Oh I don't know, just a few thousand here or there I guess. I mean, class-action suits don't court right ? We're not looking for the thousands of people united under one cause, we want the individual war stories of those who were wronged and didn't take the settlement.
Windows gets pwned because it ISN'T simple. That just goes to show what little you know of NT administration. Do the words Active Directory mean anything to you ? It's a huge mess of registry edits, disjointed GUIs spread out all over the place, and services with confusingly-written documentation that were probably proofread by a dozen lawyers and not one single tech. Linux is the same, minus the lawyers.
And don't dare point me at those READMEs. If there's one thing developers hate doing, it's writing documentation. That's probably why most docs are useless at conveying any pertinent information. I guess my point in all this, is that if a significant portion of Postfix users are running virtual domains, then why do we even need 8 pages of documentation to make it work ? How about "ENABLE_VIRTUAL = true" and "DOMAINS = file:///etc/domains" or "DOMAINS = mysql:///select * from mydb.domains where mail='true'"
Instead, Postfix wants a dozen little definition files that essentially do the same thing, they're just a bigger pain to maintain/debug. Ultimately, for someone running a standard set of services like web, ftp, mail, nothing fancy... they should all be ready to run right out of the box. That's what it is in Windows, or Novell, or any other server platform. Instead, Linux admins who want something fast and easy have to shell out for meta-control panels like CPanel or Plesk, and then you're somewhat locked in to their specific versions and data formats.
As much as I love Linux when it runs, I hate it when it doesn't, because even with the problem laid bare before my eyes, it's still one hell of a trek to figure out exactly what's going wrong. Either software has a lack of debugging output for critical conditions, or it chokes on a misspelled config option. The fact that the source is available doesn't mean I have time to go in and figure out why some norwegian guy's hackish code is bombing. That's all nice and dandy when you're a teenager living in your parents' basement, not so much when you're a professional with bosses to answer to and clients to keep happy. I thought these stupid machines were supposed to make our work easier!:P They just ended up creating more work.
True and true. A part of me wants those damned Sens to lose just so I can sleep at night without all these idiotic partygoers terrorizing the neighborhood with their drunken jollies. I'm obviously not a sports fan, so it baffles me to see people so excited to know their team of russian and american players might win, instead of the other team of russian and american players. It's not like anyone on the team is from Ottawa anyway.
He's so serious, his games are all boring, with such sleeper hits as Xtreme Xmas Shopping, Bacteria Salad, Xtreme Errands and who could forget the gut-churning action of The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, and my personal favorite: Activism, The Public Policy Game.
This guy is serious alright, seriously deranged. He probably gets aroused while doing his taxes. His rant and much of the other "interviews" he does are little more than attention grabs, dropping names here and there trying to compare himself to the market giants. Big head with a small brain.
If writing a simple script put him off, it's because he shouldn't have had to do so in the first place. We're dealing with basic system functionality here. Do you need to write a script when the plumber comes over to fix your toilet ? No, he knows what he's doing. The operating system is supposed to be the "expert" that deals with the complexities of hardware so that users can focus on their work.
Just because someone has the skills to perform some stupid task, doesn't mean they should. I'll write scripts if I'm doing something custom, something unique to my needs. When it has to do with a task that half of all Linux users need to do more or less the same way every time, like bringing up a network interface, I expect the pre-packaged distro to do that. It's far better for a Redhat or Debian or Ubuntu wizard to write a script once that will be used millions of times, than have each user wrestle with it and waste their time when they could have been doing better things. Lord knows how many weeks of my life I've wasted trying to get an X desktop to work properly, or a DNS zone file to parse right. These are all hurdles that do not belong in modern software. We know better, we have the tools and skills to make things work better, so why don't they ?
RTFP, he just found one online... probably through a Google search. You know, searching for solutions to Linux problems hardly ever lands you at the distributor's page, because if they knew about the issue, they'd probably fix it or add a helper script to the distro itself, especially in the case of Ubuntu where they seem to do back flips to make things easy and pleasant for the users.
On a similar note, I spent 3 days trying to get a virtual email server up. I did it over about ten times, each one following a different step-by-step "guide" on the net. Not once did any of the guides explain anything that was going on and why I had to do it a certain way. I'm already quite vocal about the shoddily-parsed text file configs that burden most Linux apps. It's like no one ever heard the saying "Do as I mean, not as I say". Anyways, I eventually got it to work, but there are still some things that aren't quite right, silly things like aliasing local accounts to a virtual mailbox residing on the same freakin' machine.
Linux software always has to do things the hard way. At least some Windows apps are kind enough to offer Simple prompts that work for 99% of the population, with Advanced settings available for those who need finer control. One would tend to think that setting up virtual email, or WiFi, could be done a heck of a lot easier than 14-steps found somewhere on the net. Ideally, they should be 2-minute ordeals.
