I've always found the word "geek" to be much like the word "nigger".
When used by members within the group it is a great compliment or is used as a bonding term. Compare one geek saying to another geek "You're such a geek:)" to a black person saying to another black person "Hey, what's up my nigger?". Much the same thing.
It becomes disparaging when people outside the group say the same things. Compare when a white person calls a black person a "nigger" to the "cool group's" use of the word "geek" when referring to someone who is a member of the after school programming club (ie people who cannot call themselves part of the respective groups). It always reminds me of Jackie Chan's Rush Hour quote when he mimics Chris Tucker's friendly greeting of "Hey what's up my nigger" and nearly gets killed for it. Hilarious scene played for great effect by Chan's thick Chinese accent.
As for the word "nerd" I find it even more offensive and my friends and I don't use it. I don't know if that's because I live in Australia or what. Then again I accept that a lot of other people don't find it offensive, hence Slashdot's slogan.
I myself have always been proud to be a geek, and have always used the term complimentary to my (geek) friends. I tend to get very pissed off at non-geeks who use that term with me.
I heard this too. Apparently, when you're lying on a boogie board with your legs and arms dangling over the side, you look a helluva lot like a seal from underneath to a shark (as they have poor eyesight).
I got really annoyed with Stargate and channel 7 - it was on again, off again, changed times, off for a few weeks while some crap was on.
They did the same thing to 24 Season 3 (I'm a BIG 24 nut).
They switched the timing around 3 times, and had some stupid sport special on and delayed the series a week. For a show that ends on a cliffhanger every episode that is fucking annoying.
Guess what the big surprise twist in 24 Season 3 was? The fact that Nina Myers rocks up when you're least expecting her. Shock factor++ for fans. What does channel seven do 5 seconds before the show starts? Voiceover: "Nina Myers returns to 24...Now!" - show start.
I almost threw something at the tv. I spent the entire episode wondering how they were going to bring her in and I wasn't surprised when she showed up. Thanks a lot.
Add to that the fact that Channel 7 can't even tell us when 24 Season 4 is going to be aired, and I've had enough.
Well, they're up to episode 15 of 24-S4 in the US. Guess how many episodes are sitting on my hard drive courtesy of BitTorrent.
Fuck em. If they're going to screw around that much, I can't be bothered putting up with their shit. That's my reason for using BT and if they want to stop that, they can clean up their act and I'll start watching the TV and muting the ads like I used to.
Yeah I thought it was funny. Dunno what's going on with the moderation here lately (this seems to happen a lot). I guess the 12 year old that modded that troll hasn't heard of the "I'd trust my asschip to Linux" thing.
... authorized US Naval attacks on German submarines prior to Pearl Harbor...
Hmm. Can you give me a reference for that? The only thing that comes to mind is the fact that FDR authorized unrestricted naval warfare shortly after Pearl Harbor.
Actually my post included something like "by your logic, not mine".
Yes and I'm arguing that that's not what I was getting at......an elected Iraqi governmant rather than Saddam...which has effectively zero control of the country and the oil fields due to the "insurgency" which is exactly how the Bush Administration likes it. If Iraq were to form alliances with other like-minded, oil producing countries then they would wield quite a bit of market power don't ya think? Bush can't let that happen because it would threaten US interests. Also, the election and this whole democracy thing is a smoke screen to keep popular public opinion about the US's actions. We can't have another Vietnam now can we? Bush isn't finished yet...
You can't imagine how funny that is to us old farts...
Maybe I can. It sounds like you're pulling rank based on age - nice one. I didn't say it was the end of world. I do however think that if the founding fathers of the US were to visit the country as it stands they would not like what they saw.
Oh BTW, your full of crap, the Iraqi oil fields are being run by the Iraqi's.
You really need to get past the politics, be it from the left or right, pro-US or anti-US, and do a little more research and read a little more history. Then you'll start to understand how incomprehensibly complicated things really are.
Ah huh... And I guess your blanket statement that the Iraqi's are running the oilwells is based on your complete understanding of the incomprehensibly complicated things right?
Maybe you should read a bit of history. Roosevelt passed legislation in 1939 that kept the US out of the war until attacked by the Japanese in 1941.
Oil has always been an important resource ever since we figured we could use it for machinery. Humans have always squabbled over resources, be it oil, food, land or water.
