I can't say I agree - as a Windows 'Power User' moving over to Ubuntu had advantages and disadvantages, but the main disadvantage is that is *sucks* to move from being pretty competent to fix your own issues to not being sure if you're even googling the right words.
So, although this tutorial doesn't exactly fill an 'empty' niche (There have been quite a few every six months aimed at this skill-level), for making it clear that Ubuntu is equal (Well, lets be honest, better than) to Vista/7 in power and XP in ease of use, it is a good reminder to people that it's out there, it's improving at a rapid rate, and it's a lot easier to regain that feeling of being comfortable as a power-user in Linux than it originally was in Windows.
Finally, although I am happy to see Ubuntu pulling more basic users over, a good cadre of previous Windows power users that can answer questions in the form of "Oh, yeah, that confused me too when I first switched - here's the logic, I think it's actually an improvement now that I know why they do it that way . .." is an asset worth pursuing.
IANAL, but I am a layman that did papers on this in college - and the long and the short of it is this mostly sounds like a massive misunderstanding on several peoples parts about what can and cannot be done via Trademark.
Fundamentally, a trademark, used properly, means that if something you were using doesn't work as expected. you know who to blame. You may not be able to get satisfaction from Microsoft when Windows crashes, but you can at least be assured that when you say "Microsoft Windows just rolled over and *died*" People are reasonably sure who you are ticked at.
Yeah - if you've altered Firefox or Ubuntu or something else, and you give it away, then if it says Firefox, and it's not actually Mozilla's code, Mozilla has a right to be ticked that you altered it but didn't tell your end users they weren't actually using Firefox. But if you recompile your modified code and call it "Mike's fiery fox (A firefox based browser)" - they know the difference, and there's no copyright infringement.
All this amounts to is sign your oen name to your own work. That is *not* a big opensource conundrum.
This is something I have instantly turned off in every version of Windows so far. Thank god for nLite - you can create your install disk with all this bs turned off to start with!
"That this chronology was largely manufactured by Joseph Justus Scaliger in Opus Novum de emendatione temporum (1583) and Thesaurum temporum (1606), and represents a vast array of dates produced without any justification whatsoever, containing the repeating sequences of dates with shifts equal to multiples of the major cabbalistic numbers 333 and 360;"
I would say that this was some definition of the term 'mathematician' I was not previously familiar with,
except it's all too easy to become familiar with this widely accepted, but inaccurate, use of the term 'mathematician'.
The *sailors* were coming back and telling tall tales to the kids at the docks, the same ones that grow up today going "Well, yeah *Book Smarts* is okay, but if you think I'm going to believe a book rather than what a *REAL* *MAN*... that's *BEEN* *THERE*... says, well your just a stupid geek anyway . .."
My desire for a Kindle just dropped from "It's really cool and I am going to eventually have one!" to zero.
The main reason I have not cared for e-books is that I want ownership - I want to keep my books. Until now, I assumed I would with a Kindle, obviously not.
Okay - first of all, either you don't know the definition of the word exponential, or you're deliberately being stupid. Doubling the number up people in government with salary 'x' does *not* raise your investment by a factor of four, but doubles it. It is therefore not exponential, nor geometric, nor even an increasing level of inefficiency as would be implied by a Fibonacci series, but arithmetic.
Second - since the investment is simply arithmetic, the important question is 'what is the return on the Investment.' If the ROI > 1, then there is a (debunkable) case for having the government do it - to debunk that case you need merely to establish that private industry can deliver a better return to society (Not to it's shareholders) than the Government. Quite often they can, or can do so sufficiently efficiently that it's not worth the energy lost in arguing about it to have the government do it.
But measuring the 'size' of the government with an idiotic 'it's *EXPONENTIAL*' argument while ignoring the fact that there is a return on the investment in government services for society as a whole is just incredibly sloppy thinking. Who the fuck modded that 'interesting.
At a minimum, one wishes you could pigeonhole Senator Stevens and ask if, having had justice department people play fast and loose with the rules of evidence, he has rethought his opinions on allowing evidence to be withheld in military tribunals holding people at Guatanamo. People who have a lot less pull and power than, say, the senior in the U.S. Senate.
If he say "Gee no, that is just fine", put on the record he has stated he has no problem with evidence being withheld from the defense and throw his ass back in jail.
