And you feel that others shouldn't enjoy the same tools that you do?
If you are suggesting I give away the contents of my toolbox, no thanks. But I'll assume we're still talking about software, which can be easily duplicated.:) I give tools away all the time, I gave away a sed script earlier today.
The very things you love about Linux are the very things you would end up denying others simply because they would never find it, or the barrier for entry would be to high.
But, see, that's not our disagreement. I have no problem with other people expanding their capabilities (with or without my help). You are talking about taking things away from people, not giving them things. There should be as close to an infinite number of options as people want, and believe me, people want more than one package manager.
If you want to change the way of things, work on interoperability between the major package managers. There are already several projects working on this that would appreciate your help.
DDT has never been banned. It's been in production since the 1800s and has been used as an insecticide since the 1930s. You can buy it today, but it is illegal to use it as an agricultural pesticide.
Wanna know why I'm glad it is illegal to use DDT as an agricultural pesticide?
Because spraying DDT causes disease vector insects to develop DDT resistance, which results in people unnecessarily dying from malaria, yellow fever and other diseases.
And also, I like dragonflies.
Using DDT in targeted applications, specifically on window screens and bed nets, would work IF the swamps hadn't been sprayed with DDT. This is documented, real honest science.
It's the so-called "DDT ban" (that Rush Limbaugh types do so love to talk about) that is helping the poor suffering malaria infested non-Westerners.
Have you noticed that whenever "conservative" pundits start talking about policy, their proposals always involve foreign brown people taking it in the neck? This is just another example; bring back wide-spread DDT spraying "to control the excess population" but call it charity.
Personally speaking, I fail to see the difference of talking about Malaria Carriers then opening a jar of them, and someone pointing a gun at my head screaming, "Give Me Your Wallet!"
They were just mosquitoes, not malaria-carrying mosquitoes. If they existed at all, that is... it was probably just an empty jar.
It would still piss me off mightily, though, because I'm allergic to mosquito venom and I don't normally wear DEET to indoor events.
DDT's original purpose was malaria control. Only later was it used for a general pesticide. For a while, the WTO suggested the use of DDT in this manner. DDT is extremely effective, and when used moderately and not as a general pesticide, the environmental effects are highly reduced. Clearly DDT as a pesticide is clearly worse that the pests, but DDT as a malaria prevention is not clearly worse that malaria.
Well, you're wrong about DDT's original purpose. It was not determined to be a contact insecticide until the 1930s, but was created in the 1800s.
However, your general point is still valid; it is overuse of DDT that has made it ineffective against malaria. The people screaming "DDT! SPRAY DDT! MORE DDT! KILL ALL THE BUGS!", instead of using it in carefully targeted applications, were the ones who ruined the efficacy of DDT against malaria - not scary greens and evil liberals.
You'll note from reading this thread that loud and uninformed people are still willing to throw poison about without proper understanding of the consequences... I'd only trust someone like yourself, who is willing to consider nuances, with DDT.
Develop DDT. OK, that would be a German associate of Bayer in the 1800s. Determined to be a potent insecticide by a Swiss in the 30s. Or, to put it another way, "we" didn't discover DDT, or develop it.
Use DDT to wipe out the North American malaria-carrying mosquito population. North America is not a statistically significant malaria reservoir and never has been. Mosquitoes spread malaria they do not magically create malaria by their very presence.
Drain the swamps to prevent mosquitos from returning. North America's swamps were not universally drained, there are several dozen within a hundred miles of where I sit and some of the largest ones (the Great Dismal, the Okefenokee and the Everglades) still exist and generate billions of mosquitoes every year.
The swamps that were drained were mostly drained to increase the value of the land for agricultural or housing purposes anyway, and although some were drained to control mosquitoes, malaria was less involved than diseases that actually killed significant numbers of Americans, such as yellow fever.
Enjoy life in a malaria-free country It's hard when lying dittoheads keep trying to demonize me as a dreaded "Green Liberal" spawn of satan. But I will try!
Ban DDT. DDT was banned for most (but not all) purposes because it was more effective at accumulating in birds and humans than suppressing mosquitoes. Interestingly enough, one of the few purposes that DDT was still legal for, and still is legal for, is controlling malaria.
Crusade against anyone else seeking to drain their own swamps. Your persecution fantasies are a bit extreme; when has anyone kept you from draining a swamp? Never! Prove me wrong? People all over the USA drain swamps all the time and thumb their noses at wetlands preservation laws. State governments do it when they want to put a road through around here.