To compare Bush and Roosevelt and say "these two are the same because oil was involved somehow in both wars" I think is a little short sighted - the world is a bit more complicated than that.
By the way, I've never been to a campus rally. But I don't simply accept the Bush Administration's party line that Iraq deserved to be invaded because they were part of the "Axis of Evil". The reasons for the invasion are many and complicated but what it boils down to is an oil grab by the US.
PS: I am decidedly not anti-US. Far from it, I stayed for a while in that fine country in 1996, and loved every minute of it. I am however appalled at what the Bush Administration has turned it into.
There are definitely Christian wackos out there, but they are nothing compared to Islamic wackos.
George W Bush is a Christian wacko, and he's murdered about 120,000 Iraqi civilians for a few oilfields.
According to the US State Department, the death toll from all the actions of all the Islamic (and other) wackos from 1980-1999 is 9,255. Add on another 10,000 (generous estimate) for Sept. 11 and other outrages and we have almost 20,000 for the last 20 years.
So we can see Bush is ahead by about 100,000. I'm sure, though that Osama bin Laden and his ilk would have killed more if they could.
Make no mistake: wacko fundamentalism is dangerous no matter what the excuse^H^H^Hreligion.
You might have expected your moderation to happen the way it came out, Doc.
I think your moderator got to USA into Afghanistan West? and hit the button. I find your post succinct, to the point and insightful.
To the moderator - you're an idiot if you think that was flamebait. You may not agree with the post, but the comment is a valid expression of a point and is not inflammatory in any way.. May I suggest you actually try to read the entire post before going off half cocked next time?
Unfortunately I spent all my moderator points earlier today, but if I had some left I'd give you one to undo this moron's mod.
Can I install any.deb package on Ubuntu without possibly causing binary version problems? Similarly, can I build a package on Ubuntu, give it to a Debian user, and be sure that it'll work properly on their system?
Actually...Yes. Yes you can
In fact the system I'm writing this on is Ubuntu Warty and I have the Debian Sarge repositories loaded in my sources list. I've got quite a few Debian packages loaded on my system with no breakage whatsoever. I've heard people refer to this type of setup as "Debuntian".
I wouldn't do anything stupid like apt-get upgrade (I comment out the Debian stuff for that) but for installing specific packages you're pretty safe.
First of all I'm not a Star Wars fanatic. I have a passing interest in the movies and enjoy watching the original 3 every now an again.
But, I always thought the whole point of Mos Eisley was that it was a barren wasteland - the few inhabitants of which were a "retched hive of scum and villainy".
For me, the new CG scenes made it look too busy when it really needed a sparse "nothing really happens here look".
I'm not trying to be disparaging, but it seems to me that you can sell 12yo CounterStrike kiddies pretty much anything as long as it's a nice bright shiny penis that they can bring to LAN parties and show off to their 12yo CounterStrike kiddie friends.
GATES: We're responsible for the creation of the PC industry.
For some more information on why this statement is utter bullshit, I recommend Fire in the Valley - The Making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It is a very in-depth rundown on who did what, when how and why to get the PC where it is today. Hefty book but it's told like a story with interviews and quotes from those that started it - yes including Mr Gates.
Microsoft, if they had their way, would NEVER let end users install windows on a blank machine.
You know, when I was working as a field technician, I noticed that all of the boxed processors (AMD and Intel) had written on the outside "This product is intended to be professionally installed."
I thought to myself "Man, Windows REALLY needs to have that printed on the disc."
That way when the end users make a pig's ear of their installations and ask me why their installation was broken and mine worked I could have simply pointed to the label on the disc. Would have saved me some stress.
As an aside, you mentioned that Linux must be 3-5 times better than Windows in every regard for people to switch. Although I agree with your sentiment, I also think that that it will happen. Microsoft can't possibly compete on a technical level with the innovation of hundreds of thousands of people unrestricted by monoculture. I'm absolutely blown away at how good Linux has become, particularly over the last 2 years. I only see this exciting trend continuing.
I firmly believe that there will come a point when Linux surpasses Windows useability and technical qualities (hardware detection, commercial software support etc) and there will literally be NO reason to use Windows, even for Mum and Pop.
yes yes and yes. I agree 100% with everything you just said.
