Absolutely true! I use -O69 on my make.conf's CFLAGS and not only does my laptop blow up spectacularly, it blows me up^H^H, too.
On a serious note, you could re-install Windows and never mention Linux to these morans. In either case, I'd put up a web page rather prominently with detailed (and non-ranting) information about this vendor. If done well enough, they may come to regret their decision to reject your repair claim.
If that's "the real reason," then we are *screwed*! No government that thinks it's protecting its citizens by tearing down Saturn V posters is actually protecting its citizens at all.
Of course they're not capable of protecting us this way. Most likely it was some mid-level moran who made that decision but then again, who is the government? It's people with the real or the apparent power to enforce such evil sh--.
But then there was this clever guy named H. L. Mencken who said, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
So, if they're trying to scare you, try looking somewhere other than where they want you to look. Could be interesting...
Re:What's good for the goose...
on
Explosives Camp
·
· Score: 1
This is the same sort of fuzzy logic we see with USA possessing nuclear weapons and yet demanding that Iran be prevented from ever having any.
Just like the ski resort where girls are looking for husbands and husbands are looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as you may think: Iran's present leader has stated as one of his goals the destruction of Israel which, no matter how hard one may try to argue the point, is a great deal more worrisome than any real or perceived imperial power mongering on the part of the USA.
I'm sure you can agree that if your next door neighbor shouted loudly across the street that he's gonna "f--- you up good", you'd have cause for worry when he takes a drive down to the gun store soon after.
That's the real problem with countries like Iran: their leadership is too often enchanted with radicalism which inspires about as much admiration and confidence among the more mature peoples of the world as a rabid drunk does at the Saturday matinee. Allowing such nations to have nuclear weapons is somewhere between unconscionable and insane.
Your best bet would be to bring signs of a crime to the police's attention as quickly as possible on the theory that the less time passes the more likely it is that they can establish that you could not have had anything to do with it. If I discovered blood in my car, I'd go so far as to say every minute counts because I'd want the police to establish my innocence from the start, when evidence is fresh and it's obvious what I could and could not have done to cover my tracks. Unless I were guilty, of course.
The problem in this case is that by the limited evidence that we have to go by, Hans Reiser did precisely the kind of things that a guilty person would to cover his tracks, and trying to hide the car was probably the most damning among them. Are there other explanations for his behavior? Sure, and they probably number in the hundreds, but how plausible are they? None of this convicts Hans Reiser of a crime but it certainly appears as if he had a lot to hide and given the various bizarre circumstances of the case, and in the light of what is known generally about Hans' personality, it certainly seems that he is guilty of something. If nothing worse, he tampered with and destoyed a lot of the evidence and that doesn't make him look innocent.
In any case, the whole thing is a tragedy for all involved.
Want to bet that they're going to try to fix this inconvenient mess by making compliance with the Presidential Records Act voluntary, and retroactively so?
Move along, nothing to see. These are not the officials you're looking for!
They save 0.3% bandwidth and you, you need double the diskspace to extract and view the movie. On the plus side, once you delete the.zip and the.wmv files you've got half a gigabyte free again to fill up with pr0n.
I've got a 4-year old R250-based laptop. The proprietary ATI drivers ceased to be supported and 3D "performance" was never worth talking about, nor was it ever stable enough for serious work. I switched to the open source radeon driver and got quite an awakening: glxgears went from 120fps to 1500fps; even at full resolution (1600x1200) glxgears still ran at 450fps.
I bet I get significantly better performance out of my old R250-based system with the open source driver than I'd get from an expensive brand-new card with the shabby proprietary drivers. So, I wouldn't bother with any ATI card that doesn't have 3D support in the open source driver. End of story.
Sorry, but I've installed and upgraded Java more times than I can remember now over the past 10 or 11 years, and the only place where I've ever had real issues was on Windows (but even those have not reared their ugly head in a few years). Java's initial startup time is on the order of a second or two, yes, but only the first time. After that a simple Hello World program takes about 1/50th of a second to load (that's on a 4-year old laptop).