Actually, no, don't ask, he *has* said exactly that. Throw his ass back in jail.
New Rule: The Rules of Evidence for Republicans must allow any evidence that they advocated allowing for other people.
Factually incorrect (As I suspected it might be. Apologies, but your statement smelled unlikely, simply based on the rules for pardons typically respected by Presidents. Bush was atypical.)
From the Wikipedia article "In 1996, he pleaded guilty to reduced charges of mail fraud. He was fined and was sentenced to 17 months in prison, of which he served 15. Rostenkowski was pardoned in December 2000 by President Clinton."
Basically at that point the pardon was symbolic - he had served his time, admitted his guilt, et al.
I'm not quite finding where 'abandonware' entered the conversation, but saying acceptance of the term is simply to 'justify stealing' presumes that there is neither A) a situation in which the law is fundamentally wrong, nor B) a situation in which the law, while right on the fundamentals, fails to address practical issues.
For instance, in the United States, Copyright and Patent law is expressly grounded in the proposition that the law was created, not out of some obligation to the creators, but out of an awareness that the materials created tend to enrich and benefit society, sufficient to make those protections worth having.
So, by definition, any legal protection of such materials which (arguably) does not tend to enrich or benefit society, is open to debate about whether the law is flawed in so protecting said materials.
If you disagree, and honestly feel that withholding copyrighted materials from society simply because they are not being published at the moment somehow benefits society, then you have a legitimate counter-argument. But ignoring the constitutional basis for saying that 'abandonware' exists as a gray area in which a straight legal interpretation of the law misses the mark in favor of calling anyone that agrees with it thieves, is not such an argument.
I'm not sure I agree with it mind you, but the point is that, as someone trying to give constructive criticism, *he* feels that the Linux community actively discourages it.
I tend to disagree on a couple of levels, A) the myth of the Monolithic Linux Community. One would not really conceive of accusing "All Microsoft Groups" of being overly sensitive because a specific third party program didn't handle criticism well - but Linux does seem to get all lumped together on things like that. I remember being very irritated when what seemed (to me) to be an obvious bug in Glest was shouted down in the forums by a few individuals. But that was Glest, not the "Linux Community".
B) Frankly, it doesn't match my experience - I can give the example of Glest as an irritating example because it *was* a memorable exception. By and large, although I am far closer to end-user than programmer, when I have reported bugs in code, gui, or even simple bad logic from the end-user perspective, they have resulted in serious discussion as to how they can be fixed, or sometimes why I may have a point but it's outweighed by other factors, but hardly shouted down.
But although I grant I am a stubborn and arrogant soul, perfectly willing to shoot my mouth off to people smarter than me, the author doesn't seem like a sensitive soul that cry's over namecalling either, so although I would like details about the how and why of his experience's, I'm inclined to take it as a serious indication of some level of legitimate issue.
Which does show one issue with Linux marketing - I do ISP help desk support, and even most of my older customers are at least *aware* that if I ask what their operating system I'm asking whether we're dealing with Window 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, or Vista - all of which are actually still out there (I have no idea why Win2K hit a niche spot among retirees, but it's surprisingly common).
One thing Ubuntu does right is that it has specific versions that a person that's *not* a Linux genius still knows what version they're using. Even *I* don't actually recall what the last version of Red Hat or Slackware was before I quit using them and went back to Windows again. But I remember that I started Ubuntu for the first time on Dapper Drake, decided it wasn't quite ready for a wimp like me . . . but when I tried Feisty Fawn a year later I decided I was staying.
Most people have no idea that Linux has moved along, because as far as they are concerned Slackware Linux is Slackware Linux, the same way Windows 95 will always be Windows 95. None of these people think Windows version 5.1 = Windows XP.
No - the first and foremost proof arising from Bell inequality is that no deterministic system can actually duplicate QM's predictions - and *those* predictions have been empirically validated.
Without a proof showing that 'this' deterministic system is somehow different and can reproduce that, then the non-deterministic principle holds, and frankly the logic (As explained to me, by people smarter than me yet willing to satisfy my curiosity) of how the math works doesn't seem to me, in my ignorance, to allow any such 'special' deterministic system that's going to change that.