User: "Hi, I'd like virtual email on my server hosting multiple domains, like everyone else." Linux: "Ok, here you go. And here's the XYZ interface to manage mailboxes with ease." User: "Thank you, un-elitist operating system that I love"
bentcd, you've hit the nail right on the head. We live in a culture that ENCOURAGES stupidity, real or pretend. Now before I get flamed to death here, I'm going to give my personal account and nothing more. My experiences could be skewed, and I mean no ill intent by this, but I've seen women MASTER the ability to switch their brain "off" if it benefits them in a particular situation. Men for some reason, we can't do it so convincingly, or maybe I just don't fall for it as much when it's a fat bald middle-aged guy trying to pull a dumb act on my business.
I've been thrown off by that uncanny acting skill even when I was the one benefiting. Let me paint a picture. I'm at some megastore, standing in line with Jenny Random Girlfriend, both wise and educated individuals, at the customer service desk to get a refund for Gadget-X that sucks. I make my plea, explaining how I'm dissatisfied with my purchase and would like a refund, all done in a friendly tone; they send me a manager to convince me otherwise. After a few minutes of condescending bullshit from the kid with the darker pants, Jenny steps up and unleashes a tsunami of enraged nonsensical babble worthy of a Jerry Springer award. No matter what the kid says, it's as if she were deaf as she repeats the same childish chorus. We walk out minutes later with our money and I give myself a headache trying to figure out how the hell that worked.
You see, it's impossible to reason with truly dumb or lazy people, because their logic skills is shit, they will always rebut your carefully crafted arguments with mindless drivel to frustrate you further as nothing you say will get through their thick skull. If you flip it around and act stupid, you give your adversary no option but to give in to your demands. Like the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
many might argue that reproducing is the point of it all - and reproduction rates tend to vary inversely with IQ
Yep that's the big reason why earth is doomed. The smarter ones either have better things to do than slave over babies, or they feel we have a population crisis and would rather not worsen the problem. Me, a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. Oh I forgot C: we're so smart but our physical traits are lacking, thus we can't secure a mate. Believe me, that's a blessing in disguise!;)
none of the people who excel at any of the above tasks have ever once called me an idiot
That's because those people know better than the common geek. They wouldn't call you an idiot/ignorant to your face, because that's how they earn a living. Geeks who learn to shut up, also make good money. The problem is this rampant unchecked elitism that's so pervasive in computer culture. So what if a user calls the monitor "computer" and the tower "power supply" ? They didn't call tech support to be insulted, they called for help, and help you will provide for compensation. You could even get paid to educate those who care, but for the most part, people just want to get their work done and not have to worry about the rest.
Me, I'm an uber-geek; I absorb knowledge wherever I can find it. Even then, I don't know everything and for every facet of my current expertise, I had to start somewhere. I may have been born into computers, but for example six years ago I knew nothing about car stereos. I walked into a store, said "I want a nice stereo" and let the experts take my money. Well, the stereo was kind of lame and I paid a bit more than I should have, but at the time I didn't know any better. Were I not an uber-geek, I probably would have gone back every few months to buy upgrades like most people. Instead, I started reading everything I could find on car audio, and now I can firmly assert that my modest system's sound quality rivals that of systems costing ten times more, thanks to my meticulous tuning and customizations. Six years ago I was an "idiot".
On the other hand, there are some things I'd rather not learn, like auto repair, law, medicine, or bartending. Does that make me an idiot ? Hell no! That makes me a human. There are services that I enjoy paying for, firstly because it means _I_ don't have to do it, and secondly it makes the world go round, just as I get paid for the things I do best. If we were all idiots, we'd each live on our own private island and we'd have to do everything ourselves. No cars, no computers, no TV. That's exactly the opposite of how society works!
Sure, we can only distinguish 16 thousand unique colors, but we can clearly see banding in the gradients that are present in the great bulk of digital art. I may not be able to accurately spot the RGB values of 16 million colors, but I can easily trace the contrasting demarcation when two neighboring shades of red have a more than 3% difference in luminance, which is the smallest gradient possible when trying to cram the entire visible light spectrum in a mere 16 bits. I don't care if blue #17 in 16-bit isn't as "accurate" as blue #139, but I do care that any untrained eye can see nasty contrasts between #16 and #17.
Even 24-bit color shows its weaknesses at at very high or very low brightness. That's why some people work with even higher precision color spaces. I wouldn't expect a portable display to go beyond the standard 24-bit color, simply because environmental factors would probably negate any further improvement, but I find it perfectly reasonable to hold Apple to their advertised specs. They are Apple, after all. They didn't build their reputation by selling washed-out low-resolution displays to near-sighted spreadsheet mongrels.