And with Java 1.6 a splash graphic for applications shows up in a fraction of a second and within a second or two (even on first load) your application can begin to draw into it to provide feedback to the user while a complex GUI is constructed in the background.
With Flash, on the other hand, I can never predict when the sound will work and when things are mysteriously silent. Sometimes I'm sent off to a website to upgrade to the latest and greatest only to be informed that it's not available for my operating system.
So, while Flash may be more ubiquitous on some platforms, its record is extremely spotty as far as I'm concerned. My money is on software that has a proven cross-platform record and if JavaFX actually delivers on its promise (which has yet to be proven, of course) then a 1 or 2 second startup time will not be much of an argument against it.
P.S. The myriad Java acronyms are ugly, yes, but there are really only three you need to be remotely familiar with: J2EE (the "EE" part is the enterprise edition which you probably don't need). The other are the JDK (dev kit for developers) and the JRE (runtime edition if you just want to run Java stuff). The vast majority of people want the JRE. On Windows this one will even check for and install updated versions once a week or so. And it can't get much easier than going to java.com and clicking the big green button...
Can't say I pity the RIAA: I used to buy CDs for $11 a piece and kept thinking that the prices would surely come down (market forces, supply and demand, right?) At $17 I think not just twice, but five times about buying a disc because it's obviously been a planned rip-off all these years.
Along comes the internet and a new way of getting the word out and distributing music. Does the RIAA take advantage of lower (read: "nil") media costs? Do they dance with joy at all the chance of ridiculously low advertisement costs? Do they use P2P as a kind-of word of mouth mechanism? No, they sue us. Really f---ing bright idea, that, and then they wonder why I vote with my money and buy absofriggenlutely *nothing* anymore from any artist associated with the RIAA? Sheesh!
Not sure what the IAA stands for but I know the 'R' stands for 'Retarded'.
The real trouble is that the Patriot Act wasn't written with the possibility in mind that it might be abused. The executive branch will abuse what power it is given so this is really a failure of the legislative branch (our law-givers, the senate), which makes our dear Senators' protestations nothing short of an exercise in hypocrisy.
The best thing that can come of this is that our senators grow a collective set of balls, realize that Patriot Act makes a mockery of our professed idea of freedom, and pull in the reigns on this heinous piece of legislation./well, I can dream, can't I?//hey look, men in dark glasses at my door
Sure, you can buy your tombstone with your stuff back instead of doing a corpse run but you will not recover the experience that you've lost due to death. If you do recover your tombstone "the hard way" you get most of that experience back. It's a choice you get and given that not all tombstones are easy (or even possible) to retrieve, it's a good choice to have.
Unfortunately I've been getting unsolicited phone calls via machine on my cell phone recently and they're all in Spanish, which I neither speak nor understand. Other than improving my skill of shouting vile curses and heinous threats into the phone, is there anything I can do?
Will you all please stop telling the likes of Microsoft and Sony how they are hurting their customer base? I, for one, would much rather have these clueless behemoths "innovate" themselves into a hole in the ground than clue them in, and for free at that. Sheesh, people!
The question is not so much the production of resources (food, oil, etc.), but what impact the waste has on the environment as the population continues to grow. Not unlike cancer, we can only bury and forget the waste for so long. Eventually it will not be ignored any longer and we're going to have to face the consequences.
Land fills are reaching capacity (waste is shipped from one state to another where there is still space), and waste pumped into rivers, lakes, and oceans are killing fish or keeping life away (the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico around the mouth of the Mississippi). Looking the other way isn't going to make it go away. It's just a question of when and how severely it'll come back to bite us.
Abso-fricken-lutely! Want a horror story? The gory details are here (including names, ESAD!) but the gist of it is this:
National City Mortgage used to (back around the middle of 2002) withdraw every month from our bank account a mortgage payment. One day they contacted us about an accellerated payoff (withdraw half a month's payment every 14 days, which pays a 30-year mortgage off in about 22 years). We agreed to it but soon after our checks started bouncing: National City Mortgage had withdrawn not just the usual month's mortgage payment but another FULL month's payment two weeks later (and way before we asked for this to be started). For all we knew they were looking to ride us for triple payments!