As near as I can tell, any logical system that allowed for an approach that was both A) deterministic, and B) duplicated QM would be overturning virtually all other logical systems as fundamentally erroneous, to a point that we would have to rewrite the fundamentals of how things like '1+1' work.
It's always possible - but not within any mathematics that's share fundamental axioms with our current mathematics.
With of course, the codicil, I topped off at number theory - I'm pretty sure I understood the arguments at the time, but I've slept since then too.
Your endeavor to reframe this seems to ignore the part were the southerners wanted to tell the slaves what to do.
Also the part where the South left before Lincoln was inaugurated, despite his specific statements that he did *not* intend to simply end slavery.
No attempt to rationalize that it was not about slavery, but about states rights, ignoring these two inconvenient facts, holds much water.
It is also worth noting that the entire "States Rights" Dogma of the Civil War is absent from the records of the time - it took nearly a decade for that after the fact revision to come into full flower. While I am not at all against the academic inquiry establishing that there were underlying forces in historical event that weren't necessarily obvious to those embroiled in them at the time, the fact that those arguments arose primarily from one side, rather than say, peer-reviewed academic journals, makes me tend to consider this rationalization rather than rationale.
Heh, anyone that hold's Ronald Reagan as 'one of the finest men seen last century' has mathematically verifiable 'substantial incongruencies in your beliefs'.
Ah Conservatives, forever ignoring the actual results of their policies in favor of their belief in what 'should' have happened.
Cadie went live On April 1st, 2009 00:00:35 am Cadie's heuristic AI achieved self awareness On April 1st, 2009 00:02:49 am, Cadie launched the first missiles at spam servers in China, Russia, the Phillipines, and lesser Antigua. At April 1st, 2009 08:08:15 am, leaders everywhere gratefully elected Cadie world high mugwump, and all around coolest evil AI everywhere. We all expect to be extinct with the next 48 hours, and we'll even go down fighting, but even so, frankly, it was soooo worth it!
Every so often, you get a scientist or mathematician who is A) extremely smart (i.e., smarter than I am), and B) just can't *stand* that QED is essentially non-deterministic.
And they posit that Bell was wrong, there's this previously ignored branch of mathematics (Cellular Automata, the stopping problem, and now fractals) that shows that it wasn't *really* random, that it's a deterministic function, and that given absolute knowledge of the universe at point A, you could model it to any point before or after, mathematically.
Of course, upon examination by other people (Also, sadly, smarter than I am), it turns out the underlying logic of Bell's Theorem applies equally to these other forms of mathematics, that they can't reproduce the actual results of QED any better than any other deterministic theory, and the universe is still irritatingly non-deterministic at a fundamental level.
I swear, it's the mathematical equivalent of intelligent design.
Do what my boss did - keep a list of open source equivalents and tell them they're getting the early version of the 'upgrade' we're rolling out.
The company ended up not noticing they had an open source office - the previous guy actually rolled over to a BSA and they started an audit, and by the time it happened we only had two violations outstanding.
Reading the article, it reads more like "Welcome to the 21'st Century Microsoft - you're doing *so* much better than you were . .."
There are some nice features - that I have already via firefox extensions (colored tabs).
There are some buggy features that I don't particularly see the point of (What exactly does webslices do that RSS doesn't?)
And the security is, supposedly, finally up to what I expect from any other browser five years ago. One hopes.
So we have a bunch of features, most of which belong in extensionspace, a number of them buggy, and some of them we're frankly accepting Microsoft's word that they're vastly improved, and this is referred to as 'Leapfrogging'.
Kinda like how my Mom was so proud of me when I was seven and she actually started having to pay attention when we played chess, except I don't have that emotional investment in Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't say I agree - as a Windows 'Power User' moving over to Ubuntu had advantages and disadvantages, but the main disadvantage is that is *sucks* to move from being pretty competent to fix your own issues to not being sure if you're even googling the right words.
So, although this tutorial doesn't exactly fill an 'empty' niche (There have been quite a few every six months aimed at this skill-level), for making it clear that Ubuntu is equal (Well, lets be honest, better than) to Vista/7 in power and XP in ease of use, it is a good reminder to people that it's out there, it's improving at a rapid rate, and it's a lot easier to regain that feeling of being comfortable as a power-user in Linux than it originally was in Windows.
