I fail to see what makes him think improved driver support will change people's reasons for running it.
Wow, you're really missing the point.
Microsoft's winning tactic is "embrace and extend": grudgingly accept the winning standard, get LOTS of people to use the MS version, then slowly deviate from that standard. They win by default via customer loyalty; when a large majority of users choose the MS solution, the "standard" becomes whatever MS says it is... and the minority can either whine & be ignored, or give up and join the rest on the dark side.
In this case, the idea is to play off Linux's biggest weakness: lack of drivers. MS drivers may suck, but at least they exist! (Personally, it was incredibly frustrating to run Knoppix on a once-popular reasonably-capable Gateway laptop and not even have sound because the drivers wouldn't support even the most common sound card - but freakin' Win95 that was on it runs sound fine! ARGH!) By "embracing" Linux via a method heavily dependent on drivers, there would be a boom in Linux - to be specific, MS-Linux. Then, once hooked like crack addicts, upgrades gradually fork away from "real" Linux and toward Windows - exactly what Microsoft did to IBM regarding OS/2. The few hardcore Linux users left are left swinging in the breeze.
if you can afford to own a business or a house, most assuredly you can afford a computer and $40 for a wireless card.
Given that, you can afford to pay for your WiFi access.
Wireless access is similiar to Libraries.
No, it's not. If you want books or internet access you can go to the library. Pushing for free WiFi is like pushing for giving people books outright.
I'm surprised you didn't bring up paying for schools. Presumably you are not in school yourself nor does it seem likely you have any kids. I suppose you complain about having to pay for schools too.
I couldn't send my wife to university last year precisely because the local school taxes were too high - irnonic, no? Irony made worse by the abysmal services paid for by my tax money (my mother is a math tutor - business is extremely good due to inept yet well-paid teachers).
There are certainly some basic services a community is wise to provide to anyone and require all to pay for: fundamental roads, police, firefighting, mail, defense. WiFi is hardly "fundamental", much less so than your food, clothing and shelter society expects you to pay for; if you want Internet access go walk to the library - don't force me under threat of imprisonment to bring it to your home just so you can/. at your leisure.
Amazing, why does this continue to be a response to questioning funding by government taxation?
WiFi amounts to the most luxurious of communication services. In a world where nearly 80% of people have never even made a phone call, some are contending that others should be compelled, under threat of imprisonment, to pay for - of all things - wireless broadband.
We have to pay for postal mail, telephones, couriers, pagers, cable TV, and wired broadband - what makes WiFi so special and different that the few who actually have wireless computers (costing more than the annual salary of most people on this planet) should compel the rest to pay for it?
Do you seriously equate easy WWW access to putting out your neighbor's house fire? Even the fire department will not rebuild the home, only limit the destruction thereof. Police try to arrest people who stole your wallet; police do not ensure the filling thereof. Roads provide a pervasive system that benefits all as practically everything travels thereupon - and even there, most of the cost is borne by taxes on truckers; the only thing stopping truly commercial roads is the lack of physical space, a limitation which Internet access lacks.
Don't try to equate WiFi with firemen. Get your hand out of my wallet.
Read this paper on crossbar latches. It's relatively short (28 small pages) and an easy read (for anyone worthy of/.). The concept is really quite simple, especially if you gloss over the defect/yield probability issues also discussed. Makes me wonder why we're still using big old transistors...
That wasn't from a cheesy forwarded email. I spent a lot of time hunting down those quotes and assembling the list! If your auntie sent you a copy, she stole it from me!
I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code. -Emo Phillips
No matter how paranoid I get, it's never enough to keep up.
The question is not whether I'm paranoid, it's whether I'm paranoid enough.
The truly paraniod are rarely conned.
Doesn't matter if I'm paranoid - they're still after me.
I sincerely believe people talk about me. Mine would be a pretty meaningless existance if they didn't.
Why are some people terrified of "black helicopters" and don't even notice that they are being monitored almost constantly by the whole network of obvious surveilance cameras, credit cards, ATMs, EZpass, company ID/access cards, magazine subscriptions, SSNs, taxes, fees, video rentals, Internet firewall recording, 'cookies',... ?
Paranoia: the belief that someone cares.
Paranoia is the belief in a hidden order behind the visible.
When everyone is out to get you, paranoia is only good thinking.
"Paranoia is knowing all the facts." - Woody Allen
"Paranoia is just another word for longevity." - Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse
"Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness."