Offer extremely expensive anti-malarial drugs for sale. Oh, because the drug companies are the seekret leaders of the "Green Liberal conspiracy" you're on about? Please.
Completely fail to understand why poor third-world countries have a malaria problem Wait, you don't realize that poor third-world countries are using DDT like crazy, and that their local mosquito populations are effectively immune now? And that food products (such as shrimp) from those countries are contaminated with DDT which makes them less valuable, yet another factor keeping those countries poor? And that malaria is a disease of poverty, which can only be eliminated by eliminating the reservoir of infected humans? I think your mythical Green Liberals are not the ones misunderstanding the problem here.
?? This is the part that dittoheads always like best. Handwaving in place of reason or research.
Profit! From what, customers dying in the countries that want our goods? Yeah, I know, it was a South Park reference, I got it.
Our society has a bad habit of declaring a thing to be evil after we don't need it any more. You aren't part of my society, so I can't speak to that. My society is in favor of new solutions when old ones are proven not to work, and old solutions when they are doing the job OK. That would make me a traditional conservative before the Reagan years, but I guess I'm a radical today.
North America has little malaria because we can afford screens on our windows and because we are pretty good at keeping people who have malaria out of the country.
Now, why are you shilling for DDT? I think you hate the Bald Eagle, that's what I think, because you hate America.
Why can't they use a unified packaging system between all of the distros?
Who exactly is this "they" you are talking about?
Humans build stuff that does what they want to accomplish for their own goals. I am not so interested in your goals, though I am altruistic enough to hope you achieve them. Red Hat feels the same way about SuSE. Debian feels that way about Gentoo.
Linus is right, the system stops evolving optimally as soon as you start constraining it into your particular vision of what everyone else needs.
As for linux "dying a long quiet death", who cares? It's a tool, not a pet animal. When it stops solving your problems stop using it; me and Linus both have the source code, so we will keep using it as long as we need it... regardless of what anyone else does.
Here's the part about dealing with telcos that your CNA trainer must have skipped:
You: a squirrel has chewed through the FioS line, please send a tech.
Telco Support: Please repeatedly perform dozens of nearly random acts that demonstrate your social inferiority to my status as High Priest of Telco.
You: Sure thing!
Telco Support: What kind of computer are you running?
You: I have a desktop and a laptop. What do you recommend for best service?
Telco Support: Arcane and expensive mass-market product with obsolete features, bad support, firewall turned off and never patched, version the vendor no longer ships.
You: By amazing co-incidence, that is exactly the version I am running right here! What luck!
Telco Support: Twiddle many knobs and break lots of working stuff as I tell you to do things that cannot possibly fix a physically damaged line.
You: Sure thing! I like being helped! (be careful, here, you need to pause for appropriate amounts of time after each nonsensical suggestion is tendered so the Telco Rep will not figure out that you are watching TV and eating nachos instead of wasting your time actually doing the things he tells you to do).
You: Well, gee, it still doesn't work, even though I've reinstalled Windows three times now and stuck tender portions of my anatomy in the lightbulb socket as you instructed. What should we do now?
Telco Support: We'll have to send a truck out. It will be there sometime between 2 AM Friday a week from now and 3:15 PM Christmas next year. You will have to stay in the house between those times to let the technician into the house.
You: Sure thing, I love waiting in line! Thanks! You know, it's been such a great pleasure working with you an' all, I'd like to send you some cookies, how can I do that?
Telco Rep: We know that one. Wait for the truck.
You: OK, I'm off to my dentist appointment, I love all the drilling!
Now you wait for the truck to show up. DO NOT LEAVE THE PHONE UNATTENDED UNTIL THE TRUCK SHOWS UP. The truck will not come during the period the telco says it will come. The technician (who is not your enemy, incidentally) will receive a call from the dispatcher that goes like this:
Dispatcher: Some toad in Blooker street says his line's out. Most likely stuffed cheese and salami into his CDROM, but you better go check it out. Here's the number. If nobody answers just forget about it, his problem will most likely go away or he'll forget about it, I'm going to close the ticket now.
Tech: (Calls number)
You: Hello?
Tech: This is Jim from Telco, I got a call about a line being out?
You: Yeah, a squirrel chewed through the line. I can see it out my window.
