Uhhuh. Right. Public schools have been running to install Linux left and right, as the administrators see that buying windows is far too expensive. And students using all those Linux machines are often encouraged to read the source code for the operating system -- always guided along by the extremely well-trained computer science teachers that every public high school has...
If the schools had just been given the machines, they would have either bought Windows licenses, or stuffed them in a closet and let them collect dust. Maybe one or two enlightened teachers would have managed to talk the administrators out of a few of them and set them up running a free operating system... but those teachers are few and far between, and generally have other teaching duties to perform.
You're right that giving software away doesn't cost m$ much, but I don't think that it harms the children. Having lot of kids learn word processing etc. skills will be much more useful than having a select few learn programming skills.
...it was inevitable that it would eventually become better software than Netscape.
Gee, God forbid that somebody actually throw their money around to improve their software. I mean, anticompetitive practices and such are all well and good, but when a software company starts improving their software, that's where we need to draw the line.
What does a "fair fight" have to do with anything? There's no law (or common sense) that says that you have to lower the playing field so that everyone can get on. Your argument generally says that "because NS couldn't match the pace of IE's improvement, IE should have been reined in until such a time that they were equal again." Isn't this the same/. where we always complain about companies stifiling innovation?
If you want to complain about monopolistic practices, go ahead. But claiming that there's something wrong with building a better browser is ridiculous.
Of course people have the right to change a piece of art.
The right of the artist is to create whatever he wants. This technology in no way conflicts with that -- he can still create a movie with as much gratuitous sex and violence as he wants.
It may be a little debatable as to whether the right of an artist includes enabling others to see what has been created. If it's curtailed too much, then it becomes censorship. However, that's not at issue here, as the full movie is still there, assuming you set the controls correctly.
However, I can do whatever I want with somebody's work of art. It's my business what I feed into my head, not anybody else's. We already can modify the artist's intention (fast-forward buttons come to mind most easily, but I'm sure anyone could give a dozen examples where people commonly change the 'original intention' of the artist.)
It makes me think of Windows 95. When I first installed it on a 486/33, it seemed huge, bloated and slow. If I run it now on a PIII/800, it seems to be fast, lean, stripped down and almost elegant.
I'm not quite sure that's true. Win95 seemed bloated and slow on the ancient 486/25 I first used it on... and yet, it's _still_ bloated and slow on new machines. One would think that it would be quick as lightning, and yet I still "click the start button... drum fingers for a second..." Same really goes for both KDE and GNOME. On the flip side, Blackbox was lightning fast on the first machine I installed Linux on (a 486/66, IIRC), and it seems just as fast on my machine today.
Best explanation I can come up with is that there hasn't been any increase in processor speed in the last 5 years. I'm convinced that they hit a wall around the 386 or so, and have simply been rebranding the same chips every year or so, trusting that we'll convince ourselves that things really are going faster.
I'd like to say -- I worked with IBM for a year or so (as a co-op), and can say that I quite enjoyed it. I'm not sure at all that it's what I'll want to do once I get out of school, (I'm not even studying CS, though of course that's largely irrelevant...) but it definately was much, much more enjoyable than school.
Of course, I've found that some people absolutely love school, and would rather be there. If that describes you, then I recommend forgetting about job-hunting for the time being and continue your schooling for now. (Face it -- life is a lot easier in school than in the real world, especially the way the economy stands today.) However, if you're like me and want nothing more than to graduate and put it behind you, look around until you can find a job you enjoy.
Why would you want to laugh about "MS getting bashed on" after seeing this?
It seems to me that the vast majority of slashdotters consider the fact that these providers don't "support" Linux to be a leading cause of evil in the world, depriving people of their constitutional right to broadband, and furthering the M$ monopoly. Seeing so many people ready to applaud this action just goes to show -- most people here really don't care as much as they claim to.
Even if you did this, it's still possible that your actions would cause the numbers to come up just right so a passing hill orc is generated with a wand of wishing, and nobody else gets one. While working around this kind of thing is probably possible (generate *ALL* items and monsters beforehand, and then pick one out of the queue in place of random generation, for instance), the fact is that it would be extremely difficult to get working in a 'fair' manner.
But in practice, a large part of the fun of nethack is that it isn't fair. A couple days ago, I was walking around on the third or fourth level of the dungeon, and... *ZOT*... a death ray comes shooting out of a darkened doorway. I never did find out who did it. Fair? Probably not. But it's things like that that make the game difficult and interesting.
essentially the only choices are DirecPC satellite service or cablemodem...
