> I'm sick of linux people being elitists. Its like they wont admit there is some stuff windows does better than linux. Fact is for games and multimedia windows is the system.
That isn't something Windows does better, that's something that application writers don't port to other OSes.
It's a sign of Windows being a monopoly, not of it being better.
> Did anyone buy any of the Enron stuff from Dovebid when that went down a while back? The main thing that discouraged me, other than lack of money, was the insanely high minimum proxy bid. Most of the stuff wasn't worth that much.
For some reason I find it unsurprising that Enron's stuff was overvaluated.
> Excerpt: Some things change our lives so significantly that they deserve better than to be trampled out of existence by the changing face of subtle bureaucratic oppression. A bit dramatic perhaps...
Not IMO. I think this is sad because Napster was the most innovative use of the internet since the WWW came along. And notably, it started out as a garage app rather than as the effort of some big software machine. In the IP age it's the big businesses who are breaking up the machines that scare them.
> What is being presented is a claim that Microsoft enjoys abnormally high profit margins, and the question has been raised is whether those margins are, in fact, abnormally high. Maybe they are, but it's a valid question. Clearly, at least part of that margin is perfectly normal business, and michael's characterization of the entire margin as "monopoly rent" is just spew.
I think what they're saying is, if a desktop application is clearing nearly $2,000,000,000 per year for its owner, how come venture capitalists aren't falling all over themselves to fund a rival to cut in on some of that profit?
Due diligence.
on
Due Diligence?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This is too easy, folks. Subscribe to your distro's update announcement list, read your mail daily, and apply the relevant patches promptly.
It's really not that hard. A typical update for me is:
read mail
ncftpget whatever.rpm
rpm -Uhv whatever
read rest of mail
By far the most time-consuming part is waiting for the RPM to download. Some say that it's even easier for source-based distros.
> There's nothing keeping me on Windows. I switched to Linux way back in 1997 and never looked back.
<aol>meetoo!</aol> And right about the same time, too.
And it just keeps getting better every year. I can see how someone who actually needed Photoshop or MS Word or some other specific commercial application, or who was addicted to games, wouldn't be able to live on Linux. But for the rest of us, Windows doesn't offer anything we need or particularly need or even want.
I'm still on Red Hat 7.2 / GNOME 1.4, and I don't feel any rush to upgrade. It has gotten to the point that upgrades are luxuries that I do at some convenient time, rather than something that needs to be done to pick up new features as soon as they become available. Back in RH 4.x days I always upgraded immediately, but for the last 2-3 years I've been skipping more and more upgrades.
At any rate, let me emphasize the "never looked back" part.
> ext2 is a quite stable fs... there is no reason why an ext2 fs should magically develop inconsistencies after 3-6 weeks of runtime.
Agreed. My typical login time is 180 days, and I almost always have > 100 processes alive on the system for that whole time, but the only time I've had disk problems in several years of operating that way is when I had hardware failures.
> I hear this a whole lot -- that the people who still have jobs have a lot of new work and that it is hard to keep up. They are being asked to work more hours on that salary pay, do more things than they ever did before.... > The second thing that I am hearing from a lot of people is that as soon as things get better, or they get a break into another job that pays better, they are gone, zero notice, no regrets. They are being milked by the management, they know it, and they are going to split as soon as things get better.
This is exactly how things were during the downsizing craze of the late 80's and early 90's, and not just in the IT field. (The more things change, blah.) That's when the anti-buzzword "dumbsizing" first came into vogue.
> But from all the things that look stupid about US politics from this side of the ocean, this phenomenon of tacking on loads of totally unrelated stuff to some bill must be the worst.
You should see how it looks from this side of the ocean!
> Has any politician who did this ever defended this process in public?
The pork is almost invariably something to pay off the legislator's own constituents, so they don't have much motivation to question the practice. Of course, people in other states/districts may no like it, but they don't get to vote for the pork packer, so s/he doesn't need to give a flip what they think.
This is just another way that money taints elections, slightly more indirect than the campaign donor system. The people who could outlaw it are the ones who benefit from it. (I.e., it's another way of buying votes.)