That's one of the things that irks me about Linux (specifically the various GUIs) is that every applications looks different. Even when you theme them, sometimes the window frame gets a theme and then the application itself has this horrible Win95 style drab grey window without any theme on it. What's needed, IMHO is a way for an application to accept a theme from the manager no matter what it is (KDE/Gnome whatever). Maybe a unified API for themes or something. Disclaimer: I'm not a developer and don't know a lot about these things.
What he was getting at is that the procedures to do something like burn a bunch of images onto CD seemed more complicated to do under XP than Ubuntu (Gnome).
I guess he just thought Gnome was a bit better laid out and the stuff you do inside the GUI just seemed more logical. Hell I agree with him, I think a lot of the stuff you do inside the UI in Windows is a little overcomplicated. The way the default My Pictures folder is laid out, not to mention the way Windows pressures you into using that My Pictures folder (putting it back if it gets deleted, making it the default save location for images etc.) means that IMHO, Windows is a little heavy handed. Some users appreciate that but my gf's dad doesn't.
He doesn't have a Linux PC (yet) he's interested in getting me to do it though.
Agree with you on the "when trouble strikes" scenario. I have honestly found however, overall the number of things to fix on Ubuntu is less than when running Windows. Gnome just seems more... resilient to people clicking on things they shouldn't than XP. That, combined with unpriviledged accounts means that a normal user is unlikely to get themselves in serious strife once the computer has been set up. It's a better architecture than Windows, where "Everyone's a System Administrator(tm)".
Slashdot Mirror
Leave your torrent clients open after you're finished.
:)
Let's not reduce Canonical's servers to smoldering piles of silicon over the next few days
I've always found the word "geek" to be much like the word "nigger".
:)" to a black person saying to another black person "Hey, what's up my nigger?". Much the same thing.
When used by members within the group it is a great compliment or is used as a bonding term. Compare one geek saying to another geek "You're such a geek
It becomes disparaging when people outside the group say the same things. Compare when a white person calls a black person a "nigger" to the "cool group's" use of the word "geek" when referring to someone who is a member of the after school programming club (ie people who cannot call themselves part of the respective groups). It always reminds me of Jackie Chan's Rush Hour quote when he mimics Chris Tucker's friendly greeting of "Hey what's up my nigger" and nearly gets killed for it. Hilarious scene played for great effect by Chan's thick Chinese accent.
As for the word "nerd" I find it even more offensive and my friends and I don't use it. I don't know if that's because I live in Australia or what. Then again I accept that a lot of other people don't find it offensive, hence Slashdot's slogan.
I myself have always been proud to be a geek, and have always used the term complimentary to my (geek) friends. I tend to get very pissed off at non-geeks who use that term with me.
I heard this too. Apparently, when you're lying on a boogie board with your legs and arms dangling over the side, you look a helluva lot like a seal from underneath to a shark (as they have poor eyesight).
I got really annoyed with Stargate and channel 7 - it was on again, off again, changed times, off for a few weeks while some crap was on.
They did the same thing to 24 Season 3 (I'm a BIG 24 nut).
They switched the timing around 3 times, and had some stupid sport special on and delayed the series a week. For a show that ends on a cliffhanger every episode that is fucking annoying.
Guess what the big surprise twist in 24 Season 3 was? The fact that Nina Myers rocks up when you're least expecting her. Shock factor++ for fans. What does channel seven do 5 seconds before the show starts? Voiceover: "Nina Myers returns to 24...Now!" - show start.
I almost threw something at the tv. I spent the entire episode wondering how they were going to bring her in and I wasn't surprised when she showed up. Thanks a lot.
Add to that the fact that Channel 7 can't even tell us when 24 Season 4 is going to be aired, and I've had enough.
Well, they're up to episode 15 of 24-S4 in the US. Guess how many episodes are sitting on my hard drive courtesy of BitTorrent.
Fuck em. If they're going to screw around that much, I can't be bothered putting up with their shit. That's my reason for using BT and if they want to stop that, they can clean up their act and I'll start watching the TV and muting the ads like I used to.
Yeah I thought it was funny. Dunno what's going on with the moderation here lately (this seems to happen a lot). I guess the 12 year old that modded that troll hasn't heard of the "I'd trust my asschip to Linux" thing.
So much for rememberance of geek history.
The Linux powered asschip is a reality!