...or a dialup. I've seen no evidence that dialups are going to suddenly dissappear, even if they're becoming less important. Until the cable modem providers really do have a monopoly on internet access, they should be able to act as any other private business.
Too bad that a lot of slashdot moderators sympatize to M$ so much that they moderate up very weak arguments that just please them. Maybe you ought to take out the 'symathize with M$' part -- M$, linux, gnome, kde, and nader supporters all do the same thing. perhaps we need a click-though license on the moderation guidelines before they can moderate... now THAT'll solve the problems...
If someone's been hired to admin a server, why do they deserve to be paid for dedicating a 'barest minimum of effort' to their job? Keeping your server secure is part of being a sysadmin, and anyone who doesn't do a competent job of doing so deserves to be fired.
IIS is insecure. Fine. I'll believe that. However, as many people have pointed out, everything that's been exploited lately has been fixable, with even mediocre security practices, for some time. I can see that MS and the marketing-driven higher-ups share in responsibility for all of this, but that doesn't excuse idiot sysadmins.
From what I've seen, you're half right -- CS professors would never say "just make it work." But they wouldn't want you to strive for elegance, either. The job of CS professors is to churn out immeasurable numbers of the mindless Java programmers that the industry wants, solely so that the school can claim "Look! 94% of our graduates got a job!" and lure in more future drones. (Of course, this is only bad if you believe that the job of a university is to educate rather than simply sell off all its students. If you think the latter, then go ahead and skip the rest of this post/moderate accordingly.)
Object-oriented programming and other "silver bullets" have been around for awhile. Bill Gates, while he may not be a legendary programmer, isn't the guy who's creating those BSODs now. It's the newer people, straight out of college, whose idea of important algorithms includes bubble sorting and who only have a 50-50 chance of distinguishing a pointer from a coconut. New programming methodologies won't make programs better -- only better educated programmers can do that.
That's what the "boss's boss... boss's boss..." thing was about. Thay say it works... but it doesn't. Their claim of it working is only relevant if you give up.
No... it's because we're tired of the whining. And it's a false statement.
Bush was elected by the rules of the election. That's why it's false. Whether or not he got a majority of the popular in the election is completely irrelevant. If you and Stallman don't like that, you should work on changing it. But lashing out at Bush is simply an attack, rather than rational argument.
No... that's "if you like to play brand-new computer games". If you've grown up enough to realize that being six months or a year old doesn't make a game suck, then you're perfectly happy playing games that were released for winders earlier.
That said, lots of people do think that anything but the latest and greatest isn't worth playing, and the number of games available for Linux is significantly less than for windows, so people who play a lot of games may choose to have a windows machine. So yes, there's still a place for making more and better games for Linux.
(Surprise) Slashdot is broken again. Well, let's try again...
You always have the right not to release your own code or modifications. Indeed, the FSF objects to software licenses that require people to release private modifications. However, once you release your software to other people, the FSF asserts that it is not ethical to restrict the freedom of other people to use that software.
The problem I have with the FSF's position is that their goal is to rid the world of proprietary software -- it's not enough that people have the opportunity to use free software, but proprietary software is off-limits. If they had their way, I wouldn't even be able to let someone have a binary-only release of software for free... I'd be required to provide sources for it as well. Exactly why should I be forced to provide source for something that I want to give away?
Sure, we'll have a few companies selling and developing free software (After all, it's certainly proven itself as an effective business model so far. Right.) And everyone else... goes into support for free software? Maybe everyone in the software industry can get jobs flipping burgers, and develop free software on their off-hours, just like they do now. (Quick check... can I have a show of hands of how many people here are employed making or otherwise involved in the creation of proprietary software? At the moment, how easy will it be for you to find another job?)
I like using free software, and I write it as well, but peoples' "rights" aren't infringed by proprietary software. The slavery analogy is terminally flawed, because I can always choose not to use proprietary software. Unless the day comes when that isn't true (and we seem to be moving farther away from it all the time, as Linux becomes better and better), those who create the content are perfectly within their rights to enforce software licenses.
Re:What will the next 2.4 revision be called?
on
2.4.9 Kernel Released
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Personally, I think that negative moderations should get more scrutiny (and harsher penalties) during metamoderation than positive moderations. Far too often you'll see people marked as "offtopic" and "overrated" because the moderators know that those two are more likely to be accepted in metamod than "flamebait".