Tech: Oh, is it FioS? We told purchasing to stop buying the kind insulated with molasses and peanut butter, but they won't listen, they say it is more cost-effective.
They live in a culture that has more commercial freedom than yours, apparently. Given that they are in Russia, that's a sad commentary on wherever you live.
why? just because they claim to be an 'auditor' means they can profit from a cracker?
Because it's a tool. You can cave people's heads in with a hammer, you can assassinate the pope with a kitchen knife. They are tools, they have no moral dimension. Even a thumbscrew can be used for moral purposes, such as a doorstop that keeps cute fuzzy puppies from running on to train tracks.
Effective tools amplify your ability to do things you want to do. They don't make it necessary or possible for you to commit crimes; your will and your circumstances are what makes you a criminal.
I have used wifi crackers to audit networks in my workplace with the full knowledge of my employer. I have never used one to commit a crime, ever. It's just a tool.
You need letters, numbers and symbols. Mixed case also.
If you follow such a formula black hats know more about your password than if you don't, so their brute force attacks from 10,000 node botnets just got exponentially faster. You made the key space smaller when you eliminated all possible passwords that do not contain letters, numbers, symbols and mixed case.
My password is also not based on a dictionary word and means something only to me.
That's a far better strategy.
Myself, I ignore all "rules" and "formulas" for password generation and use 64 characters or more for important passwords. Until this became possible (I'm old) I always used the maximum number of characters allowed (so old, I had to use six-character passwords for decades).
Back in the day, college students and security auditors used to routinely brute passwords without dictionaries because MVS and RSX had such short passwords.
back in the day...red hat7.0, mandrake7.0, would all boot within about 5 to 10 seconds... maybe its all the add ins these days to stay competitive to M$???
Thank you for the link, and for your work! I'll pass it on. I hope you've got all 3 touchpanels working, that would be totally awesome.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
That entirely depends upon your definition of "God". If you include existence or non-existence as part of your definition (as typical of most fundamentalist dogmas) then scientific reasoning cannot be applied due to circular logic. It's pure faith, since you cannot provide proof if your axioms include your conclusions.
The God of the Judeo-Christian mythos, as described by scripture, almost certainly does not exist.
However, if your God is a dachshund named Fred, it may well be that your God does exist. Hi, Fred!
Back in the day, when mac afficiandos were always bragging about how "intuitive" their OS was (so intuitive, you dragged a network drive into the file deletion widget to unmount it... uh right) we used to say "the only intuitive interface is the nipple".
Then we all got old and had kids and grandkids, and discovered how ignorant we were. So now we say "no interface is intuitive, not even the nipple. It's all learned."
Frankly, I never did cotton to the Sugar UI (let's stop this talk of it being an OS please). I'm now running Ubuntu on the XO and I'm happier for it. Running XP on the XO hardware will be a joke.
Can you give me any useful advice on accomplishing that? My kids have been unsuccessful; they've been googling and following various how-tos but none have worked so far. They've had to reformat back to the OLPC OS distro every time in order to get the XO working again.
If you can supply any links or tips I'll pass 'em along to the kids. Thanks!
...from the days of ruinously expensive proprietary UNIX available only on mainframes at large corporate and academic sites, to the modern age in which any individual's cheap home computer can provide all manner of network services, given only sufficient bandwidth and a distribution of free open-source software, are tremendous.
Sigh... UNIX didn't run on ruinously expensive mainframes and was not proprietary in the "old days". Quoth the old man who was there.
UNIX was developed for cheap minicomputers; specifically, the DEC PDP series, which were called "Programmable Data Processors" (PDP, get it?) instead of "computers" because they were so cheap customers refused to believe they were real computers. The DEC salesman would use the pitch "Oh, you don't need a ruinously expensive mainframe, your particular application needs can be satisfied by a cheap programmable data processor!".
The big iron ran stuff like SCOPE, OS/360 variants, GECOS (ever wonder why/etc/passwd has a GECOS field? Look it up.) and Burroughs MCP. Weirdly enough, though, it has recently become possible to run a unix descendant (linux) on a mainframe descendant (System Z). So you've got it backwards - UNIX started small and went big. It also started free - Ritchie used to give it away to universities - but became expensive and proprietary after it gained market share.
The internet is rich with self-organising tribal societies clustering around memes rather than geography.
These tribes began to form before the age of computers, with the advent of cheap travel and communications (postwar auto and telecommunications booms) but you're right, the Internet has created a medium where they can flourish far beyond what was possible in earlier ages.