"Paranoia is reality seen on a finer scale." - Philo Gant, Strange Days
"The issue is not whether you are paranoid, the issue is whether you are paranoid enough." - Max, Strange Days
"Why are you so paranoid, Mulder?" "Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's because I find it hard to trust anybody." - Scully & Mulder, The X-Files, "Ascension"
Paranoia strikes deep / Into your life it will creep / It starts when you're / always afraid. You step out / of line, the man come and / take you away.
"I don't agonize over decisions as much these days. The criteria of what's important to me is clear. The insecurity that you feel, and the paranoia that you feel, have been around for a long time -- you know it's a liar because it's been lying to you all along -- every time you start something new. You get used to it, and you sort of go, 'Oh, you're showing up again, well f*** you.'" - John Cusack
Freedom is just a hallucination created by a pathological lack of paranoia.
Paranoia doesn't mean the whole world really isn't out to get you.
If you ever wanted to know what a person with acute paranoia looks like, just keep watching.
I have the power to channel my imagination into ever-soaring levels of suspicion and paranoia.
Paranoia is heightened awareness.
Paranoia is a social disease--you get it from screwing other people.
"Paranoia is the delusion that your enemies are organized." - Arthur D. Hlavaty.
"This is the Nineties, Bubba, and there is no such thing as Paranoia. It's all true." - Hunter S Thompson
"There are two kinds of paranoia: Total, and insufficient. I am both, because if you think you are sufficiently paranoid, you're not." - Guildenstern, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
"The truly paranoid are clever enough to not *act* paranoid." - Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation
"When everyone _is_ out to get to you, being paranoid isn't going to help." - Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation
"When did you get so paranoid?" "When they started plotting against me." - The Paper
"Paranoia is only the leading edge of the discovery that everything in the world is connected." - `The Illuminatus Trilogy'
When you've been through everything I have, paranoia is merely a precaution!
Paranoia is not the belief that everybody's out to get you -- they are. Paranoia is the belief that everybody's conspiring to get you.
The greater the concentration of power, the greater the paranoia it generates about its need to destroy everything outside itself.
I love this job. Nothing like paranoia and neurosis. Who needs a Coke habit? I've got journalism!!
There's something inherently American about paranoia. Given the i
Scared of WiFi snoops to turn your house into a Faraday cage? Ya sure?
No FM/AM radio in the house. No broadcast TV (not everyone has cable, guys). No stepping outside while on the cordless phone. No using your WiFi-enabled laptop on the back porch. No cell phone reception inside. No dedicated weather radio. No self-setting "atomic" clock. No pager.
"Write [the price of this year's tax prep program] off on next years taxes."
Great. Considering he likely pays around 25% in income tax, a $50 tax program really costs $63... but with your generous advice to write it off, he actually gets to not pay the extra $12 in taxes, only the $50 actual price.
Real smart response to someone observing that, due to the insane complexity of tax code, the gov't should provide tax software for $0.
('Our users are the admins of their machines. They can load whatever software they want on their machines, but we do audit the network continuously.') I wonder how much time is spent combatting spyware?"
Pardon me for standing up for them, but... it's MICROSOFT. They have a lot of smart talented software engineers who are just as capable of administrating their own computers as those writing for/. - and whatever is missed, like some spyware, gets picked up by the continuous network audit.
Peeves me off when the people writing the software are not trusted to administrate their own computer which they are writing software for (or some equivalent thereto). What's with this growing American sentiment that nobody should be trusted with tools, that only someone special should be (without noting the perversity that if nobody can be trusted, then nobody can be trusted)?
Same stuff, different box
on
Digital Packrats
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
1000-2000 songs at hand? What's "packrat" about that? Storing a normal-sized music collection in a super-compact uber-convenient manner is not being a packrat, it's simply repackaging your stuff in a more convenient fasion.
I have about 150 CDs and 3000 books. This is neither unusual nor takes up an excessive amount of space. Having all of it at my fingertips in a few cubic inches of storage is convenience and efficiency born of the information age, not "packrat".
The article states "He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper." That is a preposterous comparison, as by that measure a single vinyl LP record equates to a half-truck of paper - were we thus "packrats" back in the 60's? hardly.
A movie, uncompressed full-resolution, is about 2TB. Squashing it onto a DVD does not equate to truckloads of paper, it's simply a different medium.
Cute shocking analogy. Get real. Having a normal book/music/video library in your pocket is progress, not "packratting".
Anyone in the Marines is a good shot - Marines are first and foremost riflemen.