We called our bank immediately and blocked any further access to our account. Even "better": when my wife called National City Mortgage about the problem they not only gave her the run-around, but laughed at and hung up on her. It took well over a month to get the refund and we had to swallow all the fees for bounced checks (and there were a lot of them!)
Bottom line: Never, ever(!) authorize someone to withdraw money from your bank account without you supplying the explicit authorization on a case-by-case basis. Oh, and never, ever do business with National City Mortgage. I sure wouldn't.
Companies illegally spying on people is something straight out of a cyberpunk novel or something.
Actually I'm not in the least surprised: the President leads the way (wholesale spying on all Americans) and the People (HP) follow his example.
What would scare the crap out of me is if the President is actually pardoned and allowed to continue to operate above the law because that would lead us into far deeper shit than if one company (HP) breaks the law and (as they should be) is slapped down for it. We're all supposed to be equal before the law. Except, maybe the President, who is more equal than the rest of us, I guess.
I'm afraid that Blackboard's motivation may be to grind down D2L financially until D2L can be bought cheap or simply driven from the market. If the tactic works, we'll see more of it. This one is a test case and it's probably a lot cheaper and less risky to sue than buy D2L. The fact that they didn't approach D2L first with demands for licensing fees says to me that they probably expected D2L to show them the door at once, so why not skip that step and go straight for litigation?:-/
Blackboard wouldn't be the first to use that tactic and they won't be the last. As a public company they are beholden to their shareholders who want to profit from a rising stock price. Any considerations of a moral nature (crushing competitors, eating them alive, spitting out the pieces) are often of secondary importance at best. That's the ugly side of capitalism.
IANAL, but if the patent is proved invalid somehow (perhaps due to undisclosed but obvious prior art, which seems to be at least one of D2L's counter arguments) Blackboard may simply lose the suit by default and go home. For a while their stock will go "on sale" (not unlike right now), which is good for speculators. Eventually public memory of these events will fade, the stock price recovers, the world keeps spinning, and Jack Bauer has yet another bad day.
Disclaimer: Long ago I used to work for Bb. I own Bb stock. I'm rather unhappy with this litigation.:(
Why are laws written in english anyway? English is ambiguous, and that's a bad thing. Why not some formal law language with clear semantics and syntax?
Because then you'd have to have specially trained and licensed practitioners who understand that language and are able to interpret it to the rest of us. Ummm, waitaminute...
If the employees don't want to work without internet then they should get the boot, screw letting them quit. Their job is to work, not surf.
My job requires me to figure stuff out and, not yet being omniscient, I resort to Google to look stuff up. Then the company I work for started messing with queries and the mangled mess was rejected by Google as bot crappings. What was I to do? Quit my job? Really?! Some of us actually like our jobs and we do work (even if we also surf here and there, the equivalent of taking a smoke break or staring out the window for while) and if limited internet access is the only real issue, then look into ssh. It's not just for shell access, you know?
Back in the day when I was a network admin (think 286 and the powerhouse 386 with a whooping 8mb RAM), we had occasional issues with one networked PC or another. Most of the time I'd carry a fairly large hammer with me and would place it on top of the computer case while I had it open to investigate the problem and work on the machine. The sight of the hammer freaked out more than one person in the office because they thought I intended to really use the thing. Apparently it had a similar effect on the computer because I never had a problem getting the thing to work again in short order. They also behaved just fine after that implicit threat (the computers, not the people).
It all becomes perfectly clear now! Polar waters flatten and equatorial waters rise because of increased spin of the Earth. The days (and months and years) don't seem to be as long as they used to be. Time is not constant. We all die young. Augh!