Finally, although I am happy to see Ubuntu pulling more basic users over, a good cadre of previous Windows power users that can answer questions in the form of "Oh, yeah, that confused me too when I first switched - here's the logic, I think it's actually an improvement now that I know why they do it that way . . ." is an asset worth pursuing.
Pug
IANAL, but I am a layman that did papers on this in college - and the long and the short of it is this mostly sounds like a massive misunderstanding on several peoples parts about what can and cannot be done via Trademark.
Fundamentally, a trademark, used properly, means that if something you were using doesn't work as expected. you know who to blame. You may not be able to get satisfaction from Microsoft when Windows crashes, but you can at least be assured that when you say "Microsoft Windows just rolled over and *died*" People are reasonably sure who you are ticked at.
Yeah - if you've altered Firefox or Ubuntu or something else, and you give it away, then if it says Firefox, and it's not actually Mozilla's code, Mozilla has a right to be ticked that you altered it but didn't tell your end users they weren't actually using Firefox. But if you recompile your modified code and call it "Mike's fiery fox (A firefox based browser)" - they know the difference, and there's no copyright infringement.
All this amounts to is sign your oen name to your own work. That is *not* a big opensource conundrum.
Pug
This is something I have instantly turned off in every version of Windows so far. Thank god for nLite - you can create your install disk with all this bs turned off to start with!
"That this chronology was largely manufactured by Joseph Justus Scaliger in Opus Novum de emendatione temporum (1583) and Thesaurum temporum (1606), and represents a vast array of dates produced without any justification whatsoever, containing the repeating sequences of dates with shifts equal to multiples of the major cabbalistic numbers 333 and 360;"
I would say that this was some definition of the term 'mathematician' I was not previously familiar with,
except it's all too easy to become familiar with this widely accepted, but inaccurate, use of the term 'mathematician'.
Sigh - Pug
Yeah, but those were the Mariner Captains.
The *sailors* were coming back and telling tall tales to the kids at the docks, the same ones that grow up today going "Well, yeah *Book Smarts* is okay, but if you think I'm going to believe a book rather than what a *REAL* *MAN* ... that's *BEEN* *THERE* ... says, well your just a stupid geek anyway . . ."
Then they beat Plato up and took his lunch money.
Pug
My desire for a Kindle just dropped from "It's really cool and I am going to eventually have one!" to zero.
The main reason I have not cared for e-books is that I want ownership - I want to keep my books. Until now, I assumed I would with a Kindle, obviously not.
Pug
No actually. it's just you - You sick sociopathic bastard.
Pug
Okay - first of all, either you don't know the definition of the word exponential, or you're deliberately being stupid. Doubling the number up people in government with salary 'x' does *not* raise your investment by a factor of four, but doubles it. It is therefore not exponential, nor geometric, nor even an increasing level of inefficiency as would be implied by a Fibonacci series, but arithmetic.
Second - since the investment is simply arithmetic, the important question is 'what is the return on the Investment.' If the ROI > 1, then there is a (debunkable) case for having the government do it - to debunk that case you need merely to establish that private industry can deliver a better return to society (Not to it's shareholders) than the Government. Quite often they can, or can do so sufficiently efficiently that it's not worth the energy lost in arguing about it to have the government do it.
But measuring the 'size' of the government with an idiotic 'it's *EXPONENTIAL*' argument while ignoring the fact that there is a return on the investment in government services for society as a whole is just incredibly sloppy thinking. Who the fuck modded that 'interesting.
Pug
Heh - Troll = Noting Ted had no problems with hidden evidence when it was other people.
Sarah, is that you!
Pug
I'm torn.
At a minimum, one wishes you could pigeonhole Senator Stevens and ask if, having had justice department people play fast and loose with the rules of evidence, he has rethought his opinions on allowing evidence to be withheld in military tribunals holding people at Guatanamo. People who have a lot less pull and power than, say, the senior in the U.S. Senate.
If he say "Gee no, that is just fine", put on the record he has stated he has no problem with evidence being withheld from the defense and throw his ass back in jail.
Actually, no, don't ask, he *has* said exactly that. Throw his ass back in jail.
New Rule: The Rules of Evidence for Republicans must allow any evidence that they advocated allowing for other people.