Having witnessed a huge chunk of my city's IT population get sloppily downsized by Nortel years ago, seeing them pull this sort of cry-baby move makes me wonder if the company is on the verge of extinction. So they lost one client to a competitor, who probably offered a better fit for price and features than Nortel's big archaic systems. The fact that this client was a former subsidiary of Nortel does not give the latter a license to publicly ream their former partners in a fit of jealousy. Sure, it's a big hit against the company's image, underlining the fact that Nortel hasn't been a leader in a very long time. Where I live, the word Nortel is a synonym for fraud, failure. They fucked over their staff, they fucked over their shareholders, and now they're trying to fuck over their own offspring. It's as though they want to make sure everyone knows they can't compete anymore.
If raising kids is a legal nightmare, then just skip the exercise altogether. Or move to a country that doesn't reek of political over-correctness. Or just kill the ungrateful little spawns, plead guilty, get out after 3 years of exemplary conduct and inspire millions of parents with your survival story to do the same.
Either way I don't care. If parents can't discipline their own kids, eventually someone else will, someone who is not bound by the rules of child abuse: another child. That's right, kids who don't learn the value of respect will become each other's enemies. Isn't that what we all want, more youth violence ? 'Course it is, it's good for the ratings.
The ONLY reason this is on slashdot is because it has the word "Microsoft" in it. In the USA, in Canada, in Sweden, even in that shameful tourist toilet called France, installing an illegitimate copy of Windows on a computer is illegal. Whether the pirate charges for the "service" or does it for free, makes no difference whatsoever. He/she still hasn't purchased the right to use the software. Why should things be any different in India ? There is no "Robin Hood" clause in the license agreement.
If these pirates had any brains they'd be installing something else on there, something legal. Windows too expensive ? Then don't use Windows! If you really want to do a selfless act, burn a few dozen copies of Ubuntu and hand them out for free.
Gee that's an easy solution: dump the legacy apps! PHP 5's only been out for 3 years:P How hard can it possibly be to rewrite the vulnerable bits of SQL anyway ? I never really felt much of a shock when I switched to PHP5 years ago, the bulk of my coding habits were unaffected and the few things that broke involved a 5-minute fix or less.
Atari quack Nolan Bushnell said it nicely with geek flair:
"Business is a good game - lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money."
Just look at how people play games: they look for shortcuts, strive to collect every coin in every level, use "soft cheats" like auto-fire (*rimshot*), and when they're tired of playing the same old game, they sell it to some cheap bastard and start all over with a new game.
Actually, the editor probably put that last bit in there because we've all heard the same story a thousand times before on/. and the only thing anyone ever does is throw more gasoline on the flames. It may feel like a free speech issue because of the media involvement, but that's just the result of people lumping all media together into one big nazi ball of hate. XM isn't ClearChannel, despite having some CC capital they're not sock puppets like the wholly-owned terrestrial stations. There is a big difference between a media network explicitly biasing their affiliates into an alternate-reality class of spin, and a small player like XM making a newbie mistake like firing someone whose opinions they simply disagree with. This could even be the result of just one exec having a beef with the radio jocks or anyone else involved with that show... I dunno, maybe Opie fucked the guy's mother or something... really, when you're sitting high on an executive board it doesn't take much to knock a guy off balance. When your job is high-pressure, and I'm pretty sure running a radio network is way up there on the barometer, it really doesn't take much to crack someone.
The difference is that when you buy a "real copy" of something, you usually also acquire the privilege to call someone and complain when it doesn't work the way it's supposed to.
I can't help but feel cheated deep down when a gigabyte on the box is not a gigabyte in my PC. I know the numbers, I know the reasoning but wouldn't it be all much easier if we fixed one or the other ? Hard drives are sold in decimal gigabytes, so why does all the software report in gibibytes ? It's obvious that the easy solution would be to use gibibytes everywhere, since it's easier to change the printing on a box than it is to fix all the software in the world. Especially as sizes increase and the differential grows quite large, this becomes rather important.
I'm sure anyone who's ever been in a retail situation has had to deal with the ignorant yet logical customer that demanded a 7% refund on their undersized hard drive. In the case of this terabyte drive, we're talking about 70 gigabytes. Most people don't even have 70gb worth of data on their PC (excluding file hoarders)... that is one big marketing discrepancy. The bigger the gap, the louder and more frequently the ignorants will complain.
How hard is it, really, to just quote the proper number ? Or maybe just increase the actual capacity by 7% to avoid printing an odd number like 931gb.