"You got to be trusted by the people that you lie to so when they turn their backs on you, you get the chance to put the knife in." -- Pink Floyd, "Dogs" (Animals, 1977)
In all seriousness, Microsoft likely understands quite well what Open Source and what Free Software is all about and they know they are not prepared (and quite possibly incapable) of operating under any such banner. Control is their game. Control of standards, markets, minds, and of ideas. They will never let go of that. They cannot.
They are not "seeing the light" at all, but continuing to formulate and play out strategies to convince all who would listen (or not think too clearly, at least) that limited openness is all you really need and freedom has to do with price and TCO. Don't worry. Just relax and play along, all will be fine. Really!
But think of how many billions of dollars Microsoft stands to lose (and is already losing given that a quarter of Dell's server business, for example, is shipping GNU/Linux instead of MS-Windows) and you can probably think of just how far they will go and how many resources they will dedicate to keeping their golden goose from heading for the hills with that smiling penguin.
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Absolutely true! I use -O69 on my make.conf's CFLAGS and not only does my laptop blow up spectacularly, it blows me up^H^H, too.
On a serious note, you could re-install Windows and never mention Linux to these morans. In either case, I'd put up a web page rather prominently with detailed (and non-ranting) information about this vendor. If done well enough, they may come to regret their decision to reject your repair claim.
But then there was this clever guy named H. L. Mencken who said, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
So, if they're trying to scare you, try looking somewhere other than where they want you to look. Could be interesting...
I'm sure you can agree that if your next door neighbor shouted loudly across the street that he's gonna "f--- you up good", you'd have cause for worry when he takes a drive down to the gun store soon after.
That's the real problem with countries like Iran: their leadership is too often enchanted with radicalism which inspires about as much admiration and confidence among the more mature peoples of the world as a rabid drunk does at the Saturday matinee. Allowing such nations to have nuclear weapons is somewhere between unconscionable and insane.
Your best bet would be to bring signs of a crime to the police's attention as quickly as possible on the theory that the less time passes the more likely it is that they can establish that you could not have had anything to do with it. If I discovered blood in my car, I'd go so far as to say every minute counts because I'd want the police to establish my innocence from the start, when evidence is fresh and it's obvious what I could and could not have done to cover my tracks. Unless I were guilty, of course.
The problem in this case is that by the limited evidence that we have to go by, Hans Reiser did precisely the kind of things that a guilty person would to cover his tracks, and trying to hide the car was probably the most damning among them. Are there other explanations for his behavior? Sure, and they probably number in the hundreds, but how plausible are they? None of this convicts Hans Reiser of a crime but it certainly appears as if he had a lot to hide and given the various bizarre circumstances of the case, and in the light of what is known generally about Hans' personality, it certainly seems that he is guilty of something. If nothing worse, he tampered with and destoyed a lot of the evidence and that doesn't make him look innocent.
In any case, the whole thing is a tragedy for all involved.
Want to bet that they're going to try to fix this inconvenient mess by making compliance with the Presidential Records Act voluntary, and retroactively so?
Move along, nothing to see. These are not the officials you're looking for!
They save 0.3% bandwidth and you, you need double the diskspace to extract and view the movie. On the plus side, once you delete the .zip and the .wmv files you've got half a gigabyte free again to fill up with pr0n.
I've got a 4-year old R250-based laptop. The proprietary ATI drivers ceased to be supported and 3D "performance" was never worth talking about, nor was it ever stable enough for serious work. I switched to the open source radeon driver and got quite an awakening: glxgears went from 120fps to 1500fps; even at full resolution (1600x1200) glxgears still ran at 450fps.
I bet I get significantly better performance out of my old R250-based system with the open source driver than I'd get from an expensive brand-new card with the shabby proprietary drivers. So, I wouldn't bother with any ATI card that doesn't have 3D support in the open source driver. End of story.
Sorry, but I've installed and upgraded Java more times than I can remember now over the past 10 or 11 years, and the only place where I've ever had real issues was on Windows (but even those have not reared their ugly head in a few years). Java's initial startup time is on the order of a second or two, yes, but only the first time. After that a simple Hello World program takes about 1/50th of a second to load (that's on a 4-year old laptop).