> I figured that the lack of a genetic relationship between the two species was already well known
"We are not related" and "lack of a genetic relationship" greatly overstate the case. Humans "have a genetic relationship" with all species, and exceed 98% identity (depending on the way you measure it) even with chimps, and we are much more closely related to the Neanderthals than to the chimps.
What scientists actually say is that we are not descended from the Neanderthals.
> My company had a lot of lazy/stupid people hired under quotas, nepotism, or because, in the case of one person I worked directly with, it was the "Christian" thing to do.... XP is many things, but it is NOT a solution for serious mistakes made by HR.
Ah, you've outed them. It has previously been a great secret, but you've discovered that "XP" is actually "Chi Rho".
> While the MPAA is campaigning for new restrictions on content, the artists at the studios are using and helping create open source. Having Linux and open source as a crucial part of studio operations may help executives rethink their corporate position on open source and Linux issues.
Whoever wrote that has obviously never had a job. Executives don't give a fig what their employees want or need to get their jobs done.
> I'm wondering: how did life survive the other dozens of other times the pole flipped?... > Suddenly, global warming (the artificially-induced kind) doesn't seem like that big of a long-term threat.
There was a note on this in the latest Scientific American, and it mentions that historically the pole flips have not corresponded with mass extinctions. No big biological problems are expected.
Slashdot Mirror
> I'm sick of linux people being elitists. Its like they wont admit there is some stuff windows does better than linux. Fact is for games and multimedia windows is the system.
That isn't something Windows does better, that's something that application writers don't port to other OSes.
It's a sign of Windows being a monopoly, not of it being better.
> The "Sidebar" seems (functionally) very much like The Dock in MacOS X.
There they go innovating again...
Looks like a candy-assed version of the way I've had my GNOME panels (note plural) set up since GNOME 1.4 came out.
> Here's your chance to see what the future of the microsoft desktop is gonna look like!
I already know what the future of the Microsoft deskgop is gonna look like: Nowhere to be seen on my desk.
I went cold turkey five or six years ago, and there aren't enough whores in Vegas to drag me back.
> Did anyone buy any of the Enron stuff from Dovebid when that went down a while back? The main thing that discouraged me, other than lack of money, was the insanely high minimum proxy bid. Most of the stuff wasn't worth that much.
For some reason I find it unsurprising that Enron's stuff was overvaluated.
> > Webcast bidding requires 1) a unique bidder number for each auction and 3) an open telephone connection with a touchtone phone.
> Good thing there's no step 2. I HATE second steps.
They left it out on purpose, as a memorial to Napster:
2) profit
> Excerpt: Some things change our lives so significantly that they deserve better than to be trampled out of existence by the changing face of subtle bureaucratic oppression. A bit dramatic perhaps...
Not IMO. I think this is sad because Napster was the most innovative use of the internet since the WWW came along. And notably, it started out as a garage app rather than as the effort of some big software machine. In the IP age it's the big businesses who are breaking up the machines that scare them.
> The "overview" and "detailed" changes links lead to the same URL, which seems either mistaken or redundant.
They figure you'll get the big picture the first time you visit the link, and you'll pick up more details if you go back and read it again.
> Shhh! I get all my karma by reposting all the (Score:5) comments on repeat stories.
Hey, that's my joke!
> > You know, when you're friends with a girl you really like and they claim to need to find a guy that's just like you but not you.
> What she really means, is that she's looking for a guy just like you, but with tattoos, long hair and a motorcycle.
Ah - she's looking for a UNIX sysadmin!
> What is being presented is a claim that Microsoft enjoys abnormally high profit margins, and the question has been raised is whether those margins are, in fact, abnormally high. Maybe they are, but it's a valid question. Clearly, at least part of that margin is perfectly normal business, and michael's characterization of the entire margin as "monopoly rent" is just spew.
I think what they're saying is, if a desktop application is clearing nearly $2,000,000,000 per year for its owner, how come venture capitalists aren't falling all over themselves to fund a rival to cut in on some of that profit?
This is too easy, folks. Subscribe to your distro's update announcement list, read your mail daily, and apply the relevant patches promptly.
It's really not that hard. A typical update for me is:
- read mail
- ncftpget whatever.rpm
- rpm -Uhv whatever
- read rest of mail
By far the most time-consuming part is waiting for the RPM to download. Some say that it's even easier for source-based distros.> There's nothing keeping me on Windows. I switched to Linux way back in 1997 and never looked back.