When metamodding, I mark all + moderations as "fair" (even if it's a goatse.cx post as insightful. There will always be more people modding it down, and this way there's no grey area.) I take a good look at any - moderations, because there's way too many people that simply mod down the viewpoints they don't like.
Re:Want some cheese with that whine?
on
Dorm Storm?
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· Score: 2
But I can get a real, live computer, with much better specs, for far cheaper than those laptops. Laptops tend to be more finicky, harder to use, easier to steal, etc., etc. They might be nice if you're carrying it around all over the place, but if you just want to be able to surf the web, type your essays, and play your games at home, they're a step down, not up.
I'm already sick of the ways that the universities screw you out of your money (books, written by faculty members, that cost upwards of $100 and are never used in class? Fortunately, after my first semester I got smarter and stopped buying books until I had read them and decided I wanted them.) I attend the University of Arizona... if they started doing something similar here, I'd just ignore them. (Fortunately, "They do it at ASU" is enough to convince most people here to fight against it.)
It's the students' business how they decide to get their education. I can understand requiring basic things that are necessary... but there's absolutely no excuse to require a $1000 - $3000 piece of equipment that's of only limited utility to many people. The only reason they do this is because some fraction will buy the laptops available at inflated prices through the university. It's disgusting. If companies didn't place so much importance on the ability to buy yourself a diploma, maybe we could go back to learning things rather than playing this stupid game.
Slashdot Mirror
If the schools had just been given the machines, they would have either bought Windows licenses, or stuffed them in a closet and let them collect dust. Maybe one or two enlightened teachers would have managed to talk the administrators out of a few of them and set them up running a free operating system
You're right that giving software away doesn't cost m$ much, but I don't think that it harms the children. Having lot of kids learn word processing etc. skills will be much more useful than having a select few learn programming skills.
Gee, God forbid that somebody actually throw their money around to improve their software. I mean, anticompetitive practices and such are all well and good, but when a software company starts improving their software, that's where we need to draw the line.
What does a "fair fight" have to do with anything? There's no law (or common sense) that says that you have to lower the playing field so that everyone can get on. Your argument generally says that "because NS couldn't match the pace of IE's improvement, IE should have been reined in until such a time that they were equal again." Isn't this the same
If you want to complain about monopolistic practices, go ahead. But claiming that there's something wrong with building a better browser is ridiculous.
Hey, guess what? It already exists, and Bill Gates has elected himself president!
The right of the artist is to create whatever he wants. This technology in no way conflicts with that -- he can still create a movie with as much gratuitous sex and violence as he wants.
It may be a little debatable as to whether the right of an artist includes enabling others to see what has been created. If it's curtailed too much, then it becomes censorship. However, that's not at issue here, as the full movie is still there, assuming you set the controls correctly.
However, I can do whatever I want with somebody's work of art. It's my business what I feed into my head, not anybody else's. We already can modify the artist's intention (fast-forward buttons come to mind most easily, but I'm sure anyone could give a dozen examples where people commonly change the 'original intention' of the artist.)
I'm not quite sure that's true. Win95 seemed bloated and slow on the ancient 486/25 I first used it on
Best explanation I can come up with is that there hasn't been any increase in processor speed in the last 5 years. I'm convinced that they hit a wall around the 386 or so, and have simply been rebranding the same chips every year or so, trusting that we'll convince ourselves that things really are going faster.
Of course, I've found that some people absolutely love school, and would rather be there. If that describes you, then I recommend forgetting about job-hunting for the time being and continue your schooling for now. (Face it -- life is a lot easier in school than in the real world, especially the way the economy stands today.) However, if you're like me and want nothing more than to graduate and put it behind you, look around until you can find a job you enjoy.
It seems to me that the vast majority of slashdotters consider the fact that these providers don't "support" Linux to be a leading cause of evil in the world, depriving people of their constitutional right to broadband, and furthering the M$ monopoly. Seeing so many people ready to applaud this action just goes to show -- most people here really don't care as much as they claim to.
But in practice, a large part of the fun of nethack is that it isn't fair. A couple days ago, I was walking around on the third or fourth level of the dungeon, and
Is karma and/or the fame of the front page really so important to you that it warrants crying to the whole of slashdot?
Wow. You can violate somebody's constitutional rights by putting some computer chips together and allowing them to buy it?
essentially the only choices are DirecPC satellite service or cablemodem...
...or a dialup. I've seen no evidence that dialups are going to suddenly dissappear, even if they're becoming less important. Until the cable modem providers really do have a monopoly on internet access, they should be able to act as any other private business.
Well, yeah. But we'll eventually be dead too.