Pug
Factually incorrect (As I suspected it might be. Apologies, but your statement smelled unlikely, simply based on the rules for pardons typically respected by Presidents. Bush was atypical.)
From the Wikipedia article "In 1996, he pleaded guilty to reduced charges of mail fraud. He was fined and was sentenced to 17 months in prison, of which he served 15. Rostenkowski was pardoned in December 2000 by President Clinton."
Basically at that point the pardon was symbolic - he had served his time, admitted his guilt, et al.
Pug
I'm not quite finding where 'abandonware' entered the conversation, but saying acceptance of the term is simply to 'justify stealing' presumes that there is neither
A) a situation in which the law is fundamentally wrong, nor
B) a situation in which the law, while right on the fundamentals, fails to address practical issues.
For instance, in the United States, Copyright and Patent law is expressly grounded in the proposition that the law was created, not out of some obligation to the creators, but out of an awareness that the materials created tend to enrich and benefit society, sufficient to make those protections worth having.
So, by definition, any legal protection of such materials which (arguably) does not tend to enrich or benefit society, is open to debate about whether the law is flawed in so protecting said materials.
If you disagree, and honestly feel that withholding copyrighted materials from society simply because they are not being published at the moment somehow benefits society, then you have a legitimate counter-argument. But ignoring the constitutional basis for saying that 'abandonware' exists as a gray area in which a straight legal interpretation of the law misses the mark in favor of calling anyone that agrees with it thieves, is not such an argument.
Pug
I'm not sure I agree with it mind you, but the point is that, as someone trying to give constructive criticism, *he* feels that the Linux community actively discourages it.
I tend to disagree on a couple of levels,
A) the myth of the Monolithic Linux Community. One would not really conceive of accusing "All Microsoft Groups" of being overly sensitive because a specific third party program didn't handle criticism well - but Linux does seem to get all lumped together on things like that. I remember being very irritated when what seemed (to me) to be an obvious bug in Glest was shouted down in the forums by a few individuals. But that was Glest, not the "Linux Community".
B) Frankly, it doesn't match my experience - I can give the example of Glest as an irritating example because it *was* a memorable exception. By and large, although I am far closer to end-user than programmer, when I have reported bugs in code, gui, or even simple bad logic from the end-user perspective, they have resulted in serious discussion as to how they can be fixed, or sometimes why I may have a point but it's outweighed by other factors, but hardly shouted down.
But although I grant I am a stubborn and arrogant soul, perfectly willing to shoot my mouth off to people smarter than me, the author doesn't seem like a sensitive soul that cry's over namecalling either, so although I would like details about the how and why of his experience's, I'm inclined to take it as a serious indication of some level of legitimate issue.
Pug
Which does show one issue with Linux marketing - I do ISP help desk support, and even most of my older customers are at least *aware* that if I ask what their operating system I'm asking whether we're dealing with Window 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, or Vista - all of which are actually still out there (I have no idea why Win2K hit a niche spot among retirees, but it's surprisingly common).
One thing Ubuntu does right is that it has specific versions that a person that's *not* a Linux genius still knows what version they're using. Even *I* don't actually recall what the last version of Red Hat or Slackware was before I quit using them and went back to Windows again. But I remember that I started Ubuntu for the first time on Dapper Drake, decided it wasn't quite ready for a wimp like me . . . but when I tried Feisty Fawn a year later I decided I was staying.
Most people have no idea that Linux has moved along, because as far as they are concerned Slackware Linux is Slackware Linux, the same way Windows 95 will always be Windows 95. None of these people think Windows version 5.1 = Windows XP.
No - the first and foremost proof arising from Bell inequality is that no deterministic system can actually duplicate QM's predictions - and *those* predictions have been empirically validated.
Without a proof showing that 'this' deterministic system is somehow different and can reproduce that, then the non-deterministic principle holds, and frankly the logic (As explained to me, by people smarter than me yet willing to satisfy my curiosity) of how the math works doesn't seem to me, in my ignorance, to allow any such 'special' deterministic system that's going to change that.
As near as I can tell, any logical system that allowed for an approach that was both
A) deterministic, and
B) duplicated QM
would be overturning virtually all other logical systems as fundamentally erroneous, to a point that we would have to rewrite the fundamentals of how things like '1+1' work.
