(yes, I lost an email I was writing last night because of this and I'm still a bit sore...)
Yes, it screwed up a drive rebuild here that had been running for about 20 hours before the reboot. There's an option "download but don't install until I tell you" that may stop this unpredictable rebooting.
He'll tell you not to jump, beg with you, plead, but at the end of the day all he can do is follow your orders
No. He also has the choice to quit. Not taking that choice - or entering into an arrangement that surrenders that choice - implies that he condones the actions he's being asked to carry out.
Paragraphs, please? Slashdot has a preview button for a reason. Anyway...
1.) So I can ping from the GUI but I can't even install a program such as a Firefox nightly build unless I go skinny dipping in the command console?
There are several GUI package managers available.
2.) Why is Linux forcing me to use the AC97 onboard audio in place of my Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum audio card... and then gives me no GUI option to switch from between the devices across the several flavors of Linux I've tried out?
Ask Creative. If they have chosen to provide a Windows driver but not a Linux driver, then that's their fault, not the fault of Linux.
3.) Consistency of design, example: key combinations need to work include Win+D, CTRL+ESC, ALT+TAB, CTRL+ALT+DEL, among many others. Kudos to Xandros for making headway on this.
Consistent with respect to what? Windows? If you want Windows, buy Windows.
4.) "YAST" is a Linux developer's preferred way of referring to something as a control panel. If Linux were to replace Windows normal users would be looking for their "preferences", "settings", or "options".
"YAST" is not Linux, it's Suse. Different distributions do things differently.
5.) Get rid of useless junk: virtual memory (and a forced virtual memory partition on top of that).
Every modern OS (outside of the embedded world) uses virtual memory.
6.) Stop turning my hard drive in to swiss cheese. One drive one partition.
There are several very good reasons for partitioning a drive, but you can put everything into one partition if you want.
To be honest, I get the impression that you are confusing Windows-specific concepts with universal concepts, and are dismayed when you find out that other systems do things differently and you have to learn new concepts. If you travel, it's the height of crassness to complain that the place you are in does things differently to the place you came from - not everywhere in the world speaks English, and to demand that they do is offensive. To expect that all computer systems work like Windows is equally ignorant.
5. I am not interested in your philosophy, assemble me a bundle of software that fits my needs regardless of whether than software fits your philosophy.
Sure. I do philosophy for fun. Contract work is at my normal hourly rate, or assemble your own damn software.
"Put it in writing or buy the licenses, I won't risk my ass over this - or I can install this free program thats just as good and we don't have to pay for it, legally"
You have it spot-on. For the sake of those in the/. readership who haven't been around long enough to have learnt both the art of CYA and the necessity of it, the magic words are: "can I have that in writing, please?"
Anyone who says "no" to a request for a written version of their instructions... leave immediately. It makes your life so much more manageable, and remember, life's too short to spend it managing other people's fuckups.
A driver is basically a look-up table with settings. Get over it.
Funny. The last driver I worked on had 3 embedded compilers, a full OS abstraction layer, garbage collector, and more than one look-up table. Drivers for similar devices have got more complicated in the time since then.
You haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Get over it.
Please look at it in the context of what it was a reply to. I was saying that I regarded corporations as a tool for avoiding the consequences of one's actions, and therefore I did not agree with the fiction of corporate personhood.
nor have I met a Libertarian who thinks that the idea of corporate personhood and the existence of the same free speech rights for corporations should both be abolished.
You have now. (Small-"l" libertarian, at least). I'd rather people were required to face all of the consequences of their actions, rather than the Government allowing them to redistribute many of the negative ones back onto the rest of society.
I absolutely stay away from the Big Corporate chocolate: Hershey's, Cadbery's, etc. It's all shit.
I agree, but the Cadbury's that you get in the US is far far worse than the Cadbury's elsewhere. Take a look at the label and you'll see why - it's actually not made by Cadbury's, but by Hershey's under license. Get a bar somewhere else and it's almost tolerable. (As milk chocolate goes, anyway).
This works rather nicely if you assume everyone earns enough money to provide for their own retirement and healthcare; this simply isn't true. Taking a look at America, the self-styled champion of this Conservative ideology, 10.5 percent of elderly people are living below the poverty line
I would suggest that if the majority of that 10.5 percent had put 50% of everything that they had spent on non-essential items from the age of 18 up 'til their retirement into a retirement account they would not be living below the poverty line after retirement. The minority that would be in poverty no matter how hard they tried to save fully deserve the assistance of the rest of society, those that made a choice should - within certain bounds, I'm not saying that people should be left to starve - live with that choice. See, for example, Moral hazard.
It works even better if you assume that privatisation is more efficient; this isn't true either. Take healthcare, for example; if private companies are "more efficient" than government schemes, why is it that the USA spends more on healthcare per capita than any other developed country (OECD, 1998) without, according to the NBER, an improvement in survival or recovery rates?