I think what the OP means is that we only have two choices: believe what the government tells us about 9/11, or don't. Either way, it doesn't change much as it's already happened and there isn't anything to be done about it anymore. I'm not sure what to believe, but I'm a cynical anti-american bastard who loves to argue so really, I'm biased. I apply the same logic to the JFK assassination, because at the end of the day, I really don't give a flying fuck who shot who in the what, I only care that neither of those people is Moi, and that no matter how far people dig, few are able to tell truth from lies. Your experience with military intelligence might make it easier for you, but for the layman it's just a big game of he-said-she-said. I'm quite proud to say that I can find far more interesting things to waste my time on than petty bickering.
Will this increase the amount of lead going into our landfills?
No, but it will increase the amount on my hydro bill when I build a cluster of "obsolete" 32-bit processors in the basement:)
Just because Microsoft gives up on something, doesn't mean everyone else has to. Just look at Vista, it was more exciting when it was still vaporware. Even people buying new Vista-ready PCs still prefer XP, because Vista does hardly anything new, certainly nothing better. Microsoft should have released a new Theme pack for XP instead. I'm sticking witn XP for as long as I can, despite having a perfectly fast dual-core with gobs of ram and a beast of a graphics card. I didn't buy all that nice kit to waste all its power on a filesystem and mouse driver... I spent the cash to do video processing, rendering and GAMING! Anything that takes power away from those primary activities is a bad thing. That's why I like Linux because I can make it as lean as I want to squeeze out a few extra cycles.
If I wanted a pretty OS, I'd buy a Mac. They manage the slick graphics without the outlandish hardware requirements, and they can actually do two things at once without both processes stuttering.
It's not so much the virtualization, as hardware VT is apparently slower than VMWare (big big blunder!). More important is the fact that you can have Mac OS and Windows on the same machine on Intel Macs. Windows has drivers for everything, so it runs everywhere. Mac OS does not, it only has support for Apple boards.
Apple's success is partly due to the fact that they've practically removed the barrier to entry. People who were curious about a Mac, but couldn't justify buying a second computer, or didn't want to risk switching, now can have both... 100% legally and supported.
I find the "problem" of image spam quite easy to avoid. I just don't accept any emails with attachments/images unless they're on my whitelist, because really... who's going to be emailing pictures to me other than my friends and family ? It's just plain retarded.
I gave up on snowboarding after breaking a few boards and limbs. I would happily use some sort of stationary hands-free fitness gadget at my desk because my current situation as a self-employed future web mogul (fingers crossed) means I spend 16 hours a day sitting at my PC. I try to get whatever exercise I can, but it's certainly had a strong effect on my body. Anything to get the cardio up would be more than welcome in my life.
I have some serious doubts about the Truthiness(tm) of this article, just because in years of web business I've never met a serious fellow with 10 different hosting providers. A normal person would either pick one provider and pay for a large enough account to handle the 10 projects, or take the next step and get a dedicated server.
The author also suggests that small hosting companies have poorly-trained staff. That could not be any further from the truth. In most cases, small companies are run by one or more highly skilled techie entrepreneurs who know their clients well enough to avoid such security blunders. A large faceless company with dozens or even hundreds of employees is far more likely to have things slip through the cracks, and the staff hierarchy ensures that no single individual knows the whole story.
Take for example the world of Internet Service Providers. In a small, 3-man shop, when you call tech-support you're probably talking to a server administrator or network guru. In a big nationwide telecom, you're talking to an outsourcer who learned his "trade" six months ago during his job training and his primary source of information is the knowledge base and screenshots on his workstation.
Well here's a not-so-secret fact about hosting companies: they outsource their sales and support just like any other business. The bigger they are, the more likely you will be speaking with someone who has no idea who you are, what your server looks like and who is more afraid of their own supervisor than of you withdrawing your business. I was shopping for a cheap junky server a couple months ago and I dealt with 4-5 different hosting companies who were looking great, right up until their sales person dropped the ball out of either ignorance or laziness. Most of them were just human parking pages, no matter what I typed into the chat box, they'd simply return a list of links to their terms of service or FAQ. There's one particularly brilliant fellow who pointed me to a non-existent PDF file on their website, then took another 10 minutes to finally accept that I am not an idiot and if I say a link is 404, it's friggin 404. Many of them ended the conversation saying they would email me various documents or a contract, and none ever did. At one point I was even doubting my own mail server, since NONE of them were coming through on their promises.
The moral of this rant ? The world of web hosting is bursting with fraudsters, posers and imbeciles. I probably put in 30-40 hours of research before finally coming across a provider that suited my needs and budget, most of that time was wasted dealing with crooks and idiots. Here's a tip: go to a forum like webhostingtalk.com and have a chat with other hosting clients, read all the success and horror stories before throwing your money at a company you don't know. Make sure you know what you're getting into before signing anything.
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Oh I don't know, just a few thousand here or there I guess. I mean, class-action suits don't court right ? We're not looking for the thousands of people united under one cause, we want the individual war stories of those who were wronged and didn't take the settlement.