<aol>meetoo!</aol> And right about the same time, too.
And it just keeps getting better every year. I can see how someone who actually needed Photoshop or MS Word or some other specific commercial application, or who was addicted to games, wouldn't be able to live on Linux. But for the rest of us, Windows doesn't offer anything we need or particularly need or even want.
I'm still on Red Hat 7.2 / GNOME 1.4, and I don't feel any rush to upgrade. It has gotten to the point that upgrades are luxuries that I do at some convenient time, rather than something that needs to be done to pick up new features as soon as they become available. Back in RH 4.x days I always upgraded immediately, but for the last 2-3 years I've been skipping more and more upgrades.
At any rate, let me emphasize the "never looked back" part.
> ext2 is a quite stable fs
Agreed. My typical login time is 180 days, and I almost always have > 100 processes alive on the system for that whole time, but the only time I've had disk problems in several years of operating that way is when I had hardware failures.
> Who are these mythical "shareholders" of whom you speak? In reality, they're everyone who has a 401(k) or other investments.
Sorry, your 401 is 404.
> I hear this a whole lot -- that the people who still have jobs have a lot of new work and that it is hard to keep up. They are being asked to work more hours on that salary pay, do more things than they ever did before.
> The second thing that I am hearing from a lot of people is that as soon as things get better, or they get a break into another job that pays better, they are gone, zero notice, no regrets. They are being milked by the management, they know it, and they are going to split as soon as things get better.
This is exactly how things were during the downsizing craze of the late 80's and early 90's, and not just in the IT field. (The more things change, blah.) That's when the anti-buzzword "dumbsizing" first came into vogue.
>
So long as they don't downsize the doughnut boxes... no problemo.
> But from all the things that look stupid about US politics from this side of the ocean, this phenomenon of tacking on loads of totally unrelated stuff to some bill must be the worst.
You should see how it looks from this side of the ocean!
> Has any politician who did this ever defended this process in public?
The pork is almost invariably something to pay off the legislator's own constituents, so they don't have much motivation to question the practice. Of course, people in other states/districts may no like it, but they don't get to vote for the pork packer, so s/he doesn't need to give a flip what they think.
This is just another way that money taints elections, slightly more indirect than the campaign donor system. The people who could outlaw it are the ones who benefit from it. (I.e., it's another way of buying votes.)
>
Yep. And G-string means GNU-string.
> I figured that the lack of a genetic relationship between the two species was already well known
"We are not related" and "lack of a genetic relationship" greatly overstate the case. Humans "have a genetic relationship" with all species, and exceed 98% identity (depending on the way you measure it) even with chimps, and we are much more closely related to the Neanderthals than to the chimps.
What scientists actually say is that we are not descended from the Neanderthals.
> My company had a lot of lazy/stupid people hired under quotas, nepotism, or because, in the case of one person I worked directly with, it was the "Christian" thing to do.
Ah, you've outed them. It has previously been a great secret, but you've discovered that "XP" is actually "Chi Rho".
> I read the whole article trying to figure out what he was on about. eXtreme Programming?
1. Find a new way to waste time.
2. Call it a programming methodology.
3. Give it a name with buzzword potential so your PHB can brag about having adopted it when he has power lunches with other PHBs.
4. ???
5. Profit!
> There is a bit of a catch-22 in introducing new methods: in order to draw people you have to make noise...
And sometimes the noise is the message.
> While the MPAA is campaigning for new restrictions on content, the artists at the studios are using and helping create open source. Having Linux and open source as a crucial part of studio operations may help executives rethink their corporate position on open source and Linux issues.
Whoever wrote that has obviously never had a job. Executives don't give a fig what their employees want or need to get their jobs done.
> if someone breaks into an ftp server, they might as well replace the md5 signatures, too.
Fetch the
> I'm wondering: how did life survive the other dozens of other times the pole flipped?
> Suddenly, global warming (the artificially-induced kind) doesn't seem like that big of a long-term threat.
There was a note on this in the latest Scientific American, and it mentions that historically the pole flips have not corresponded with mass extinctions. No big biological problems are expected.