It's Gandhi, and he did win in the end.. more or less, despite the partition. If the Linux community ends up being split into pro- and anti-Novell camp, the parallel is even more ironic, though, since Gandhi's dream of a united Indian subcontinent was also shattered to bits.
I realize it was Gandhi; I was just using a silly example to illustrate the ridiculousness of the quote, as though being laughed at inevitably leads to victory, instead of Gandhi's strategy being applicable to an extremely narrow set of circumstances. Personally, I like Carl Sagan's quote along the same lines... "They laughed at the Wright Brothers... they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Of course/everybody/ has the right/not/ to be photographed in public (or private) without consenting to it. Look it up in your country's civil law (unless you are from North Korea or so).
And of course you are dead wrong. Otherwise no one could take a picture in public without getting releases from everyone that might be in the frame. Now, using someone's image for profit -- that's a different kettle o' fish.
But being in public means being in PUBLIC. You have no expectation of privacy. Whoa, I can even SEE YOU in public, and TELL ANYONE about it! Including your wife that you were with another woman! If you don't like it, wear a hood.
Except that as I see it now the whole thing is a cluster fuck in terms of notability
Wait, something created by humans is not perfect? GOOD LORD!
I personally laugh at the webcomic entries as by wikipedia's OWN standards 99% of them shouldn't be there.
The question is notability. If they have sufficient readership (or links, based on Googling, for example), then they probably belong there.
If your web comic isn't getting enough people thinking it's notable and campaigning for it, then yes, it probably isn't. Sorry about that. Keep working on it...
What would be the harm of being a repisotory of every article that somebody had the energy to write?
Because we already have the web at large for that. The point of an Encyclopedia is not be the repository of all knowledge, but to be a summary of all notable subjects. The "repository of all knowledge" IS all published knowledge.
A pair of scissors is simply two knives attached on a fulcrum. Unless you're talking about plastic "safety scissors" unsuitable for any use but giving to kindergartners to cut construction paper with, scissors are going to be nearly as hazardous as a single-bladed knife.
Except you'll note the clever way the handle allows one to perform a "scissoring" action safely behind the oh-so-hazardous razor-sharp blades o' death.
I would also like to know how you manage to cut away a nine-inch strip of plastic from one of these clamshells using five-inch shears, without exposing your knuckles to fresh jagged edges, o scissor-knowing genius.
Well, in this case, you could simply cut from each end, producing a total cutting action of 10", but let's say it's 12" of plastic with 5" shears. In that case, I would normally cut away the excess plastic as I go, and angle the scissors (and my hand) away from potential bloody menace. As another poster pointed it, it's really a question of patience.
I had no idea that so many Slashdotters lived in fear of sharp tools...
Did you sue? I sure as hell would have. The only thing that is going to stop this madness is for everyone these things happen to sue. And don't just go for medical bills. File for unspecified punitive damages for the mental anguish you went through almost losing your [lw]ife.
Sue for WHAT? I sympathize with the guy for a very scary incident -- but knives don't just "jump" and slash your wrist. She was holding it in some dangerous fashion (how, I don't know -- I can't even see how this happens in the first place), and tried to muscle it out of the packaging. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that you should be careful with knives. If the woman had carefully cut the knife ALL THE WAY out of the package with scissors, this wouldn't have happened.
But hey, we all do foolish things and have foolish accidents. But when I have foolish accidents, I don't immediately look around to see where I can displace the blame.
How would you suggest that elements of a union could possible have different alignment, since they have the same address?
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I could be -- my C is rusty, and please forgive any syntax mistakes), but for:
union { char a[5]; int b; } u;
&u.a is not guaranteed to be the same as &u.b. That way, you could potentially pack unions/structs that have character data and don't need to be aligned. In other words, 'a' doesn't need to be aligned if the preceding data caused the union to fall on an odd address, but b could force an alignment.
Some packaging is resistant to even scissors. But the real point is the extremely DANGEROUS packaging left over after you cut it with scissors or knife- that alone can cause really deep cuts and abrassions.
You know, knives are sharp and dangerous, too, but I somehow manage to handle them without slicing my skin to ribbons.
Yeah, I agree the packaging is annoying, but all the comments here are perplexing me (e.g., "how do the manufacturers expect people to open these?", "Using a knife is dangerous!!")
Like, have people on Slashdot never heard of this fancy gadget called "scissors"? Come down from the trees, my monkey brethren, and let me show these wacky things called "tools".