And with Java 1.6 a splash graphic for applications shows up in a fraction of a second and within a second or two (even on first load) your application can begin to draw into it to provide feedback to the user while a complex GUI is constructed in the background.
With Flash, on the other hand, I can never predict when the sound will work and when things are mysteriously silent. Sometimes I'm sent off to a website to upgrade to the latest and greatest only to be informed that it's not available for my operating system.
So, while Flash may be more ubiquitous on some platforms, its record is extremely spotty as far as I'm concerned. My money is on software that has a proven cross-platform record and if JavaFX actually delivers on its promise (which has yet to be proven, of course) then a 1 or 2 second startup time will not be much of an argument against it.
P.S. The myriad Java acronyms are ugly, yes, but there are really only three you need to be remotely familiar with: J2EE (the "EE" part is the enterprise edition which you probably don't need). The other are the JDK (dev kit for developers) and the JRE (runtime edition if you just want to run Java stuff). The vast majority of people want the JRE. On Windows this one will even check for and install updated versions once a week or so. And it can't get much easier than going to java.com and clicking the big green button...
Blasphemer! You will be next.
Can't say I pity the RIAA: I used to buy CDs for $11 a piece and kept thinking that the prices would surely come down (market forces, supply and demand, right?) At $17 I think not just twice, but five times about buying a disc because it's obviously been a planned rip-off all these years.
Along comes the internet and a new way of getting the word out and distributing music. Does the RIAA take advantage of lower (read: "nil") media costs? Do they dance with joy at all the chance of ridiculously low advertisement costs? Do they use P2P as a kind-of word of mouth mechanism? No, they sue us. Really f---ing bright idea, that, and then they wonder why I vote with my money and buy absofriggenlutely *nothing* anymore from any artist associated with the RIAA? Sheesh!
Not sure what the IAA stands for but I know the 'R' stands for 'Retarded'.
The real trouble is that the Patriot Act wasn't written with the possibility in mind that it might be abused. The executive branch will abuse what power it is given so this is really a failure of the legislative branch (our law-givers, the senate), which makes our dear Senators' protestations nothing short of an exercise in hypocrisy.
/well, I can dream, can't I? //hey look, men in dark glasses at my door
The best thing that can come of this is that our senators grow a collective set of balls, realize that Patriot Act makes a mockery of our professed idea of freedom, and pull in the reigns on this heinous piece of legislation.
Sure, you can buy your tombstone with your stuff back instead of doing a corpse run but you will not recover the experience that you've lost due to death. If you do recover your tombstone "the hard way" you get most of that experience back. It's a choice you get and given that not all tombstones are easy (or even possible) to retrieve, it's a good choice to have.
Nice article. Thanks.
Unfortunately I've been getting unsolicited phone calls via machine on my cell phone recently and they're all in Spanish, which I neither speak nor understand. Other than improving my skill of shouting vile curses and heinous threats into the phone, is there anything I can do?
Will you all please stop telling the likes of Microsoft and Sony how they are hurting their customer base? I, for one, would much rather have these clueless behemoths "innovate" themselves into a hole in the ground than clue them in, and for free at that. Sheesh, people!
The question is not so much the production of resources (food, oil, etc.), but what impact the waste has on the environment as the population continues to grow. Not unlike cancer, we can only bury and forget the waste for so long. Eventually it will not be ignored any longer and we're going to have to face the consequences.
Land fills are reaching capacity (waste is shipped from one state to another where there is still space), and waste pumped into rivers, lakes, and oceans are killing fish or keeping life away (the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico around the mouth of the Mississippi). Looking the other way isn't going to make it go away. It's just a question of when and how severely it'll come back to bite us.
National City Mortgage used to (back around the middle of 2002) withdraw every month from our bank account a mortgage payment. One day they contacted us about an accellerated payoff (withdraw half a month's payment every 14 days, which pays a 30-year mortgage off in about 22 years). We agreed to it but soon after our checks started bouncing: National City Mortgage had withdrawn not just the usual month's mortgage payment but another FULL month's payment two weeks later (and way before we asked for this to be started). For all we knew they were looking to ride us for triple payments!