That Marine A calls Marine B a "lousy shot" is comparing B to the best. That Marine B is a Marine means he's still a far better shot than the general population.
Entry hole: very small, little energy. Exit hole: very large, lots of energy. While seemingly counter-intuitive, physical norm is for the target to move toward the shooter. Wrap a melon in celophane and try for yourself. Penn & Teller have a chapter on it in one of their books.
As a phone tech support guy, I got a call from someone complaining "whenever I try to use my laptop to dial up the company computer, the police show up at my front door."
Turns out the guy had gone to a hotel on business. Getting an outside line required dialing 9-1, then the desired phone number: 1-800-...-.... Upon returning home, the unmodified dialer dutifully dialed 9-1-1-800-...-....
The law is not secret at all, you need to show ID before boarding a flight. What is so secret about this?
How do you know it's a law? 'cuz some rentacop at the gate told you? Do you know what the law actually says? is it being fully enforced? not enforced enough? or is it just a figment of a deluded public's imagination?
If I cannot actually read the law somewhere, how do I know it exists? Most people are grossly ignorant of the law, believing certain laws exist when they don't, or don't believe other laws exist when they do. Show me the "you must show your ID to fly" law - if you can't, then I'm inclined to believe it doesn't actually exist, and have a big problem with someone illegally violating my right to anonymous travel.
What's with the funny-looking connector? Does this thing double as a memory stick and/or other non-USB interfaced device? Why the separate USB adapter thingie if this has a USB interface already?
I already read the article in the processed-dead-tree-carcass, delevered-by-internal-combustion-engine copy of Wired. I'm amazed/. posted this story so late.
WHen will broadband companies truly serve the populace by providing broadband capability to all, not just the city folk?
Cable lines cost on the order of $20,000 per mile. In the city, that mile of cable serves hundreds or thousands of customers. In seriously rural areas you might get a dozen or less - or even have to run miles of cable for one customer. It's just cost-prohibitive to serve wired broadband to _everyone_.
A friend wanted cable...but wasn't about to shell out $45,000 to string it along her 2.5-mile driveway.
Ironically, it was rural ranchers who first got full-blown (for the time) telephone service installed - because they already had many miles of barbed wire running from home to home. Maybe now we just need to figure out how to run broadband over barbed wire.
Slashdot Mirror
I fail to see what makes him think improved driver support will change people's reasons for running it.
... and the minority can either whine & be ignored, or give up and join the rest on the dark side.
Wow, you're really missing the point.
Microsoft's winning tactic is "embrace and extend": grudgingly accept the winning standard, get LOTS of people to use the MS version, then slowly deviate from that standard. They win by default via customer loyalty; when a large majority of users choose the MS solution, the "standard" becomes whatever MS says it is
In this case, the idea is to play off Linux's biggest weakness: lack of drivers. MS drivers may suck, but at least they exist! (Personally, it was incredibly frustrating to run Knoppix on a once-popular reasonably-capable Gateway laptop and not even have sound because the drivers wouldn't support even the most common sound card - but freakin' Win95 that was on it runs sound fine! ARGH!) By "embracing" Linux via a method heavily dependent on drivers, there would be a boom in Linux - to be specific, MS-Linux. Then, once hooked like crack addicts, upgrades gradually fork away from "real" Linux and toward Windows - exactly what Microsoft did to IBM regarding OS/2. The few hardcore Linux users left are left swinging in the breeze.
Most of them! One groove for each of two sides.
Given that, you can afford to pay for your WiFi access.
Wireless access is similiar to Libraries.
No, it's not. If you want books or internet access you can go to the library. Pushing for free WiFi is like pushing for giving people books outright.
I'm surprised you didn't bring up paying for schools. Presumably you are not in school yourself nor does it seem likely you have any kids. I suppose you complain about having to pay for schools too.
I couldn't send my wife to university last year precisely because the local school taxes were too high - irnonic, no? Irony made worse by the abysmal services paid for by my tax money (my mother is a math tutor - business is extremely good due to inept yet well-paid teachers).
There are certainly some basic services a community is wise to provide to anyone and require all to pay for: fundamental roads, police, firefighting, mail, defense. WiFi is hardly "fundamental", much less so than your food, clothing and shelter society expects you to pay for; if you want Internet access go walk to the library - don't force me under threat of imprisonment to bring it to your home just so you can
Seemed rediculous to me too - until I sat down with appropriate stats and worked it out. Yes, sir, I did research it to see if it is true.