Here, I agree entirely with you. The healthcare system in the US is ridiculous and inefficient and fails to provide the benefits that it claims for itself.
You're comparing apples and oranges, and, not only that, but comparing two different types of apple with a single type of orange. Or something like that, whatever the correct metaphor should be.
AMD and ATI have only just merged, so it's a little early to judge the "open-source friendliness" of the new company. However, the history is varied. AMD provides very strong support for gcc and other projects that are important to it, funding a number of full-time developers. ATI hasn't provided as much support for its graphics chipsets - partial documentation rather than active development - but the open-source drivers for ATI still do more than those for Intel, just because Intel graphics chips are a whole lot simpler. (Which means that Intel aren't losing any trade secrets by exposing their internals - their graphics chips are using less "clever stuff" than ATI or nVidia). Every ATI chip that has capabilities in the same class as any Intel graphics chip you care to name has a complete open-source driver, and for every closed ATI GPU there's an equally closed Intel wireless chipset.
Both companies play nice where it suits them and take their ball and go home where that is percieved as the more profitable option. My advice to you is to do the same and pick whichever option gives you more performance per dollar.
They can afford to give me a voucher to pay for a conversion box.
"They" can't afford to pay for anything - "they" can only take the money from one person and give it to another. As someone who hasn't owned or watched a TV in approaching 20 years, I object to paying for frivolous services that I don't use. As far as it being the government's fault for changing the spectrum allocation, did they ever promise that the allocation would be permanent? Or have people merely assumed a variable to be a constant and are complaining that this assumption turned out to be false?
Gah, I wonder if I could use my voucher to buy books with.
The first thing they'll do is hire aides to add literally thousands of minute ammendments to every bill for the simple reason
7-day "sniper rule" (like online auctions) and limiting change submissions to the original sponsors of the bill (anyone else has to write their own bill to enact amendments). Can't vote until 7 days have passed after the last change.
You're a moron if you think that a you can "grow a pair" and "admit responsibility" for something your boss mandates that you do.
I'm sorry, but this attitude pisses me off immensely. Someone giving you money to do X does not reduce your responsibility for doing X one jot. When I tell telesales people "I said no politely and you continued to press me - you are now being rude" and they reply "I'm just doing my job" it sends me into a rage - not so much for the specific act, but for how common this attitude is.
And yes, I have simply walked out when my employer has asked me to violate my ethical standards and would do so again in a heartbeat if the situation arose - without integrity (as I define it for myself) I am nothing. No, this has not resulted in me being unemployable - I just started my own business so that I wouldn't have to deal with that kind of crap again.
No problem. I'd advise you to grab the latest CVS and look in the forums for any required build tweaks - the tarball on sourceforge often lags by quite a bit.
Look up 'ubiquitous' before you whine about how far behind Intel might seem to be.
Sorry, late night submission. I'll claim an error of verb tense rather than adjective usage: "this will beat" rather than "this beats". This silicon is shipping high-end in a couple of weeks, so it'll be mid-range this time next year and integrated on the motherboard the year after that (or thereabouts). Another year or two for the regular PC replacement cycle to churn that through, and it should be widespread by the time Intel predicted for shipping of their 80-core prototype.
Even if Nvidia's CUDA is as hard as the Ars Technica article suggests, I still hope AMD either makes their chips binary compatible, or makes a compiler that works for CUDA code.
From what I saw at the demo, the AMD stuff was running under Brook. As far as I've been able to make out from nVidia's documentation, CUDA is basically a derivative of Brook that has had a few syntax tweaks and some vendor-specific shiny things added to lock you in to nVidia hardware.
The key flaw in your argument is that accidents are ACCIDENT'S.
Apart from the vague possibility of a meteorite hitting the car, there's pretty much no such thing as a car accident. If someone makes a choice to carry out a particular act and they know (or should know) that that act may endanger other people, the results are not "accidental". At best, you could term it negligence.
I'd disagree that it's useless or hypocritical, instead I'd say that it's honest. I do hold beliefs about the universe that I find myself in, and try to act accordingly. However, I don't claim that any of those beliefs are absolute truths, just that they are what I believe to be the highest probability.
Maybe you consider that a meaningless distinction, but I find that it's of value in keeping my head straight when considering alternative viewpoints.
Slashdot Mirror
(yes, I lost an email I was writing last night because of this and I'm still a bit sore...)
Yes, it screwed up a drive rebuild here that had been running for about 20 hours before the reboot. There's an option "download but don't install until I tell you" that may stop this unpredictable rebooting.
He'll tell you not to jump, beg with you, plead, but at the end of the day all he can do is follow your orders
No. He also has the choice to quit. Not taking that choice - or entering into an arrangement that surrenders that choice - implies that he condones the actions he's being asked to carry out.