If this were true (it is not, in my own personal experience) it would most likely be because people who need to carry guns are more likely to be in situations where they are in danger. I have plenty of friends who carry and only one of them has ever been shot; he was shot on two separate occasions while completely unarmed, which is why he carries now.
Blue Screen of Death, et cetera, censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
As the number of domains that point to the same IP address increases, so does the number of pointless DNS requests.
I don't think so; after all, humans will click the same number of times regardless. You haven't increased the number of index fingers or eyeballs by creating a wider namespace.
iRobot has dispatched terminators to your location.
Please move to the midpoint of the nearest wall for the duration of this operation. Should you become lodged in a corner, move outwards slowly until you come into contact with either the terminator's plasma rifle or the rotating brush.
Actually, spiders do not eat other spiders. While they are known for being very aggressive towards other species, spiders will not attack each other.
The more you know...
You are quite extremely wrong on this one, my friend. Most spiders will eat anything that they can if they are hungry; this makes spider mating rituals (males are typically smaller than females) quite dangerous.
My spouse is an entomologist; we own several books on spider behaviour. I strongly recommend to you John Crompton's "The Spider" which is an interesting, entertaining, and scientifically accurate resource.
Crompton's other books are great too, if you enjoy personal narratives that present natural science accurately. Of course, if you don't, that's like shooting spiders with a howitzer.
Slashdot Mirror
And you feel that others shouldn't enjoy the same tools that you do?
If you are suggesting I give away the contents of my toolbox, no thanks. But I'll assume we're still talking about software, which can be easily duplicated. :) I give tools away all the time, I gave away a sed script earlier today.
The very things you love about Linux are the very things you would end up denying others simply because they would never find it, or the barrier for entry would be to high.
But, see, that's not our disagreement. I have no problem with other people expanding their capabilities (with or without my help). You are talking about taking things away from people, not giving them things. There should be as close to an infinite number of options as people want, and believe me, people want more than one package manager.
If you want to change the way of things, work on interoperability between the major package managers. There are already several projects working on this that would appreciate your help.
DDT has never been banned. It's been in production since the 1800s and has been used as an insecticide since the 1930s. You can buy it today, but it is illegal to use it as an agricultural pesticide.
Wanna know why I'm glad it is illegal to use DDT as an agricultural pesticide?
Because spraying DDT causes disease vector insects to develop DDT resistance, which results in people unnecessarily dying from malaria, yellow fever and other diseases.
And also, I like dragonflies.
Using DDT in targeted applications, specifically on window screens and bed nets, would work IF the swamps hadn't been sprayed with DDT. This is documented, real honest science.
It's the so-called "DDT ban" (that Rush Limbaugh types do so love to talk about) that is helping the poor suffering malaria infested non-Westerners.
Have you noticed that whenever "conservative" pundits start talking about policy, their proposals always involve foreign brown people taking it in the neck? This is just another example; bring back wide-spread DDT spraying "to control the excess population" but call it charity.
Personally speaking, I fail to see the difference of talking about Malaria Carriers then opening a jar of them, and someone pointing a gun at my head screaming, "Give Me Your Wallet!"
They were just mosquitoes, not malaria-carrying mosquitoes. If they existed at all, that is... it was probably just an empty jar.
It would still piss me off mightily, though, because I'm allergic to mosquito venom and I don't normally wear DEET to indoor events.
DDT's original purpose was malaria control. Only later was it used for a general pesticide. For a while, the WTO suggested the use of DDT in this manner. DDT is extremely effective, and when used moderately and not as a general pesticide, the environmental effects are highly reduced. Clearly DDT as a pesticide is clearly worse that the pests, but DDT as a malaria prevention is not clearly worse that malaria.
Well, you're wrong about DDT's original purpose. It was not determined to be a contact insecticide until the 1930s, but was created in the 1800s.
However, your general point is still valid; it is overuse of DDT that has made it ineffective against malaria. The people screaming "DDT! SPRAY DDT! MORE DDT! KILL ALL THE BUGS!", instead of using it in carefully targeted applications, were the ones who ruined the efficacy of DDT against malaria - not scary greens and evil liberals.
You'll note from reading this thread that loud and uninformed people are still willing to throw poison about without proper understanding of the consequences... I'd only trust someone like yourself, who is willing to consider nuances, with DDT.