Here are [vital] services I have never used:
Amazing, why does this continue to be a response to questioning funding by government taxation?
WiFi amounts to the most luxurious of communication services. In a world where nearly 80% of people have never even made a phone call, some are contending that others should be compelled, under threat of imprisonment, to pay for - of all things - wireless broadband.
We have to pay for postal mail, telephones, couriers, pagers, cable TV, and wired broadband - what makes WiFi so special and different that the few who actually have wireless computers (costing more than the annual salary of most people on this planet) should compel the rest to pay for it?
Do you seriously equate easy WWW access to putting out your neighbor's house fire? Even the fire department will not rebuild the home, only limit the destruction thereof. Police try to arrest people who stole your wallet; police do not ensure the filling thereof. Roads provide a pervasive system that benefits all as practically everything travels thereupon - and even there, most of the cost is borne by taxes on truckers; the only thing stopping truly commercial roads is the lack of physical space, a limitation which Internet access lacks.
Don't try to equate WiFi with firemen.
Get your hand out of my wallet.
Should the money someone else pays the government under threat of imprisonment be used for something they don't want, won't use, and won't enjoy?
If you want it, you pay for it. Don't force anyone else to pay who doesn't want to. I've got enough bills to pay without funding your addiction to
FWIW, the entire Inca civilization rose, thrived and fell - without the wheel.
He needs to talk to Bombardier about their Embrio project - a supercool motorcycle-like unicicle.
That wasn't from a cheesy forwarded email. I spent a lot of time hunting down those quotes and assembling the list! If your auntie sent you a copy, she stole it from me!
Paranoia Quotes
... ?
I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code. -Emo Phillips
No matter how paranoid I get, it's never enough to keep up.
The question is not whether I'm paranoid, it's whether I'm paranoid enough.
The truly paraniod are rarely conned.
Doesn't matter if I'm paranoid - they're still after me.
I sincerely believe people talk about me. Mine would be a pretty meaningless existance if they didn't.
Why are some people terrified of "black helicopters" and don't even notice that they are being monitored almost constantly by the whole network of obvious surveilance cameras, credit cards, ATMs, EZpass, company ID/access cards, magazine subscriptions, SSNs, taxes, fees, video rentals, Internet firewall recording, 'cookies',
Paranoia: the belief that someone cares.
Paranoia is the belief in a hidden order behind the visible.
When everyone is out to get you, paranoia is only good thinking.
"Paranoia is knowing all the facts." - Woody Allen
"Paranoia is just another word for longevity." - Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse
"Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness."
"Paranoia is reality seen on a finer scale." - Philo Gant, Strange Days
"The issue is not whether you are paranoid, the issue is whether you are paranoid enough." - Max, Strange Days
"Why are you so paranoid, Mulder?"
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's because I find it hard to trust anybody." - Scully & Mulder, The X-Files, "Ascension"
Paranoia strikes deep / Into your life it will creep / It starts when you're / always afraid. You step out / of line, the man come and / take you away.
"I don't agonize over decisions as much these days. The criteria of what's important to me is clear. The insecurity that you feel, and the paranoia that you feel, have been around for a long time -- you know it's a liar because it's been lying to you all along -- every time you start something new. You get used to it, and you sort of go, 'Oh, you're showing up again, well f*** you.'" - John Cusack
Freedom is just a hallucination created by a pathological lack of paranoia.
Paranoia doesn't mean the whole world really isn't out to get you.
If you ever wanted to know what a person with acute paranoia looks like, just keep watching.
I have the power to channel my imagination into ever-soaring levels of suspicion and paranoia.
Paranoia is heightened awareness.
Paranoia is a social disease--you get it from screwing other people.
"Paranoia is the delusion that your enemies are organized." - Arthur D. Hlavaty.
"This is the Nineties, Bubba, and there is no such thing as Paranoia. It's all true." - Hunter S Thompson
"There are two kinds of paranoia: Total, and insufficient. I am both, because if you think you are sufficiently paranoid, you're not." - Guildenstern, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
"The truly paranoid are clever enough to not *act* paranoid." - Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation
"When everyone _is_ out to get to you, being paranoid isn't going to help." - Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation
"When did you get so paranoid?"
"When they started plotting against me." - The Paper
"Paranoia is only the leading edge of the discovery that everything in the world is connected." - `The Illuminatus Trilogy'
When you've been through everything I have, paranoia is merely a precaution!
Paranoia is not the belief that everybody's out to get you -- they are. Paranoia is the belief that everybody's conspiring to get you.