Yeah, you really got me there.
Windows gets pwned because it ISN'T simple. That just goes to show what little you know of NT administration. Do the words Active Directory mean anything to you ? It's a huge mess of registry edits, disjointed GUIs spread out all over the place, and services with confusingly-written documentation that were probably proofread by a dozen lawyers and not one single tech. Linux is the same, minus the lawyers.
:P They just ended up creating more work.
And don't dare point me at those READMEs. If there's one thing developers hate doing, it's writing documentation. That's probably why most docs are useless at conveying any pertinent information. I guess my point in all this, is that if a significant portion of Postfix users are running virtual domains, then why do we even need 8 pages of documentation to make it work ? How about "ENABLE_VIRTUAL = true" and "DOMAINS = file:///etc/domains" or "DOMAINS = mysql:///select * from mydb.domains where mail='true'"
Instead, Postfix wants a dozen little definition files that essentially do the same thing, they're just a bigger pain to maintain/debug. Ultimately, for someone running a standard set of services like web, ftp, mail, nothing fancy... they should all be ready to run right out of the box. That's what it is in Windows, or Novell, or any other server platform. Instead, Linux admins who want something fast and easy have to shell out for meta-control panels like CPanel or Plesk, and then you're somewhat locked in to their specific versions and data formats.
As much as I love Linux when it runs, I hate it when it doesn't, because even with the problem laid bare before my eyes, it's still one hell of a trek to figure out exactly what's going wrong. Either software has a lack of debugging output for critical conditions, or it chokes on a misspelled config option. The fact that the source is available doesn't mean I have time to go in and figure out why some norwegian guy's hackish code is bombing. That's all nice and dandy when you're a teenager living in your parents' basement, not so much when you're a professional with bosses to answer to and clients to keep happy. I thought these stupid machines were supposed to make our work easier!
True and true. A part of me wants those damned Sens to lose just so I can sleep at night without all these idiotic partygoers terrorizing the neighborhood with their drunken jollies. I'm obviously not a sports fan, so it baffles me to see people so excited to know their team of russian and american players might win, instead of the other team of russian and american players. It's not like anyone on the team is from Ottawa anyway.
He's so serious, his games are all boring, with such sleeper hits as Xtreme Xmas Shopping, Bacteria Salad, Xtreme Errands and who could forget the gut-churning action of The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, and my personal favorite: Activism, The Public Policy Game.
This guy is serious alright, seriously deranged. He probably gets aroused while doing his taxes. His rant and much of the other "interviews" he does are little more than attention grabs, dropping names here and there trying to compare himself to the market giants. Big head with a small brain.
If writing a simple script put him off, it's because he shouldn't have had to do so in the first place. We're dealing with basic system functionality here. Do you need to write a script when the plumber comes over to fix your toilet ? No, he knows what he's doing. The operating system is supposed to be the "expert" that deals with the complexities of hardware so that users can focus on their work.
Just because someone has the skills to perform some stupid task, doesn't mean they should. I'll write scripts if I'm doing something custom, something unique to my needs. When it has to do with a task that half of all Linux users need to do more or less the same way every time, like bringing up a network interface, I expect the pre-packaged distro to do that. It's far better for a Redhat or Debian or Ubuntu wizard to write a script once that will be used millions of times, than have each user wrestle with it and waste their time when they could have been doing better things. Lord knows how many weeks of my life I've wasted trying to get an X desktop to work properly, or a DNS zone file to parse right. These are all hurdles that do not belong in modern software. We know better, we have the tools and skills to make things work better, so why don't they ?
RTFP, he just found one online... probably through a Google search. You know, searching for solutions to Linux problems hardly ever lands you at the distributor's page, because if they knew about the issue, they'd probably fix it or add a helper script to the distro itself, especially in the case of Ubuntu where they seem to do back flips to make things easy and pleasant for the users.
On a similar note, I spent 3 days trying to get a virtual email server up. I did it over about ten times, each one following a different step-by-step "guide" on the net. Not once did any of the guides explain anything that was going on and why I had to do it a certain way. I'm already quite vocal about the shoddily-parsed text file configs that burden most Linux apps. It's like no one ever heard the saying "Do as I mean, not as I say". Anyways, I eventually got it to work, but there are still some things that aren't quite right, silly things like aliasing local accounts to a virtual mailbox residing on the same freakin' machine.
Linux software always has to do things the hard way. At least some Windows apps are kind enough to offer Simple prompts that work for 99% of the population, with Advanced settings available for those who need finer control. One would tend to think that setting up virtual email, or WiFi, could be done a heck of a lot easier than 14-steps found somewhere on the net. Ideally, they should be 2-minute ordeals.