I wonder if you could bioengineer a plant that could survive in the ocean similar to seaweed, which would secrete this chemical. Eventually all the oceans would turn into Hydrogen and Oxygen... and LIFE WOULD BE DOOMED! Bwahahaha
Isn't it a little clearer, and potentially faster (at least if your optimiser doesn't understand) to use...
Definitely not clearer to someone well-versed in C, but also is not considered portable (I think -- it's been a few years since I was up on the C Standard). I believe C doesn't guarantee that all the union elements will be on the same alignment. The compiler will (probably) choose to do it that way, but it doesn't have to.
State-run medical care doesn't exclude any of the things you mentioned. It all depends on the details of the implementation.
Everytime I go down this road, someone posts, "Well, my state-run health care gives me EVERYTHING I WANT in UNLIMITED QUANTITIES without ANY WAITING! It's UTOPIA! Wheee!
Then, if I debate it long enough, we find out, "well, usually there is a waiting list for this-or-that surgery... and true, they only use MRI machines in extreme cases because there aren't that many of them, and..."
So how about cutting to the chase and tell us the disadvantages of your system, instead of just puffing it up so that it sounds FREEEEEE and UNLIMITED, which we know is not true? Then we could have a reasonable comparison.
Of course, you didn't even post your country (which makes a wee bit of difference), so you could just be an American-not-living-under-it defending socialism.
*sigh* I don't know why I let myself get dragged into this, which it ends up the same way every single time...
You know, one of those where it's recognized that decent healthcare for everyone is a good thing.
I know why you think that, but it's not a "good thing", for a simple reason: What if you don't like you're health care? I can go to another insurer. I can go to another doctor. I can do pretty much any damn thing I want. I never have to wait for anything. You're at the mercy of what your government provides, including the infamous "waiting list".
No thanks. I'd like my complex-and-expensive knee surgery scheduled in a few hours, thank you. I'll take freedom over the nanny state any day.
Wouldn't it make more sense to spend the billions (trillions?) of dollars needed to put people on other planets on improving the lives of people on this particular planet?
Wait, all we have to do is spend money to solve poverty once and for all? Good lord, why didn't anyone think of this before?
Seriously, if it were just a matter of mere money, all of our problems would've been solved a long time ago. The problem is that you can't pay people to be responsible citizens. Quite the opposite, in fact.
"Warmer" is a code word for "distorted". You may like the effect of the distortion -- but it's still distortion, and not the way the sound is intended to be heard. See also: tube amps.
The plural of Lego is Lego NOT Legos! I'm getting fed up with every slashdot article on Lego getting this wrong, and a huge portion of the debate being about the pluralisation not the story.
Pssst, at least so far, the Lego company is not our corporate overlord and we don't need to welcome them by calling "Legos" Lego Building Blocks. Be free! Be free! Legos! Legos!
Mod this up -- it's exactly right. People want light-weight gadgets.
Coincidentally, I just got a vintage-1982 IBM Selectric III electromechanical typewriter off ebay (my seven-year-old son's big Christmas wish for the last year has been an old-school electric typewriter, heh). That thing is built like a freaking TANK. I mean, it's ridiculously heavy. You lift this monster, and you think, "Wow, this thing is really from the age of the dinosaurs. They don't build 'em like this anymore." And you know what? There's something to be said for something easy to move around. The thing has to be like 30-40 pounds of solid steel.
they are still trying to make more money than anyone of us normal folk can imagine
Yeah, because we know that there are few things more evil than "making money". Oh wait, YOU make more money than "normal folk" in third world countries can imagine. I guess you must be evil.
and to do that it takes some immoral actions.
No, it does not. The vast majority of eeeeeevil big business does not engage in immoral actions (including oil companies) -- unless you think making money is immoral, which you apparently do.
What are you babbling about? According to this article, Laptop marketshare was 12%, which was a spike from 6%. I expect it to fall back down, but we'll see.
"Success" doesn't mean "stomping out the competition". "Success" means "sell at a profit".
If my kid runs a lemonade stand and makes a profit, is he a "success" COMPARED (key word) to Minutemaid? No, though he's a success by the standards of children. By the same token, if I make $5.35/hour minimum wage (or whatever it is these days), am I success by the normal standards of society, even though I'm "making a profit"? No, I'm not. I'm a low-wage grunt. But by the standards of, say, Mexico, $5.35 is great money.
Success is always measured against expectations. Apple, as a computer company, is not particularly successful. As a maker of MP3 players, they are a success.
iTunes is a success in that it is part of what sells iPods. No iTunes and the iPod would have failed.