Paragraphs, please? Slashdot has a preview button for a reason. Anyway...
1.) So I can ping from the GUI but I can't even install a program such as a Firefox nightly build unless I go skinny dipping in the command console?
There are several GUI package managers available.
2.) Why is Linux forcing me to use the AC97 onboard audio in place of my Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum audio card... and then gives me no GUI option to switch from between the devices across the several flavors of Linux I've tried out?
Ask Creative. If they have chosen to provide a Windows driver but not a Linux driver, then that's their fault, not the fault of Linux.
3.) Consistency of design, example: key combinations need to work include Win+D, CTRL+ESC, ALT+TAB, CTRL+ALT+DEL, among many others. Kudos to Xandros for making headway on this.
Consistent with respect to what? Windows? If you want Windows, buy Windows.
4.) "YAST" is a Linux developer's preferred way of referring to something as a control panel. If Linux were to replace Windows normal users would be looking for their "preferences", "settings", or "options".
"YAST" is not Linux, it's Suse. Different distributions do things differently.
5.) Get rid of useless junk: virtual memory (and a forced virtual memory partition on top of that).
Every modern OS (outside of the embedded world) uses virtual memory.
6.) Stop turning my hard drive in to swiss cheese. One drive one partition.
There are several very good reasons for partitioning a drive, but you can put everything into one partition if you want.
To be honest, I get the impression that you are confusing Windows-specific concepts with universal concepts, and are dismayed when you find out that other systems do things differently and you have to learn new concepts. If you travel, it's the height of crassness to complain that the place you are in does things differently to the place you came from - not everywhere in the world speaks English, and to demand that they do is offensive. To expect that all computer systems work like Windows is equally ignorant.
5. I am not interested in your philosophy, assemble me a bundle of software that fits my needs regardless of whether than software fits your philosophy.
Sure. I do philosophy for fun. Contract work is at my normal hourly rate, or assemble your own damn software.
"Put it in writing or buy the licenses, I won't risk my ass over this - or I can install this free program thats just as good and we don't have to pay for it, legally"
You have it spot-on. For the sake of those in the /. readership who haven't been around long enough to have learnt both the art of CYA and the necessity of it, the magic words are: "can I have that in writing, please?"
Anyone who says "no" to a request for a written version of their instructions ... leave immediately. It makes your life so much more manageable, and remember, life's too short to spend it managing other people's fuckups.
I'm looking into Maple (can anyone tell me what their licensing scam looks like?),
Bound to MAC address. Just use ifconfig.
A driver is basically a look-up table with settings. Get over it.
Funny. The last driver I worked on had 3 embedded compilers, a full OS abstraction layer, garbage collector, and more than one look-up table. Drivers for similar devices have got more complicated in the time since then.
You haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Get over it.
What Internet radio stations do you listen to and why?
The most common two for me are:
Digital Gunfire
Groove Salad
"Which section of The Mythical Man Month did you find most insightful, and why?"
There are two major issues with your statement:
Please look at it in the context of what it was a reply to. I was saying that I regarded corporations as a tool for avoiding the consequences of one's actions, and therefore I did not agree with the fiction of corporate personhood.
nor have I met a Libertarian who thinks that the idea of corporate personhood and the existence of the same free speech rights for corporations should both be abolished.
You have now. (Small-"l" libertarian, at least). I'd rather people were required to face all of the consequences of their actions, rather than the Government allowing them to redistribute many of the negative ones back onto the rest of society.
I absolutely stay away from the Big Corporate chocolate: Hershey's, Cadbery's, etc. It's all shit.
I agree, but the Cadbury's that you get in the US is far far worse than the Cadbury's elsewhere. Take a look at the label and you'll see why - it's actually not made by Cadbury's, but by Hershey's under license. Get a bar somewhere else and it's almost tolerable. (As milk chocolate goes, anyway).
This works rather nicely if you assume everyone earns enough money to provide for their own retirement and healthcare; this simply isn't true. Taking a look at America, the self-styled champion of this Conservative ideology, 10.5 percent of elderly people are living below the poverty line
I would suggest that if the majority of that 10.5 percent had put 50% of everything that they had spent on non-essential items from the age of 18 up 'til their retirement into a retirement account they would not be living below the poverty line after retirement. The minority that would be in poverty no matter how hard they tried to save fully deserve the assistance of the rest of society, those that made a choice should - within certain bounds, I'm not saying that people should be left to starve - live with that choice. See, for example, Moral hazard.
It works even better if you assume that privatisation is more efficient; this isn't true either. Take healthcare, for example; if private companies are "more efficient" than government schemes, why is it that the USA spends more on healthcare per capita than any other developed country (OECD, 1998) without, according to the NBER, an improvement in survival or recovery rates?