User: "Hi, I'd like virtual email on my server hosting multiple domains, like everyone else."
Linux: "Ok, here you go. And here's the XYZ interface to manage mailboxes with ease."
User: "Thank you, un-elitist operating system that I love"
Sadly that's not how the story goes.
bentcd, you've hit the nail right on the head. We live in a culture that ENCOURAGES stupidity, real or pretend. Now before I get flamed to death here, I'm going to give my personal account and nothing more. My experiences could be skewed, and I mean no ill intent by this, but I've seen women MASTER the ability to switch their brain "off" if it benefits them in a particular situation. Men for some reason, we can't do it so convincingly, or maybe I just don't fall for it as much when it's a fat bald middle-aged guy trying to pull a dumb act on my business.
I've been thrown off by that uncanny acting skill even when I was the one benefiting. Let me paint a picture. I'm at some megastore, standing in line with Jenny Random Girlfriend, both wise and educated individuals, at the customer service desk to get a refund for Gadget-X that sucks. I make my plea, explaining how I'm dissatisfied with my purchase and would like a refund, all done in a friendly tone; they send me a manager to convince me otherwise. After a few minutes of condescending bullshit from the kid with the darker pants, Jenny steps up and unleashes a tsunami of enraged nonsensical babble worthy of a Jerry Springer award. No matter what the kid says, it's as if she were deaf as she repeats the same childish chorus. We walk out minutes later with our money and I give myself a headache trying to figure out how the hell that worked.
You see, it's impossible to reason with truly dumb or lazy people, because their logic skills is shit, they will always rebut your carefully crafted arguments with mindless drivel to frustrate you further as nothing you say will get through their thick skull. If you flip it around and act stupid, you give your adversary no option but to give in to your demands. Like the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Yep that's the big reason why earth is doomed. The smarter ones either have better things to do than slave over babies, or they feel we have a population crisis and would rather not worsen the problem. Me, a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. Oh I forgot C: we're so smart but our physical traits are lacking, thus we can't secure a mate. Believe me, that's a blessing in disguise!
That's because those people know better than the common geek. They wouldn't call you an idiot/ignorant to your face, because that's how they earn a living. Geeks who learn to shut up, also make good money. The problem is this rampant unchecked elitism that's so pervasive in computer culture. So what if a user calls the monitor "computer" and the tower "power supply" ? They didn't call tech support to be insulted, they called for help, and help you will provide for compensation. You could even get paid to educate those who care, but for the most part, people just want to get their work done and not have to worry about the rest.
Me, I'm an uber-geek; I absorb knowledge wherever I can find it. Even then, I don't know everything and for every facet of my current expertise, I had to start somewhere. I may have been born into computers, but for example six years ago I knew nothing about car stereos. I walked into a store, said "I want a nice stereo" and let the experts take my money. Well, the stereo was kind of lame and I paid a bit more than I should have, but at the time I didn't know any better. Were I not an uber-geek, I probably would have gone back every few months to buy upgrades like most people. Instead, I started reading everything I could find on car audio, and now I can firmly assert that my modest system's sound quality rivals that of systems costing ten times more, thanks to my meticulous tuning and customizations. Six years ago I was an "idiot".
On the other hand, there are some things I'd rather not learn, like auto repair, law, medicine, or bartending. Does that make me an idiot ? Hell no! That makes me a human. There are services that I enjoy paying for, firstly because it means _I_ don't have to do it, and secondly it makes the world go round, just as I get paid for the things I do best. If we were all idiots, we'd each live on our own private island and we'd have to do everything ourselves. No cars, no computers, no TV. That's exactly the opposite of how society works!
Sure, we can only distinguish 16 thousand unique colors, but we can clearly see banding in the gradients that are present in the great bulk of digital art. I may not be able to accurately spot the RGB values of 16 million colors, but I can easily trace the contrasting demarcation when two neighboring shades of red have a more than 3% difference in luminance, which is the smallest gradient possible when trying to cram the entire visible light spectrum in a mere 16 bits. I don't care if blue #17 in 16-bit isn't as "accurate" as blue #139, but I do care that any untrained eye can see nasty contrasts between #16 and #17.
Even 24-bit color shows its weaknesses at at very high or very low brightness. That's why some people work with even higher precision color spaces. I wouldn't expect a portable display to go beyond the standard 24-bit color, simply because environmental factors would probably negate any further improvement, but I find it perfectly reasonable to hold Apple to their advertised specs. They are Apple, after all. They didn't build their reputation by selling washed-out low-resolution displays to near-sighted spreadsheet mongrels.