Does this remind anyone of Hap's "smart" Alarm Clock from Michael Marshall Smith's One Of Us ?
If you've never read any Smith, I definitely recommend it - One Of Us is one of the funniest books I've ever read.
... authorized US Naval attacks on German submarines prior to Pearl Harbor...
...an elected Iraqi governmant rather than Saddam ...which has effectively zero control of the country and the oil fields due to the "insurgency" which is exactly how the Bush Administration likes it. If Iraq were to form alliances with other like-minded, oil producing countries then they would wield quite a bit of market power don't ya think? Bush can't let that happen because it would threaten US interests. Also, the election and this whole democracy thing is a smoke screen to keep popular public opinion about the US's actions. We can't have another Vietnam now can we? Bush isn't finished yet...
Hmm. Can you give me a reference for that? The only thing that comes to mind is the fact that FDR authorized unrestricted naval warfare shortly after Pearl Harbor.
Actually my post included something like "by your logic, not mine".
Yes and I'm arguing that that's not what I was getting at...
You can't imagine how funny that is to us old farts...
Maybe I can. It sounds like you're pulling rank based on age - nice one. I didn't say it was the end of world. I do however think that if the founding fathers of the US were to visit the country as it stands they would not like what they saw.
Oh BTW, your full of crap, the Iraqi oil fields are being run by the Iraqi's.
You really need to get past the politics, be it from the left or right, pro-US or anti-US, and do a little more research and read a little more history. Then you'll start to understand how incomprehensibly complicated things really are.
Ah huh... And I guess your blanket statement that the Iraqi's are running the oilwells is based on your complete understanding of the incomprehensibly complicated things right?
Maybe you should read a bit of history. Roosevelt passed legislation in 1939 that kept the US out of the war until attacked by the Japanese in 1941.
Oil has always been an important resource ever since we figured we could use it for machinery. Humans have always squabbled over resources, be it oil, food, land or water.
To compare Bush and Roosevelt and say "these two are the same because oil was involved somehow in both wars" I think is a little short sighted - the world is a bit more complicated than that.
By the way, I've never been to a campus rally. But I don't simply accept the Bush Administration's party line that Iraq deserved to be invaded because they were part of the "Axis of Evil". The reasons for the invasion are many and complicated but what it boils down to is an oil grab by the US.
PS: I am decidedly not anti-US. Far from it, I stayed for a while in that fine country in 1996, and loved every minute of it. I am however appalled at what the Bush Administration has turned it into.
There are definitely Christian wackos out there, but they are nothing compared to Islamic wackos.
George W Bush is a Christian wacko, and he's murdered about 120,000 Iraqi civilians for a few oilfields.
According to the US State Department, the death toll from all the actions of all the Islamic (and other) wackos from 1980-1999 is 9,255. Add on another 10,000 (generous estimate) for Sept. 11 and other outrages and we have almost 20,000 for the last 20 years.
So we can see Bush is ahead by about 100,000. I'm sure, though that Osama bin Laden and his ilk would have killed more if they could.
Make no mistake: wacko fundamentalism is dangerous no matter what the excuse^H^H^Hreligion.
You might have expected your moderation to happen the way it came out, Doc.
I think your moderator got to USA into Afghanistan West? and hit the button. I find your post succinct, to the point and insightful.
To the moderator - you're an idiot if you think that was flamebait. You may not agree with the post, but the comment is a valid expression of a point and is not inflammatory in any way.. May I suggest you actually try to read the entire post before going off half cocked next time?
Unfortunately I spent all my moderator points earlier today, but if I had some left I'd give you one to undo this moron's mod.
Can I install any .deb package on Ubuntu without possibly causing binary version problems? Similarly, can I build a package on Ubuntu, give it to a Debian user, and be sure that it'll work properly on their system?
Actually...Yes. Yes you can
In fact the system I'm writing this on is Ubuntu Warty and I have the Debian Sarge repositories loaded in my sources list. I've got quite a few Debian packages loaded on my system with no breakage whatsoever. I've heard people refer to this type of setup as "Debuntian".
I wouldn't do anything stupid like apt-get upgrade (I comment out the Debian stuff for that) but for installing specific packages you're pretty safe.
First of all I'm not a Star Wars fanatic. I have a passing interest in the movies and enjoy watching the original 3 every now an again.