We called our bank immediately and blocked any further access to our account. Even "better": when my wife called National City Mortgage about the problem they not only gave her the run-around, but laughed at and hung up on her. It took well over a month to get the refund and we had to swallow all the fees for bounced checks (and there were a lot of them!)
Bottom line: Never, ever(!) authorize someone to withdraw money from your bank account without you supplying the explicit authorization on a case-by-case basis. Oh, and never, ever do business with National City Mortgage. I sure wouldn't.
Actually I'm not in the least surprised: the President leads the way (wholesale spying on all Americans) and the People (HP) follow his example.
What would scare the crap out of me is if the President is actually pardoned and allowed to continue to operate above the law because that would lead us into far deeper shit than if one company (HP) breaks the law and (as they should be) is slapped down for it. We're all supposed to be equal before the law. Except, maybe the President, who is more equal than the rest of us, I guess.
I'm afraid that Blackboard's motivation may be to grind down D2L financially until D2L can be bought cheap or simply driven from the market. If the tactic works, we'll see more of it. This one is a test case and it's probably a lot cheaper and less risky to sue than buy D2L. The fact that they didn't approach D2L first with demands for licensing fees says to me that they probably expected D2L to show them the door at once, so why not skip that step and go straight for litigation? :-/
:(
Blackboard wouldn't be the first to use that tactic and they won't be the last. As a public company they are beholden to their shareholders who want to profit from a rising stock price. Any considerations of a moral nature (crushing competitors, eating them alive, spitting out the pieces) are often of secondary importance at best. That's the ugly side of capitalism.
IANAL, but if the patent is proved invalid somehow (perhaps due to undisclosed but obvious prior art, which seems to be at least one of D2L's counter arguments) Blackboard may simply lose the suit by default and go home. For a while their stock will go "on sale" (not unlike right now), which is good for speculators. Eventually public memory of these events will fade, the stock price recovers, the world keeps spinning, and Jack Bauer has yet another bad day.
Disclaimer: Long ago I used to work for Bb. I own Bb stock. I'm rather unhappy with this litigation.
Back in the day when I was a network admin (think 286 and the powerhouse 386 with a whooping 8mb RAM), we had occasional issues with one networked PC or another. Most of the time I'd carry a fairly large hammer with me and would place it on top of the computer case while I had it open to investigate the problem and work on the machine. The sight of the hammer freaked out more than one person in the office because they thought I intended to really use the thing. Apparently it had a similar effect on the computer because I never had a problem getting the thing to work again in short order. They also behaved just fine after that implicit threat (the computers, not the people).
Chaos is just a measure of how much relevant information you lack.
With all the relevant information at hand we could predict everything and anything.
It all becomes perfectly clear now! Polar waters flatten and equatorial waters rise because of increased spin of the Earth. The days (and months and years) don't seem to be as long as they used to be. Time is not constant. We all die young. Augh!
"You got to be trusted by the people that you lie to so when they turn their backs on you, you get the chance to put the knife in." -- Pink Floyd, "Dogs" (Animals, 1977)
In all seriousness, Microsoft likely understands quite well what Open Source and what Free Software is all about and they know they are not prepared (and quite possibly incapable) of operating under any such banner. Control is their game. Control of standards, markets, minds, and of ideas. They will never let go of that. They cannot.
They are not "seeing the light" at all, but continuing to formulate and play out strategies to convince all who would listen (or not think too clearly, at least) that limited openness is all you really need and freedom has to do with price and TCO. Don't worry. Just relax and play along, all will be fine. Really!
But think of how many billions of dollars Microsoft stands to lose (and is already losing given that a quarter of Dell's server business, for example, is shipping GNU/Linux instead of MS-Windows) and you can probably think of just how far they will go and how many resources they will dedicate to keeping their golden goose from heading for the hills with that smiling penguin.