Having witnessed a huge chunk of my city's IT population get sloppily downsized by Nortel years ago, seeing them pull this sort of cry-baby move makes me wonder if the company is on the verge of extinction. So they lost one client to a competitor, who probably offered a better fit for price and features than Nortel's big archaic systems. The fact that this client was a former subsidiary of Nortel does not give the latter a license to publicly ream their former partners in a fit of jealousy. Sure, it's a big hit against the company's image, underlining the fact that Nortel hasn't been a leader in a very long time. Where I live, the word Nortel is a synonym for fraud, failure. They fucked over their staff, they fucked over their shareholders, and now they're trying to fuck over their own offspring. It's as though they want to make sure everyone knows they can't compete anymore.
Well, thanks for the warning. Oh, and SUE ME!
Simple solution: don't have kids.
If raising kids is a legal nightmare, then just skip the exercise altogether. Or move to a country that doesn't reek of political over-correctness. Or just kill the ungrateful little spawns, plead guilty, get out after 3 years of exemplary conduct and inspire millions of parents with your survival story to do the same.
Either way I don't care. If parents can't discipline their own kids, eventually someone else will, someone who is not bound by the rules of child abuse: another child. That's right, kids who don't learn the value of respect will become each other's enemies. Isn't that what we all want, more youth violence ? 'Course it is, it's good for the ratings.
The ONLY reason this is on slashdot is because it has the word "Microsoft" in it. In the USA, in Canada, in Sweden, even in that shameful tourist toilet called France, installing an illegitimate copy of Windows on a computer is illegal. Whether the pirate charges for the "service" or does it for free, makes no difference whatsoever. He/she still hasn't purchased the right to use the software. Why should things be any different in India ? There is no "Robin Hood" clause in the license agreement.
If these pirates had any brains they'd be installing something else on there, something legal. Windows too expensive ? Then don't use Windows! If you really want to do a selfless act, burn a few dozen copies of Ubuntu and hand them out for free.
Gee that's an easy solution: dump the legacy apps! PHP 5's only been out for 3 years :P How hard can it possibly be to rewrite the vulnerable bits of SQL anyway ? I never really felt much of a shock when I switched to PHP5 years ago, the bulk of my coding habits were unaffected and the few things that broke involved a 5-minute fix or less.
Atari quack Nolan Bushnell said it nicely with geek flair:
"Business is a good game - lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money."
Just look at how people play games: they look for shortcuts, strive to collect every coin in every level, use "soft cheats" like auto-fire (*rimshot*), and when they're tired of playing the same old game, they sell it to some cheap bastard and start all over with a new game.
That's very much like business.
Actually, the editor probably put that last bit in there because we've all heard the same story a thousand times before on /. and the only thing anyone ever does is throw more gasoline on the flames. It may feel like a free speech issue because of the media involvement, but that's just the result of people lumping all media together into one big nazi ball of hate. XM isn't ClearChannel, despite having some CC capital they're not sock puppets like the wholly-owned terrestrial stations. There is a big difference between a media network explicitly biasing their affiliates into an alternate-reality class of spin, and a small player like XM making a newbie mistake like firing someone whose opinions they simply disagree with. This could even be the result of just one exec having a beef with the radio jocks or anyone else involved with that show... I dunno, maybe Opie fucked the guy's mother or something... really, when you're sitting high on an executive board it doesn't take much to knock a guy off balance. When your job is high-pressure, and I'm pretty sure running a radio network is way up there on the barometer, it really doesn't take much to crack someone.
The difference is that when you buy a "real copy" of something, you usually also acquire the privilege to call someone and complain when it doesn't work the way it's supposed to.
In the USA, that's process is called a law suit.
I can't help but feel cheated deep down when a gigabyte on the box is not a gigabyte in my PC. I know the numbers, I know the reasoning but wouldn't it be all much easier if we fixed one or the other ? Hard drives are sold in decimal gigabytes, so why does all the software report in gibibytes ? It's obvious that the easy solution would be to use gibibytes everywhere, since it's easier to change the printing on a box than it is to fix all the software in the world. Especially as sizes increase and the differential grows quite large, this becomes rather important.
I'm sure anyone who's ever been in a retail situation has had to deal with the ignorant yet logical customer that demanded a 7% refund on their undersized hard drive. In the case of this terabyte drive, we're talking about 70 gigabytes. Most people don't even have 70gb worth of data on their PC (excluding file hoarders)... that is one big marketing discrepancy. The bigger the gap, the louder and more frequently the ignorants will complain.
How hard is it, really, to just quote the proper number ? Or maybe just increase the actual capacity by 7% to avoid printing an odd number like 931gb.
Well said. Let's agree that buying pirated DVDs is funding terrorism.
Actually I just have a gripe with people whose greatest achievement in life is burning a goddamned DVD. I call that a waste of carbon.