Here, I agree entirely with you. The healthcare system in the US is ridiculous and inefficient and fails to provide the benefits that it claims for itself.
You're comparing apples and oranges, and, not only that, but comparing two different types of apple with a single type of orange. Or something like that, whatever the correct metaphor should be.
AMD and ATI have only just merged, so it's a little early to judge the "open-source friendliness" of the new company. However, the history is varied. AMD provides very strong support for gcc and other projects that are important to it, funding a number of full-time developers. ATI hasn't provided as much support for its graphics chipsets - partial documentation rather than active development - but the open-source drivers for ATI still do more than those for Intel, just because Intel graphics chips are a whole lot simpler. (Which means that Intel aren't losing any trade secrets by exposing their internals - their graphics chips are using less "clever stuff" than ATI or nVidia). Every ATI chip that has capabilities in the same class as any Intel graphics chip you care to name has a complete open-source driver, and for every closed ATI GPU there's an equally closed Intel wireless chipset.
Both companies play nice where it suits them and take their ball and go home where that is percieved as the more profitable option. My advice to you is to do the same and pick whichever option gives you more performance per dollar.
They can afford to give me a voucher to pay for a conversion box.
"They" can't afford to pay for anything - "they" can only take the money from one person and give it to another. As someone who hasn't owned or watched a TV in approaching 20 years, I object to paying for frivolous services that I don't use. As far as it being the government's fault for changing the spectrum allocation, did they ever promise that the allocation would be permanent? Or have people merely assumed a variable to be a constant and are complaining that this assumption turned out to be false?
Gah, I wonder if I could use my voucher to buy books with.
We apologize for it to not having much Oil
Err, actually, the UK is (or was until very very recently) a net oil exporter, unlike the US or the majority of continental European countries.
The first thing they'll do is hire aides to add literally thousands of minute ammendments to every bill for the simple reason
7-day "sniper rule" (like online auctions) and limiting change submissions to the original sponsors of the bill (anyone else has to write their own bill to enact amendments). Can't vote until 7 days have passed after the last change.
You're a moron if you think that a you can "grow a pair" and "admit responsibility" for something your boss mandates that you do.
I'm sorry, but this attitude pisses me off immensely. Someone giving you money to do X does not reduce your responsibility for doing X one jot. When I tell telesales people "I said no politely and you continued to press me - you are now being rude" and they reply "I'm just doing my job" it sends me into a rage - not so much for the specific act, but for how common this attitude is.
And yes, I have simply walked out when my employer has asked me to violate my ethical standards and would do so again in a heartbeat if the situation arose - without integrity (as I define it for myself) I am nothing. No, this has not resulted in me being unemployable - I just started my own business so that I wouldn't have to deal with that kind of crap again.
No problem. I'd advise you to grab the latest CVS and look in the forums for any required build tweaks - the tarball on sourceforge often lags by quite a bit.
Look up 'ubiquitous' before you whine about how far behind Intel might seem to be.
Sorry, late night submission. I'll claim an error of verb tense rather than adjective usage: "this will beat" rather than "this beats". This silicon is shipping high-end in a couple of weeks, so it'll be mid-range this time next year and integrated on the motherboard the year after that (or thereabouts). Another year or two for the regular PC replacement cycle to churn that through, and it should be widespread by the time Intel predicted for shipping of their 80-core prototype.
Even if Nvidia's CUDA is as hard as the Ars Technica article suggests, I still hope AMD either makes their chips binary compatible, or makes a compiler that works for CUDA code.
From what I saw at the demo, the AMD stuff was running under Brook. As far as I've been able to make out from nVidia's documentation, CUDA is basically a derivative of Brook that has had a few syntax tweaks and some vendor-specific shiny things added to lock you in to nVidia hardware.
It's the fact that muslix64's program is capable of decrypting a copyrighted work without permission.
So is this. And this.why is anyone alarmed (or even surprised) that WHQL-certified device drivers are not available yet which take advantage of all its features?
Because the manufacturer claimed that they were, and people made purchases based on that claim.
The key flaw in your argument is that accidents are ACCIDENT'S.
Apart from the vague possibility of a meteorite hitting the car, there's pretty much no such thing as a car accident. If someone makes a choice to carry out a particular act and they know (or should know) that that act may endanger other people, the results are not "accidental". At best, you could term it negligence.
PS. Surplus apostrophe.
I'd disagree that it's useless or hypocritical, instead I'd say that it's honest. I do hold beliefs about the universe that I find myself in, and try to act accordingly. However, I don't claim that any of those beliefs are absolute truths, just that they are what I believe to be the highest probability.
Maybe you consider that a meaningless distinction, but I find that it's of value in keeping my head straight when considering alternative viewpoints.