I highly doubt people buy iPods because of iTunes. People buy iPods despite iTunes, which locks you into an Apple-only store. I would be surprised if a very large proportion of iPod owners even use iTunes, though I don't know the stats. I think that, like everyone else, most people use ripped MP3s.
Them boom! Jobs is back, the iMac appears, OS X appears, the iPod appears, switches to Intel, Apple reinvents itself again - successfully. You could argue that Jobs is pretty much the heart and soul of Apple.
Which goes to show how good Apple's marketing really is. Apple has exactly one undebatably successful product: the iPod. The Mac's marketshare is (still) microscopic and irrelevent, and not even growing significantly (in fact, I think marketshare may have fallen, but I'm not up on recent stats). You could possibly argue iTunes is a success, but again, their marketshare of music in general is nothing.
Jobs' real genius is in -- I hate to say it -- lying. He can twist facts around to convince people of nearly the opposite (this is infamously called the "reality distortion field" by the employees, though to be fair, his salesmanship can also be inspiring as well). He's basically a high-level slick used-car salesman.
People sitting on Windows 2000 are going to see even less of what they want in Vista than they did in XP and migrating to free software will be very attractive for them. The end will come swiftly.
Do me a favor and read Slashdot posts from 2000 ("Windows 2000 is a complete rewrite! There's no way MS can ship it without huge numbers of bugs. This is the end of Microsoft") and posts from 2002 ("I hate the XP interface! And no one is going to want to pay for a minor upgrades to Win2K. And mandatory registration?? This will definitely drive people to Linux").
Then take a look at Microsoft's incredibly profitable financials. And the immense amount of money in the bank. They could bleed for DECADES before it'd be a significant problem.
Your last lesson will be to realize why people buy computers. People buy applications, not operating systems. Linux is incompatible with their software, therefore Linux is totally and completely useless to the vast majority of people. Yes, a small number of people only want email and browsing, but for some reason Linux people think this is more than a tiny part of the world.
Just wait for it -- Vista will be yet another cash cow for Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
It's Gandhi, and he did win in the end.. more or less, despite the partition. If the Linux community ends up being split into pro- and anti-Novell camp, the parallel is even more ironic, though, since Gandhi's dream of a united Indian subcontinent was also shattered to bits.
I realize it was Gandhi; I was just using a silly example to illustrate the ridiculousness of the quote, as though being laughed at inevitably leads to victory, instead of Gandhi's strategy being applicable to an extremely narrow set of circumstances. Personally, I like Carl Sagan's quote along the same lines... "They laughed at the Wright Brothers... they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Adolf Hitler
Yeah, that worked great for... OOOPS! Guess that strategy didn't work out so well for The Mustache.
Of course /everybody/ has the right /not/ to be photographed in public (or private) without consenting to it. Look it up in your country's civil law (unless you are from North Korea or so).
And of course you are dead wrong. Otherwise no one could take a picture in public without getting releases from everyone that might be in the frame. Now, using someone's image for profit -- that's a different kettle o' fish.
But being in public means being in PUBLIC. You have no expectation of privacy. Whoa, I can even SEE YOU in public, and TELL ANYONE about it! Including your wife that you were with another woman! If you don't like it, wear a hood.
Except that as I see it now the whole thing is a cluster fuck in terms of notability
Wait, something created by humans is not perfect? GOOD LORD!
I personally laugh at the webcomic entries as by wikipedia's OWN standards 99% of them shouldn't be there.
The question is notability. If they have sufficient readership (or links, based on Googling, for example), then they probably belong there.
If your web comic isn't getting enough people thinking it's notable and campaigning for it, then yes, it probably isn't. Sorry about that. Keep working on it...
What would be the harm of being a repisotory of every article that somebody had the energy to write?
Because we already have the web at large for that. The point of an Encyclopedia is not be the repository of all knowledge, but to be a summary of all notable subjects. The "repository of all knowledge" IS all published knowledge.
A pair of scissors is simply two knives attached on a fulcrum. Unless you're talking about plastic "safety scissors" unsuitable for any use but giving to kindergartners to cut construction paper with, scissors are going to be nearly as hazardous as a single-bladed knife.
Except you'll note the clever way the handle allows one to perform a "scissoring" action safely behind the oh-so-hazardous razor-sharp blades o' death.