What does that have to do with anything? I don't whine when they say I have to buy a Mac to use OSX, even if I paid for the operating system.
...accurate to three decimal places, according to the story ... good enough for me.
Too bad that a lot of slashdot moderators sympatize to M$ so much that they moderate up very weak arguments that just please them. ... now THAT'll solve the problems...
Maybe you ought to take out the 'symathize with M$' part -- M$, linux, gnome, kde, and nader supporters all do the same thing. perhaps we need a click-though license on the moderation guidelines before they can moderate
Last I checked, negligence could be criminal. We expect people to be at least marginally responsible for their actions (or, at least, we should.)
IIS is insecure. Fine. I'll believe that. However, as many people have pointed out, everything that's been exploited lately has been fixable, with even mediocre security practices, for some time. I can see that MS and the marketing-driven higher-ups share in responsibility for all of this, but that doesn't excuse idiot sysadmins.
Object-oriented programming and other "silver bullets" have been around for awhile. Bill Gates, while he may not be a legendary programmer, isn't the guy who's creating those BSODs now. It's the newer people, straight out of college, whose idea of important algorithms includes bubble sorting and who only have a 50-50 chance of distinguishing a pointer from a coconut. New programming methodologies won't make programs better -- only better educated programmers can do that.
That's what the "boss's boss ... boss's boss ..." thing was about. Thay say it works ... but it doesn't. Their claim of it working is only relevant if you give up.
Bush was elected by the rules of the election. That's why it's false. Whether or not he got a majority of the popular in the election is completely irrelevant. If you and Stallman don't like that, you should work on changing it. But lashing out at Bush is simply an attack, rather than rational argument.
"Nah... It was just a bit of hyperbole. But mark my words ... in a couple hundred years or so, it'll happen. I guarantee."
No ... that's "if you like to play brand-new computer games". If you've grown up enough to realize that being six months or a year old doesn't make a game suck, then you're perfectly happy playing games that were released for winders earlier.
That said, lots of people do think that anything but the latest and greatest isn't worth playing, and the number of games available for Linux is significantly less than for windows, so people who play a lot of games may choose to have a windows machine. So yes, there's still a place for making more and better games for Linux.
You always have the right not to release your own code or modifications. Indeed, the FSF objects to software licenses that require people to release private modifications. However, once you release your software to other people, the FSF asserts that it is not ethical to restrict the freedom of other people to use that software.
The problem I have with the FSF's position is that their goal is to rid the world of proprietary software -- it's not enough that people have the opportunity to use free software, but proprietary software is off-limits. If they had their way, I wouldn't even be able to let someone have a binary-only release of software for free ... I'd be required to provide sources for it as well. Exactly why should I be forced to provide source for something that I want to give away?
Sure, we'll have a few companies selling and developing free software (After all, it's certainly proven itself as an effective business model so far. Right.) And everyone else ... goes into support for free software? Maybe everyone in the software industry can get jobs flipping burgers, and develop free software on their off-hours, just like they do now. (Quick check ... can I have a show of hands of how many people here are employed making or otherwise involved in the creation of proprietary software? At the moment, how easy will it be for you to find another job?)
I like using free software, and I write it as well, but peoples' "rights" aren't infringed by proprietary software. The slavery analogy is terminally flawed, because I can always choose not to use proprietary software. Unless the day comes when that isn't true (and we seem to be moving farther away from it all the time, as Linux becomes better and better), those who create the content are perfectly within their rights to enforce software licenses.
When metamodding, I mark all + moderations as "fair" (even if it's a goatse.cx post as insightful. There will always be more people modding it down, and this way there's no grey area.) I take a good look at any - moderations, because there's way too many people that simply mod down the viewpoints they don't like.
I'm already sick of the ways that the universities screw you out of your money (books, written by faculty members, that cost upwards of $100 and are never used in class? Fortunately, after my first semester I got smarter and stopped buying books until I had read them and decided I wanted them.) I attend the University of Arizona ... if they started doing something similar here, I'd just ignore them. (Fortunately, "They do it at ASU" is enough to convince most people here to fight against it.)
It's the students' business how they decide to get their education. I can understand requiring basic things that are necessary ... but there's absolutely no excuse to require a $1000 - $3000 piece of equipment that's of only limited utility to many people. The only reason they do this is because some fraction will buy the laptops available at inflated prices through the university. It's disgusting. If companies didn't place so much importance on the ability to buy yourself a diploma, maybe we could go back to learning things rather than playing this stupid game.