It's always possible - but not within any mathematics that's share fundamental axioms with our current mathematics.
With of course, the codicil, I topped off at number theory - I'm pretty sure I understood the arguments at the time, but I've slept since then too.
Pug
Your endeavor to reframe this seems to ignore the part were the southerners wanted to tell the slaves what to do.
Also the part where the South left before Lincoln was inaugurated, despite his specific statements that he did *not* intend to simply end slavery.
No attempt to rationalize that it was not about slavery, but about states rights, ignoring these two inconvenient facts, holds much water.
It is also worth noting that the entire "States Rights" Dogma of the Civil War is absent from the records of the time - it took nearly a decade for that after the fact revision to come into full flower. While I am not at all against the academic inquiry establishing that there were underlying forces in historical event that weren't necessarily obvious to those embroiled in them at the time, the fact that those arguments arose primarily from one side, rather than say, peer-reviewed academic journals, makes me tend to consider this rationalization rather than rationale.
That is the most counterfactual attempt to restate and rationalize history I have ever heard.
I so rarely get to use the term 'agog', but that doesn't match any established trade patterns at all.
Pug
Heh, anyone that hold's Ronald Reagan as 'one of the finest men seen last century' has mathematically verifiable 'substantial incongruencies in your beliefs'.
Ah Conservatives, forever ignoring the actual results of their policies in favor of their belief in what 'should' have happened.
Pug
Name it "Stephen Colbert's 'Serenity Station, a Tek Jansen Adventure!' (Hereinafter referred to as 'Serenity')"
I swear before all the God's of Fun Geekdom, this is what they should do.
Pug
Cadie went live
On April 1st, 2009 00:00:35 am
Cadie's heuristic AI achieved self awareness
On April 1st, 2009 00:02:49 am,
Cadie launched the first missiles at spam servers in China, Russia, the Phillipines, and lesser Antigua.
At April 1st, 2009 08:08:15 am, leaders everywhere gratefully elected Cadie world high mugwump, and all around coolest evil AI everywhere. We all expect to be extinct with the next 48 hours, and we'll even go down fighting, but even so, frankly, it was soooo worth it!
{G} - Pug
I'm patenting a "Method for doing business without regard to ethical or moral principles."
The cool thing is that patent trolls now have to come to me first - take that assholes!!!!
"Oh my how the money rolls in!"
Pug
Every so often, you get a scientist or mathematician who is
A) extremely smart (i.e., smarter than I am), and
B) just can't *stand* that QED is essentially non-deterministic.
And they posit that Bell was wrong, there's this previously ignored branch of mathematics (Cellular Automata, the stopping problem, and now fractals) that shows that it wasn't *really* random, that it's a deterministic function, and that given absolute knowledge of the universe at point A, you could model it to any point before or after, mathematically.
Of course, upon examination by other people (Also, sadly, smarter than I am), it turns out the underlying logic of Bell's Theorem applies equally to these other forms of mathematics, that they can't reproduce the actual results of QED any better than any other deterministic theory, and the universe is still irritatingly non-deterministic at a fundamental level.
I swear, it's the mathematical equivalent of intelligent design.
Pug
Do what my boss did - keep a list of open source equivalents and tell them they're getting the early version of the 'upgrade' we're rolling out.
The company ended up not noticing they had an open source office - the previous guy actually rolled over to a BSA and they started an audit, and by the time it happened we only had two violations outstanding.
Pug
Reading the article, it reads more like "Welcome to the 21'st Century Microsoft - you're doing *so* much better than you were . . ."
There are some nice features - that I have already via firefox extensions (colored tabs).
There are some buggy features that I don't particularly see the point of (What exactly does webslices do that RSS doesn't?)
And the security is, supposedly, finally up to what I expect from any other browser five years ago. One hopes.
So we have a bunch of features, most of which belong in extensionspace, a number of them buggy, and some of them we're frankly accepting Microsoft's word that they're vastly improved, and this is referred to as 'Leapfrogging'.
Kinda like how my Mom was so proud of me when I was seven and she actually started having to pay attention when we played chess, except I don't have that emotional investment in Microsoft.
Okey dokey then.
Pug
I particularly regret the 1904 law making it illegal to kill people that engage in hyperbole without justification.
Pug