want us to. It will cost you very little and it's in your interest too. After all, declaring war on your customers is not sound business practice, however you look at it. Oh and guys, stop say 'F**k the MPAA' where it can be used as ammunition for the court case - see opendvd.org
I am not forced to buy DVDs it's true, but if I want to contribute to the profits of the MPAA by buying DVDs, they require me to pay $200 for a copy of Win98 in order to play them (yes that's how much Win98 costs here in Luxembourg) or $500 for a standalone DVD player. So if I buy DVDs I am 'forced' to buy a product I don't want in order to watch them. So I won't buy any DVDs until I can play them on Linux. And considering that I'm reasonably well off I would probably buy 2 or 3 DVDs a month. So the MPAA has lost money. What advantage have they gained? They get to prevent 'piracy' (which would cost more than buying the DVD) and they save money on a DVD player for Linux (which would reap them even more profits). Sound business sense - NOT!
Doesn't sound like you ever used it to me. Choose your resolution and depth, click done, it starts an X-Server to make sure it works, click OK, and then go into X. Not as simple as Windows perhaps, but close enough. As for Mandrake not having it, presumably they have something better.
How about if some of the Linux nouveau-riche could spend their IPO dollars on this idea. How about it Linus, Eric?
So many people here are complaining about how hard it is to set up their X server, and how it doesn't work straight out of the box, you have to hand-hack XF86Config. Have any of you heard of XF86Setup which comes with XFree86? A very simple GUI that allows you to configure all the basics required for an X server, the mouse, the keyboard, the card, the monitor, and all the resolutions, colour depths, etc. It then fires up an X server to make sure you haven't screwed your config up. Not exactly difficult, even for a newbie, and the help screens are more helpful than windows ones. So try using that before hand-hacking a very complex text file, and stop complaining.
The reason why you had so many problems is that RedHat have effectively broken KDE/QT in order to push GNOME as a better alternative. I have real problems compiling apps I download from the KDE site, which require the complete removal of QT-2.0, and even then they sometimes don't compile. I am quite frankly furious with RedHat over this, and am seriously considering Caldera or SuSe as an immediate replacement. Why couldn't they have installed the basic KDE 1.1.2 with QT-1.44? Now they have lost a customer (OK so I haven't paid for it, but I won't be recommending RedHat to anyone who is planning to buy it). The worrying thing is that to many people RedHat is Linux, and a broken version of KDE is not going to impress new users. I could use GNOME, but I am happy with KDE and don't feel a need to change just to suit RedHat's agenda.
I've been a mainframe programmer for 10 years now, and I'm heartily sick of the poor project management inherent in my industry. It's time there was a more successful model based on quality and functionality, rather than the CEO's latest whizzbang idea. Remember the rush to client-server by large organisations. It was a dumb, badly-implemented idea, where middle-managers were put under enormous pressure to deliver something that didn't work, and then took the blame when their boss's dumb idea didn't work out. As for documentation in large projects, there is very little, and programmers end up acting as a help desk whenever the user is confused (which is a regular thing). No, the bazaar is a far better idea, giving the users early input into the system they'll have to use, and everybody involved having a say without clueless individuals being in control. Of course the bazaar will never catch on, because a lot of the people in charge will have their shortcomings shown to many more people.
I have just been fired from a merchant bank for abuse of my internet account. I made the mistake of downloading a LOPHT program out of boredom to see what it was. Next thing I know security phone my manager and demand that I be sacked immediately. So here I am at 4.00am CET typing on slashdot instead of getting a good night's sleep before joining the corporate treadmill. Companies can do what they like to you, because we all made the mistake of electing too many pro-business governments. Remember that the people that really run the world are highly-paid corporate dictators and view democracy and labour rights as an obstruction to making money, so why should their political stooges be any more interested in this. Just my little whinge about absolute power.
Who then sues you for being a bad parent. God bless America :-)
An investment did help save Apply [sic]. Jobs has done a wonderful job revitalising it, but it still would be in trouble without the financial and applications support of Microsoft.
Microchannel is a specious argument, that was years ago when IBM were still trying to cling to their monopoly.
You still haven't answered the question of why the major PC manufacturers offer an 'unviable' OS preinstalled on their desktop PCs, or why so many other major vendors have invested so much time and money helping out the OSS community if it is unviable.
I don't 'demand' that Microsoft do anything. My argument is against you dismissing Linux as an unviable OS, despite the fact that most of the industry considers it to be important enough to invest in. WordPerfect Office has failed, not because there is no market for it, but because it is no better than StarOffice which is free.
As for Quake 3, you're selectively quoting what the sales director said. You failed to mention that shops weren't stocking it because it wasn't the Windows version (a problem that Mac software also encounters). That isn't a fault of Linux, as much as a fault of the salespeople not convincing the shops and the shops being overly conservative.
Linux is no more an 'unviable' platform than the Mac, it has it's strengths and weaknesses, but don't try to pretend that Microsoft has continued Mac Office for any other real reason than as evidence in the anti-trust trial. If Apple had gone bust, that would be all the more Windows Office customers available.
But as you said, there arent enough hours in the day to do all the exta stuff. It costs extra to do this work, especially in the same time the work can be done with out it.
Perhaps, but adhering to good standards and writing clear and concise code should be drummed into trainee programmers until it becomes second nature. Then maintenance of old code becomes less of a trial because it has been written properly. Code reviews should be done fairly regularly for new coders to ensure that they are doing the work correctly. This saves a fortune in the short-to-medium term, never mind the long-term, as anyone coming to modify this code doesn't have to spend loads of time figuring out an appalling hack. When IT people realise this, our job will become a great deal easier.
I should have said Office for Mac would not still exist had it not been for the anti-trust trial. Microsoft face little OS competition at the moment, despite the explosion of Linux interest, because it's hard to compete against an entrenched monopoly. I still don't see how Linux is an unviable platform as you say when most of the industry big-hitters are getting behind it. There must be something there for IBM to throw a billion dollars at.
The bizarre belief that the Microsoft investment was irrelevant and it was the genius of Steve Jobs that turned Apple around shows how truly out of touch you are.
SuSE, the only profitable Linux vendor, is very focused on the desktop. RedHat may be the major vendor in the US, but I live in Europe, where SuSE is the major vendor.
Your banging on about Corel failing, when Corel have tried to latch on to every new fad going (remember WordPerfect Office for Java) fails to demonstrate that Linux is failing any more than Microsoft's recent profit warning indicates that Windows is dying.
Does it really? Do you have any evidence to back this up? And it still doesn't fix the problem for everyone unless Microsoft sees it as a serious problem.
The reality has nothing to do with Corel, the great bandwagon jumper. Why are IBM investing a billion dollars in a 'non-viable' platform? Why are all the other industry heavyweights getting into Linux if there's nothing there. Microsoft will never build Office for Linux while their business depends on their OS monopoly.
I think you're the one out of touch with reality. You really think that Microsoft would have bailed out Apple without the anti-trust trial. Apple were in serious shit before Microsoft came along, so don't try and pretend that MacOS, no matter how good it is, would have been any less a fringe OS than Linux had Microsoft Legal not needed someone to point to and say 'see - we're not a monopoly'. Linux is already the number 2 choice on Intel servers, and it's not far behind MacOS on the desktop.