I think you are confused about what "morally" means.
Develop DDT.
OK, that would be a German associate of Bayer in the 1800s. Determined to be a potent insecticide by a Swiss in the 30s. Or, to put it another way, "we" didn't discover DDT, or develop it.
Use DDT to wipe out the North American malaria-carrying mosquito population.
North America is not a statistically significant malaria reservoir and never has been. Mosquitoes spread malaria they do not magically create malaria by their very presence.
Drain the swamps to prevent mosquitos from returning.
North America's swamps were not universally drained, there are several dozen within a hundred miles of where I sit and some of the largest ones (the Great Dismal, the Okefenokee and the Everglades) still exist and generate billions of mosquitoes every year.
The swamps that were drained were mostly drained to increase the value of the land for agricultural or housing purposes anyway, and although some were drained to control mosquitoes, malaria was less involved than diseases that actually killed significant numbers of Americans, such as yellow fever.
Enjoy life in a malaria-free country
It's hard when lying dittoheads keep trying to demonize me as a dreaded "Green Liberal" spawn of satan. But I will try!
Ban DDT.
DDT was banned for most (but not all) purposes because it was more effective at accumulating in birds and humans than suppressing mosquitoes. Interestingly enough, one of the few purposes that DDT was still legal for, and still is legal for, is controlling malaria.
Crusade against anyone else seeking to drain their own swamps.
Your persecution fantasies are a bit extreme; when has anyone kept you from draining a swamp? Never! Prove me wrong? People all over the USA drain swamps all the time and thumb their noses at wetlands preservation laws. State governments do it when they want to put a road through around here.
Offer extremely expensive anti-malarial drugs for sale.
Oh, because the drug companies are the seekret leaders of the "Green Liberal conspiracy" you're on about? Please.
Completely fail to understand why poor third-world countries have a malaria problem
Wait, you don't realize that poor third-world countries are using DDT like crazy, and that their local mosquito populations are effectively immune now? And that food products (such as shrimp) from those countries are contaminated with DDT which makes them less valuable, yet another factor keeping those countries poor? And that malaria is a disease of poverty, which can only be eliminated by eliminating the reservoir of infected humans? I think your mythical Green Liberals are not the ones misunderstanding the problem here.
??
This is the part that dittoheads always like best. Handwaving in place of reason or research.
Profit!
From what, customers dying in the countries that want our goods? Yeah, I know, it was a South Park reference, I got it.
Our society has a bad habit of declaring a thing to be evil after we don't need it any more.
You aren't part of my society, so I can't speak to that. My society is in favor of new solutions when old ones are proven not to work, and old solutions when they are doing the job OK. That would make me a traditional conservative before the Reagan years, but I guess I'm a radical today.
North America has little malaria because we can afford screens on our windows and because we are pretty good at keeping people who have malaria out of the country.
Now, why are you shilling for DDT? I think you hate the Bald Eagle, that's what I think, because you hate America.
Why can't they use a unified packaging system between all of the distros?
Who exactly is this "they" you are talking about?
Humans build stuff that does what they want to accomplish for their own goals. I am not so interested in your goals, though I am altruistic enough to hope you achieve them. Red Hat feels the same way about SuSE. Debian feels that way about Gentoo.
Linus is right, the system stops evolving optimally as soon as you start constraining it into your particular vision of what everyone else needs.
As for linux "dying a long quiet death", who cares? It's a tool, not a pet animal. When it stops solving your problems stop using it; me and Linus both have the source code, so we will keep using it as long as we need it... regardless of what anyone else does.
Here's the part about dealing with telcos that your CNA trainer must have skipped:
You: a squirrel has chewed through the FioS line, please send a tech.
Telco Support: Please repeatedly perform dozens of nearly random acts that demonstrate your social inferiority to my status as High Priest of Telco.
You: Sure thing!
Telco Support: What kind of computer are you running?
You: I have a desktop and a laptop. What do you recommend for best service?
Telco Support: Arcane and expensive mass-market product with obsolete features, bad support, firewall turned off and never patched, version the vendor no longer ships.
You: By amazing co-incidence, that is exactly the version I am running right here! What luck!
Telco Support: Twiddle many knobs and break lots of working stuff as I tell you to do things that cannot possibly fix a physically damaged line.
You: Sure thing! I like being helped! (be careful, here, you need to pause for appropriate amounts of time after each nonsensical suggestion is tendered so the Telco Rep will not figure out that you are watching TV and eating nachos instead of wasting your time actually doing the things he tells you to do).