But, I always thought the whole point of Mos Eisley was that it was a barren wasteland - the few inhabitants of which were a "retched hive of scum and villainy".
For me, the new CG scenes made it look too busy when it really needed a sparse "nothing really happens here look".
I said this to my coworker yesterday:
The only thing worse than going to jail for ilegally copying music is going to jail for ilegally copying Britney Spears!
You'd be sitting there going "WHAT was I THINKING??"
I submitted this yesterday with the originally reported article
What scares me the most is that police weren't involved at all. These are corporations barging in and taking stuff with the government's blessing!
Most companies, however, chose to pay a Linux vendor in order to receive security patches.
My golden rule:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
Once a week. For free.
Agreed. It's an old saying never truer than today:
"If you got boot, you got root".
I think I need a cold shower now.
I'm not trying to be disparaging, but it seems to me that you can sell 12yo CounterStrike kiddies pretty much anything as long as it's a nice bright shiny penis that they can bring to LAN parties and show off to their 12yo CounterStrike kiddie friends.
OTOH maybe I am being disparaging...
GATES: We're responsible for the creation of the PC industry.
For some more information on why this statement is utter bullshit, I recommend Fire in the Valley - The Making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It is a very in-depth rundown on who did what, when how and why to get the PC where it is today. Hefty book but it's told like a story with interviews and quotes from those that started it - yes including Mr Gates.
The sad part is that by the time they get around to barcoding all of them, we'll have a few less species around to bar code.
Yeah you're absolutely right.
I've only been going out with my gf for 3 years and we live together now. Heres the thing: I've already "bonded" with my gf's dad.
It couldn't possibly be that Gnome has a superior UI to Windows XP oh no...
Microsoft, if they had their way, would NEVER let end users install windows on a blank machine.
You know, when I was working as a field technician, I noticed that all of the boxed processors (AMD and Intel) had written on the outside "This product is intended to be professionally installed."
I thought to myself "Man, Windows REALLY needs to have that printed on the disc."
That way when the end users make a pig's ear of their installations and ask me why their installation was broken and mine worked I could have simply pointed to the label on the disc. Would have saved me some stress.
As an aside, you mentioned that Linux must be 3-5 times better than Windows in every regard for people to switch. Although I agree with your sentiment, I also think that that it will happen. Microsoft can't possibly compete on a technical level with the innovation of hundreds of thousands of people unrestricted by monoculture. I'm absolutely blown away at how good Linux has become, particularly over the last 2 years. I only see this exciting trend continuing.
I firmly believe that there will come a point when Linux surpasses Windows useability and technical qualities (hardware detection, commercial software support etc) and there will literally be NO reason to use Windows, even for Mum and Pop.
yes yes and yes. I agree 100% with everything you just said.
That's one of the things that irks me about Linux (specifically the various GUIs) is that every applications looks different. Even when you theme them, sometimes the window frame gets a theme and then the application itself has this horrible Win95 style drab grey window without any theme on it. What's needed, IMHO is a way for an application to accept a theme from the manager no matter what it is (KDE/Gnome whatever). Maybe a unified API for themes or something. Disclaimer: I'm not a developer and don't know a lot about these things.
What he was getting at is that the procedures to do something like burn a bunch of images onto CD seemed more complicated to do under XP than Ubuntu (Gnome).
I guess he just thought Gnome was a bit better laid out and the stuff you do inside the GUI just seemed more logical. Hell I agree with him, I think a lot of the stuff you do inside the UI in Windows is a little overcomplicated. The way the default My Pictures folder is laid out, not to mention the way Windows pressures you into using that My Pictures folder (putting it back if it gets deleted, making it the default save location for images etc.) means that IMHO, Windows is a little heavy handed. Some users appreciate that but my gf's dad doesn't.
He doesn't have a Linux PC (yet) he's interested in getting me to do it though.
Agree with you on the "when trouble strikes" scenario. I have honestly found however, overall the number of things to fix on Ubuntu is less than when running Windows. Gnome just seems more... resilient to people clicking on things they shouldn't than XP. That, combined with unpriviledged accounts means that a normal user is unlikely to get themselves in serious strife once the computer has been set up. It's a better architecture than Windows, where "Everyone's a System Administrator(tm)".
Just my 2 cents.