I think what the OP means is that we only have two choices: believe what the government tells us about 9/11, or don't. Either way, it doesn't change much as it's already happened and there isn't anything to be done about it anymore. I'm not sure what to believe, but I'm a cynical anti-american bastard who loves to argue so really, I'm biased. I apply the same logic to the JFK assassination, because at the end of the day, I really don't give a flying fuck who shot who in the what, I only care that neither of those people is Moi, and that no matter how far people dig, few are able to tell truth from lies. Your experience with military intelligence might make it easier for you, but for the layman it's just a big game of he-said-she-said. I'm quite proud to say that I can find far more interesting things to waste my time on than petty bickering.
No, but it will increase the amount on my hydro bill when I build a cluster of "obsolete" 32-bit processors in the basement
Just because Microsoft gives up on something, doesn't mean everyone else has to. Just look at Vista, it was more exciting when it was still vaporware. Even people buying new Vista-ready PCs still prefer XP, because Vista does hardly anything new, certainly nothing better. Microsoft should have released a new Theme pack for XP instead. I'm sticking witn XP for as long as I can, despite having a perfectly fast dual-core with gobs of ram and a beast of a graphics card. I didn't buy all that nice kit to waste all its power on a filesystem and mouse driver... I spent the cash to do video processing, rendering and GAMING! Anything that takes power away from those primary activities is a bad thing. That's why I like Linux because I can make it as lean as I want to squeeze out a few extra cycles.
If I wanted a pretty OS, I'd buy a Mac. They manage the slick graphics without the outlandish hardware requirements, and they can actually do two things at once without both processes stuttering.
It's not so much the virtualization, as hardware VT is apparently slower than VMWare (big big blunder!). More important is the fact that you can have Mac OS and Windows on the same machine on Intel Macs. Windows has drivers for everything, so it runs everywhere. Mac OS does not, it only has support for Apple boards.
Apple's success is partly due to the fact that they've practically removed the barrier to entry. People who were curious about a Mac, but couldn't justify buying a second computer, or didn't want to risk switching, now can have both... 100% legally and supported.
I find the "problem" of image spam quite easy to avoid. I just don't accept any emails with attachments/images unless they're on my whitelist, because really... who's going to be emailing pictures to me other than my friends and family ? It's just plain retarded.
I gave up on snowboarding after breaking a few boards and limbs. I would happily use some sort of stationary hands-free fitness gadget at my desk because my current situation as a self-employed future web mogul (fingers crossed) means I spend 16 hours a day sitting at my PC. I try to get whatever exercise I can, but it's certainly had a strong effect on my body. Anything to get the cardio up would be more than welcome in my life.
Such is the life of a hardcore computer geek.
I have some serious doubts about the Truthiness(tm) of this article, just because in years of web business I've never met a serious fellow with 10 different hosting providers. A normal person would either pick one provider and pay for a large enough account to handle the 10 projects, or take the next step and get a dedicated server.
The author also suggests that small hosting companies have poorly-trained staff. That could not be any further from the truth. In most cases, small companies are run by one or more highly skilled techie entrepreneurs who know their clients well enough to avoid such security blunders. A large faceless company with dozens or even hundreds of employees is far more likely to have things slip through the cracks, and the staff hierarchy ensures that no single individual knows the whole story.
Take for example the world of Internet Service Providers. In a small, 3-man shop, when you call tech-support you're probably talking to a server administrator or network guru. In a big nationwide telecom, you're talking to an outsourcer who learned his "trade" six months ago during his job training and his primary source of information is the knowledge base and screenshots on his workstation.
Well here's a not-so-secret fact about hosting companies: they outsource their sales and support just like any other business. The bigger they are, the more likely you will be speaking with someone who has no idea who you are, what your server looks like and who is more afraid of their own supervisor than of you withdrawing your business. I was shopping for a cheap junky server a couple months ago and I dealt with 4-5 different hosting companies who were looking great, right up until their sales person dropped the ball out of either ignorance or laziness. Most of them were just human parking pages, no matter what I typed into the chat box, they'd simply return a list of links to their terms of service or FAQ. There's one particularly brilliant fellow who pointed me to a non-existent PDF file on their website, then took another 10 minutes to finally accept that I am not an idiot and if I say a link is 404, it's friggin 404. Many of them ended the conversation saying they would email me various documents or a contract, and none ever did. At one point I was even doubting my own mail server, since NONE of them were coming through on their promises.
The moral of this rant ? The world of web hosting is bursting with fraudsters, posers and imbeciles. I probably put in 30-40 hours of research before finally coming across a provider that suited my needs and budget, most of that time was wasted dealing with crooks and idiots. Here's a tip: go to a forum like webhostingtalk.com and have a chat with other hosting clients, read all the success and horror stories before throwing your money at a company you don't know. Make sure you know what you're getting into before signing anything.