I would also like to know how you manage to cut away a nine-inch strip of plastic from one of these clamshells using five-inch shears, without exposing your knuckles to fresh jagged edges, o scissor-knowing genius.
Well, in this case, you could simply cut from each end, producing a total cutting action of 10", but let's say it's 12" of plastic with 5" shears. In that case, I would normally cut away the excess plastic as I go, and angle the scissors (and my hand) away from potential bloody menace. As another poster pointed it, it's really a question of patience.
I had no idea that so many Slashdotters lived in fear of sharp tools...
Needle-nose pliers?
Did you sue? I sure as hell would have. The only thing that is going to stop this madness is for everyone these things happen to sue. And don't just go for medical bills. File for unspecified punitive damages for the mental anguish you went through almost losing your [lw]ife.
Sue for WHAT? I sympathize with the guy for a very scary incident -- but knives don't just "jump" and slash your wrist. She was holding it in some dangerous fashion (how, I don't know -- I can't even see how this happens in the first place), and tried to muscle it out of the packaging. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that you should be careful with knives. If the woman had carefully cut the knife ALL THE WAY out of the package with scissors, this wouldn't have happened.
But hey, we all do foolish things and have foolish accidents. But when I have foolish accidents, I don't immediately look around to see where I can displace the blame.
How would you suggest that elements of a union could possible have different alignment, since they have the same address?
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I could be -- my C is rusty, and please forgive any syntax mistakes), but for:
union { char a[5]; int b; } u;
&u.a is not guaranteed to be the same as &u.b. That way, you could potentially pack unions/structs that have character data and don't need to be aligned. In other words, 'a' doesn't need to be aligned if the preceding data caused the union to fall on an odd address, but b could force an alignment.
Some packaging is resistant to even scissors. But the real point is the extremely DANGEROUS packaging left over after you cut it with scissors or knife- that alone can cause really deep cuts and abrassions.
You know, knives are sharp and dangerous, too, but I somehow manage to handle them without slicing my skin to ribbons.
Yeah, I agree the packaging is annoying, but all the comments here are perplexing me (e.g., "how do the manufacturers expect people to open these?", "Using a knife is dangerous!!")
Like, have people on Slashdot never heard of this fancy gadget called "scissors"? Come down from the trees, my monkey brethren, and let me show these wacky things called "tools".
I wonder if you could bioengineer a plant that could survive in the ocean similar to seaweed, which would secrete this chemical. Eventually all the oceans would turn into Hydrogen and Oxygen... and LIFE WOULD BE DOOMED! Bwahahaha
Isn't it a little clearer, and potentially faster (at least if your optimiser doesn't understand) to use...
Definitely not clearer to someone well-versed in C, but also is not considered portable (I think -- it's been a few years since I was up on the C Standard). I believe C doesn't guarantee that all the union elements will be on the same alignment. The compiler will (probably) choose to do it that way, but it doesn't have to.
State-run medical care doesn't exclude any of the things you mentioned. It all depends on the details of the implementation.
Everytime I go down this road, someone posts, "Well, my state-run health care gives me EVERYTHING I WANT in UNLIMITED QUANTITIES without ANY WAITING! It's UTOPIA! Wheee!
Then, if I debate it long enough, we find out, "well, usually there is a waiting list for this-or-that surgery... and true, they only use MRI machines in extreme cases because there aren't that many of them, and..."
So how about cutting to the chase and tell us the disadvantages of your system, instead of just puffing it up so that it sounds FREEEEEE and UNLIMITED, which we know is not true? Then we could have a reasonable comparison.
Of course, you didn't even post your country (which makes a wee bit of difference), so you could just be an American-not-living-under-it defending socialism.
*sigh* I don't know why I let myself get dragged into this, which it ends up the same way every single time...
You know, one of those where it's recognized that decent healthcare for everyone is a good thing.
I know why you think that, but it's not a "good thing", for a simple reason: What if you don't like you're health care? I can go to another insurer. I can go to another doctor. I can do pretty much any damn thing I want. I never have to wait for anything. You're at the mercy of what your government provides, including the infamous "waiting list".
No thanks. I'd like my complex-and-expensive knee surgery scheduled in a few hours, thank you. I'll take freedom over the nanny state any day.
Wouldn't it make more sense to spend the billions (trillions?) of dollars needed to put people on other planets on improving the lives of people on this particular planet?
Wait, all we have to do is spend money to solve poverty once and for all? Good lord, why didn't anyone think of this before?