You: Well, gee, it still doesn't work, even though I've reinstalled Windows three times now and stuck tender portions of my anatomy in the lightbulb socket as you instructed. What should we do now?
Telco Support: We'll have to send a truck out. It will be there sometime between 2 AM Friday a week from now and 3:15 PM Christmas next year. You will have to stay in the house between those times to let the technician into the house.
You: Sure thing, I love waiting in line! Thanks! You know, it's been such a great pleasure working with you an' all, I'd like to send you some cookies, how can I do that?
Telco Rep: We know that one. Wait for the truck.
You: OK, I'm off to my dentist appointment, I love all the drilling!
Now you wait for the truck to show up. DO NOT LEAVE THE PHONE UNATTENDED UNTIL THE TRUCK SHOWS UP. The truck will not come during the period the telco says it will come. The technician (who is not your enemy, incidentally) will receive a call from the dispatcher that goes like this:
Dispatcher: Some toad in Blooker street says his line's out. Most likely stuffed cheese and salami into his CDROM, but you better go check it out. Here's the number. If nobody answers just forget about it, his problem will most likely go away or he'll forget about it, I'm going to close the ticket now.
Tech: (Calls number)
You: Hello?
Tech: This is Jim from Telco, I got a call about a line being out?
You: Yeah, a squirrel chewed through the line. I can see it out my window.
Tech: Oh, is it FioS? We told purchasing to stop buying the kind insulated with molasses and peanut butter, but they won't listen, they say it is more cost-effective.
You: Yeah, FioS. It's the black jacket kind.
Tech: I'll be right over.
they can legally sell this because...
They live in a culture that has more commercial freedom than yours, apparently. Given that they are in Russia, that's a sad commentary on wherever you live.
why? just because they claim to be an 'auditor' means they can profit from a cracker?
Because it's a tool. You can cave people's heads in with a hammer, you can assassinate the pope with a kitchen knife. They are tools, they have no moral dimension. Even a thumbscrew can be used for moral purposes, such as a doorstop that keeps cute fuzzy puppies from running on to train tracks.
Effective tools amplify your ability to do things you want to do. They don't make it necessary or possible for you to commit crimes; your will and your circumstances are what makes you a criminal.
I have used wifi crackers to audit networks in my workplace with the full knowledge of my employer. I have never used one to commit a crime, ever. It's just a tool.
You need letters, numbers and symbols. Mixed case also.
If you follow such a formula black hats know more about your password than if you don't, so their brute force attacks from 10,000 node botnets just got exponentially faster. You made the key space smaller when you eliminated all possible passwords that do not contain letters, numbers, symbols and mixed case.
My password is also not based on a dictionary word and means something only to me.
That's a far better strategy.
Myself, I ignore all "rules" and "formulas" for password generation and use 64 characters or more for important passwords. Until this became possible (I'm old) I always used the maximum number of characters allowed (so old, I had to use six-character passwords for decades).
Back in the day, college students and security auditors used to routinely brute passwords without dictionaries because MVS and RSX had such short passwords.
back in the day...red hat7.0, mandrake7.0, would all boot within about 5 to 10 seconds...
maybe its all the add ins these days to stay competitive to M$???
Look up "Wirth's Law".
Thank you for the link, and for your work! I'll pass it on. I hope you've got all 3 touchpanels working, that would be totally awesome.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
That entirely depends upon your definition of "God". If you include existence or non-existence as part of your definition (as typical of most fundamentalist dogmas) then scientific reasoning cannot be applied due to circular logic. It's pure faith, since you cannot provide proof if your axioms include your conclusions.
The God of the Judeo-Christian mythos, as described by scripture, almost certainly does not exist.
However, if your God is a dachshund named Fred, it may well be that your God does exist. Hi, Fred!
And when did it's interface become intuitive?
When they replaced the ribbon with a nipple.
Back in the day, when mac afficiandos were always bragging about how "intuitive" their OS was (so intuitive, you dragged a network drive into the file deletion widget to unmount it... uh right) we used to say "the only intuitive interface is the nipple".
Then we all got old and had kids and grandkids, and discovered how ignorant we were. So now we say "no interface is intuitive, not even the nipple. It's all learned."