The greater the concentration of power, the greater the paranoia it generates about its need to destroy everything outside itself.
I love this job. Nothing like paranoia and neurosis. Who needs a Coke habit? I've got journalism!!
There's something inherently American about paranoia. Given the i
Scared of WiFi snoops to turn your house into a Faraday cage? Ya sure?
No FM/AM radio in the house.
No broadcast TV (not everyone has cable, guys).
No stepping outside while on the cordless phone.
No using your WiFi-enabled laptop on the back porch.
No cell phone reception inside.
No dedicated weather radio.
No self-setting "atomic" clock.
No pager.
Great.
"Write [the price of this year's tax prep program] off on next years taxes."
... but with your generous advice to write it off, he actually gets to not pay the extra $12 in taxes, only the $50 actual price.
Great. Considering he likely pays around 25% in income tax, a $50 tax program really costs $63
Real smart response to someone observing that, due to the insane complexity of tax code, the gov't should provide tax software for $0.
Pardon me for standing up for them, but
Peeves me off when the people writing the software are not trusted to administrate their own computer which they are writing software for (or some equivalent thereto). What's with this growing American sentiment that nobody should be trusted with tools, that only someone special should be (without noting the perversity that if nobody can be trusted, then nobody can be trusted)?
1000-2000 songs at hand? What's "packrat" about that? Storing a normal-sized music collection in a super-compact uber-convenient manner is not being a packrat, it's simply repackaging your stuff in a more convenient fasion.
I have about 150 CDs and 3000 books. This is neither unusual nor takes up an excessive amount of space. Having all of it at my fingertips in a few cubic inches of storage is convenience and efficiency born of the information age, not "packrat".
The article states "He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper." That is a preposterous comparison, as by that measure a single vinyl LP record equates to a half-truck of paper - were we thus "packrats" back in the 60's? hardly.
A movie, uncompressed full-resolution, is about 2TB. Squashing it onto a DVD does not equate to truckloads of paper, it's simply a different medium.
Cute shocking analogy. Get real. Having a normal book/music/video library in your pocket is progress, not "packratting".
Ironic that the Slashdot quote appeared right below your post on my screen, saying:
"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android
Anyone in the Marines is a good shot - Marines are first and foremost riflemen.
That Marine A calls Marine B a "lousy shot" is comparing B to the best.
That Marine B is a Marine means he's still a far better shot than the general population.
Entry hole: very small, little energy.
Exit hole: very large, lots of energy.
While seemingly counter-intuitive, physical norm is for the target to move toward the shooter. Wrap a melon in celophane and try for yourself. Penn & Teller have a chapter on it in one of their books.
As a phone tech support guy, I got a call from someone complaining "whenever I try to use my laptop to dial up the company computer, the police show up at my front door."
Turns out the guy had gone to a hotel on business. Getting an outside line required dialing 9-1, then the desired phone number: 1-800-...-.... Upon returning home, the unmodified dialer dutifully dialed 9-1-1-800-...-....
Maybe 472 hours of DVD-quality movies.
Full movie film quality with no loss requires 1TB per hour.
How do you know it's a law? 'cuz some rentacop at the gate told you? Do you know what the law actually says? is it being fully enforced? not enforced enough? or is it just a figment of a deluded public's imagination?
If I cannot actually read the law somewhere, how do I know it exists? Most people are grossly ignorant of the law, believing certain laws exist when they don't, or don't believe other laws exist when they do. Show me the "you must show your ID to fly" law - if you can't, then I'm inclined to believe it doesn't actually exist, and have a big problem with someone illegally violating my right to anonymous travel.
What's with the funny-looking connector? Does this thing double as a memory stick and/or other non-USB interfaced device? Why the separate USB adapter thingie if this has a USB interface already?
I already read the article in the processed-dead-tree-carcass, delevered-by-internal-combustion-engine copy of Wired. I'm amazed /. posted this story so late.
Cable lines cost on the order of $20,000 per mile. In the city, that mile of cable serves hundreds or thousands of customers. In seriously rural areas you might get a dozen or less - or even have to run miles of cable for one customer. It's just cost-prohibitive to serve wired broadband to _everyone_.
A friend wanted cable...but wasn't about to shell out $45,000 to string it along her 2.5-mile driveway.
Ironically, it was rural ranchers who first got full-blown (for the time) telephone service installed - because they already had many miles of barbed wire running from home to home. Maybe now we just need to figure out how to run broadband over barbed wire.
A truly silly question on