Seriously, if it were just a matter of mere money, all of our problems would've been solved a long time ago. The problem is that you can't pay people to be responsible citizens. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Nobody said the Zune outsold the iPod, Mr. Fanboy. What was your point again?
(sheesh)
MUCH warmer.
"Warmer" is a code word for "distorted". You may like the effect of the distortion -- but it's still distortion, and not the way the sound is intended to be heard. See also: tube amps.
The plural of Lego is Lego NOT Legos! I'm getting fed up with every slashdot article on Lego getting this wrong, and a huge portion of the debate being about the pluralisation not the story.
Pssst, at least so far, the Lego company is not our corporate overlord and we don't need to welcome them by calling "Legos" Lego Building Blocks. Be free! Be free! Legos! Legos!
Mod this up -- it's exactly right. People want light-weight gadgets.
Coincidentally, I just got a vintage-1982 IBM Selectric III electromechanical typewriter off ebay (my seven-year-old son's big Christmas wish for the last year has been an old-school electric typewriter, heh). That thing is built like a freaking TANK. I mean, it's ridiculously heavy. You lift this monster, and you think, "Wow, this thing is really from the age of the dinosaurs. They don't build 'em like this anymore." And you know what? There's something to be said for something easy to move around. The thing has to be like 30-40 pounds of solid steel.
they are still trying to make more money than anyone of us normal folk can imagine
Yeah, because we know that there are few things more evil than "making money". Oh wait, YOU make more money than "normal folk" in third world countries can imagine. I guess you must be evil.
and to do that it takes some immoral actions.
No, it does not. The vast majority of eeeeeevil big business does not engage in immoral actions (including oil companies) -- unless you think making money is immoral, which you apparently do.
What are you babbling about? According to this article, Laptop marketshare was 12%, which was a spike from 6%. I expect it to fall back down, but we'll see.
"Success" doesn't mean "stomping out the competition". "Success" means "sell at a profit".
If my kid runs a lemonade stand and makes a profit, is he a "success" COMPARED (key word) to Minutemaid? No, though he's a success by the standards of children. By the same token, if I make $5.35/hour minimum wage (or whatever it is these days), am I success by the normal standards of society, even though I'm "making a profit"? No, I'm not. I'm a low-wage grunt. But by the standards of, say, Mexico, $5.35 is great money.
Success is always measured against expectations. Apple, as a computer company, is not particularly successful. As a maker of MP3 players, they are a success.
iTunes is a success in that it is part of what sells iPods. No iTunes and the iPod would have failed.
I highly doubt people buy iPods because of iTunes. People buy iPods despite iTunes, which locks you into an Apple-only store. I would be surprised if a very large proportion of iPod owners even use iTunes, though I don't know the stats. I think that, like everyone else, most people use ripped MP3s.
Them boom! Jobs is back, the iMac appears, OS X appears, the iPod appears, switches to Intel, Apple reinvents itself again - successfully. You could argue that Jobs is pretty much the heart and soul of Apple.
Which goes to show how good Apple's marketing really is. Apple has exactly one undebatably successful product: the iPod. The Mac's marketshare is (still) microscopic and irrelevent, and not even growing significantly (in fact, I think marketshare may have fallen, but I'm not up on recent stats). You could possibly argue iTunes is a success, but again, their marketshare of music in general is nothing.
Jobs' real genius is in -- I hate to say it -- lying. He can twist facts around to convince people of nearly the opposite (this is infamously called the "reality distortion field" by the employees, though to be fair, his salesmanship can also be inspiring as well). He's basically a high-level slick used-car salesman.
People sitting on Windows 2000 are going to see even less of what they want in Vista than they did in XP and migrating to free software will be very attractive for them. The end will come swiftly.
Do me a favor and read Slashdot posts from 2000 ("Windows 2000 is a complete rewrite! There's no way MS can ship it without huge numbers of bugs. This is the end of Microsoft") and posts from 2002 ("I hate the XP interface! And no one is going to want to pay for a minor upgrades to Win2K. And mandatory registration?? This will definitely drive people to Linux").
Then take a look at Microsoft's incredibly profitable financials. And the immense amount of money in the bank. They could bleed for DECADES before it'd be a significant problem.
Your last lesson will be to realize why people buy computers. People buy applications, not operating systems. Linux is incompatible with their software, therefore Linux is totally and completely useless to the vast majority of people. Yes, a small number of people only want email and browsing, but for some reason Linux people think this is more than a tiny part of the world.
Just wait for it -- Vista will be yet another cash cow for Microsoft.