Frankly, I never did cotton to the Sugar UI (let's stop this talk of it being an OS please). I'm now running Ubuntu on the XO and I'm happier for it. Running XP on the XO hardware will be a joke.
Can you give me any useful advice on accomplishing that? My kids have been unsuccessful; they've been googling and following various how-tos but none have worked so far. They've had to reformat back to the OLPC OS distro every time in order to get the XO working again.
If you can supply any links or tips I'll pass 'em along to the kids. Thanks!
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity; thus saith the Preacher.
What has been done, shall be again done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
There is no remembrance of former things; nor shall those who come after remember things as they are today.
Feel free to keep your ideas to yourself...
...from the days of ruinously expensive proprietary UNIX available only on mainframes at large corporate and academic sites, to the modern age in which any individual's cheap home computer can provide all manner of network services, given only sufficient bandwidth and a distribution of free open-source software, are tremendous.
Sigh... UNIX didn't run on ruinously expensive mainframes and was not proprietary in the "old days". Quoth the old man who was there.
UNIX was developed for cheap minicomputers; specifically, the DEC PDP series, which were called "Programmable Data Processors" (PDP, get it?) instead of "computers" because they were so cheap customers refused to believe they were real computers. The DEC salesman would use the pitch "Oh, you don't need a ruinously expensive mainframe, your particular application needs can be satisfied by a cheap programmable data processor!".
The big iron ran stuff like SCOPE, OS/360 variants, GECOS (ever wonder why /etc/passwd has a GECOS field? Look it up.) and Burroughs MCP. Weirdly enough, though, it has recently become possible to run a unix descendant (linux) on a mainframe descendant (System Z). So you've got it backwards - UNIX started small and went big. It also started free - Ritchie used to give it away to universities - but became expensive and proprietary after it gained market share.
The internet is rich with self-organising tribal societies clustering around memes rather than geography.
These tribes began to form before the age of computers, with the advent of cheap travel and communications (postwar auto and telecommunications booms) but you're right, the Internet has created a medium where they can flourish far beyond what was possible in earlier ages.
People who carry guns for protection get shot
If this were true (it is not, in my own personal experience) it would most likely be because people who need to carry guns are more likely to be in situations where they are in danger. I have plenty of friends who carry and only one of them has ever been shot; he was shot on two separate occasions while completely unarmed, which is why he carries now.
Blue Screen of Death, et cetera, censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
As the number of domains that point to the same IP address increases, so does the number of pointless DNS requests.
I don't think so; after all, humans will click the same number of times regardless. You haven't increased the number of index fingers or eyeballs by creating a wider namespace.
FIRE THE WAVE MOTION GUN!
They will have to invent square roombas.
I'd opt for a triangle myself. Perhaps 30/60/90.
iRobot has dispatched terminators to your location.
Please move to the midpoint of the nearest wall for the duration of this operation. Should you become lodged in a corner, move outwards slowly until you come into contact with either the terminator's plasma rifle or the rotating brush.
Thank you for your co-operation.
Do you think if you were frozen now, you'd have trouble being resurrected in 2028? I think not. You'd love it.
Humans are like that: adaptable.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say you could resurrect an ancient Sumerian person with little or no difficulties.
You might want to read about Ishi, the last of the Yahi, before you leap to that conclusion.
"I use PostgreSQL because I'm too stupid to figure out MySQL" is not exactly a ringing endorsement.
I dunno, works for me.
If a retarded monkey can use it, that makes it less likely that I will have to personally maintain it.
kernel application binary interfaces are a moving target
So, in order to address shortcomings and become more capable, we will need to stop growing and improving! Makes perfect sense!
Actually, spiders do not eat other spiders. While they are known for being very aggressive towards other species, spiders will not attack each other.
The more you know...
You are quite extremely wrong on this one, my friend. Most spiders will eat anything that they can if they are hungry; this makes spider mating rituals (males are typically smaller than females) quite dangerous.
My spouse is an entomologist; we own several books on spider behaviour. I strongly recommend to you John Crompton's "The Spider" which is an interesting, entertaining, and scientifically accurate resource.
Crompton's other books are great too, if you enjoy personal narratives that present natural science accurately. Of course, if you don't, that's like shooting spiders with a howitzer.
I was going to point out that I am not trying to argue with you, merely reporting an event as perceived by my children, but suddenly an AC jumped in with possibly the most awesomest post to slashdot I've yet encountered.
Is it too late for me to pretend I wrote that?