Perl, Ruby, PostgreSQL, Debian-users have all been very useful lists for me. I have never been snubbed even with the most retarded questions out there. They are new, they are modest, and they are all trying together to make it a better place to be.
Yeah, well, Ruby people aren't going to tell you to RTFM, because for most of the code there is no fscking documentation...
As for Debian, the users are fine, the arrogance there mostly seems to be restricted to the developers.
I'm helping someone out with her web site at the moment. The web designer she tried to work with previously threw a hissy fit because he didn't want to work with a site someone else had designed; that was beneath him, apparently.
I'm told I'm unusual in that I actually explain how stuff works, and try to educate the site owner to be as self sufficient as possible. If something is hard to do, I explain why.
I've helped people with Mac and Linux problems too. The main barrier I find to offering assistance to Linux users is that I don't do Windows, and most newbies who want to use Linux, want to dual-boot. But if someone has a spare PC to dedicate to Linux, I'm all over that--I'll help with picking a distro, install and config, explaining how stuff works, and so on.
Yet the laws of physics and human physiology, and the general object of the game, have remained constant.
The physics of baseball changed; the objectives of basketball changed.
Those changes have taken centuries. In the computer game world, games are released and outdated within a year, replaced by something completely different.
And the response is, so what? Reality TV shows are launched and outdated within a year, but millions of people still watch them. People still watch the Olympics, even though sports are regularly cut from the list and new ones added. Football supporters will watch the finals even though completely different teams play every year. People like variety.
While it'd be great for hardware manufacturers to opensource/GPL their drivers, the restrictions that fanatics put on Linux are holding it back.
So what's your explanation for Linux taking over the free Unix market from BSD? The big difference is the license, so BSD should be running rings around Linux, what with not having the license restrictions, right?
I have an EPIA M10000. Next time I build a PC, I'll probably pick another VIA EPIA. Why? Because VIA released source code for drivers for every piece of hardware in the system, from the S3 UniChrome graphics card to the hardware MPEG decoder, from the ethernet interface (hello, nVidia) to the hardware random number generator.
It's also a nice stable silent mini board with a CPU that runs on 4W of power.
If you don't need gaming-level 3D performance or heavy number crunching power, a VIA EPIA-based system is a great option.
I have no interest in watching other people play video games. I have no interest in watching other people play sports.
My point wasn't that watching either of them was interesting; rather, that the same arguments for boringness applied to both, and that in spite of how we both feel about them being completely uninteresting, there are plenty of people who disagree.
The entry barrier to sport is generally lower than video games, financially speaking. A set of sporting clothes, a bat and a ball can be had for way less cash than a high-end gaming PC.
The entry barrier to the pro leagues, as far as skills are concerned, is the same for both--you need to be one in a few hundred thousand, at least.
You apparently aren't aware that sports rules and physics have changed arbitrarily over the years. One of the big debates in baseball is over the fact that the change of materials used for bat and ball over the years has altered the balance of the game. Similarly, tennis has become a lot more boring, with fewer long rallies, since racket technology led to ever faster balls. Formula 1 racing has rules that have been revised arbitrarily on numerous occasions.
And of course, America made up its own 'football', arbitrarily changing the game completely from that played in other countries--and most play the old games, not the new one. College football and NFL football have arbitrarily different overtime rules. In 2001, the NBA arbitrarily changed the rules of basketball to allow zone defense. And so on.
Consumers want faster CPUS and bigger displays jammed into progressively thinner/lighter computers. My T43 is really big, runs really hot, battery life is not so good, the docking station connection is finicky, and it would weigh a ton if not for the slim/flimsy parts that replaced the beefy components of the T21.
If you wanted thin and light, you should have bought an X series. The T series is designed for performance at the cost of heat and weight.
What you describe is, in fact, the original way the web was supposed to work. URLs were supposed to be a hidden layer of server-specific information; users would refer to pages via URIs, Uniform Resource Identifiers, and there would be a mapping layer from URI to the current URL.
Unfortunately, URLs and DNS hacks turned out to be "good enough", nobody saw the need for a global location-independent naming system for web pages, and we ended up with today's system.
Unfortunately, a lot of those remote admin programs have costs associated with them--like the security issues of running any kind of PHP script. Even webmin has had holes.
Then there are ports and firewalls, JDBC versions, having to match ODBC version with server version, and often having another set of IDs and passwords to deal with too.
On the whole I'd rather use the command line database client for admin via SSH than go through all the increased work necessary to provide secure remote database administration through some other means.
Sorry, but I don't buy that Netscape 4's problems were caused by Microsoft. I abandoned Netscape when version 4 came out, and I don't use Windows. IE on the Mac had better standards support, was faster than Netscape, and was less buggy.
Netscape decided to ignore standards and add more and more proprietary hacks. For instance, they didn't want to support CSS at all--they had their own proprietary JavaScript Style Sheets, and when they finally implemented CSS in Navigator 4 it was by translating it to JSSS, so if you turned off JavaScript all your CSS broke. They didn't want to support standard tables either.
Meanwhile, the Navigator code base was becoming a mess, partly because of the focus on adding more and more proprietary NSHTML and JavaScript hacks. When it became clear that web developers weren't interested in building Netscape-only sites, it was too late to go back and undo the damage and implement CSS and tables properly.
They also took the kitchen sink approach of insisting that everyone who wanted a Netscape browser also wanted a Netscape mail reader, news reader, IRC client, and so on. That might have made sense on Linux, but on the Mac there were much better alternatives everyone used (NewsWatcher, Eudora), so nobody wanted the bloat of Netscape. Microsoft did the right thing and made their browser just a browser, and offered separate news reader and IRC clients. (Which nobody wanted, so they were eventually dropped. Anyone even remember Microsoft News?)
Good practice is to avoid running server tasks as root unless absolutely necessary, and there are all kinds of server admin tasks you might need to do, that don't need to involve becoming root. Database administration, for example.
No, the problem is that all the alternatives to.com are run like.com, with special startup periods when all the people who already own.com domains get to register all the same domains in the new TLD. So they all end up copies of.com. See.eu.
A more sensible idea would have been to have a new TLD where you couldn't register a domain you already had in.com. Or a TLD where you weren't allowed to park domains for more than a few weeks. Or a.sucks TLD for protest sites, where trademark owners are specifically prohibited from registering domains to stifle speech.
The best idea of all would be a domain where transfer of ownership was prohibited. That would almost eliminate stupid domain name speculation.
Of course nobody cares about the TLDs they've created. Most are very special purpose (.mobi,.museum), the rest are just like.com, with exactly the same problems, only less well known.
It's clearly not a free market, because there's a monopoly on control of the root servers. The monopoly prevents additional top level domains from being created, and ensures that any which are created follow the same speculation-encouraging rules as.com.
The point here is to compare comparable systems. None of those offers are for comparable systems (no 1.83GHz core duo laptops). If you want to price a heavily discounted Dell that's available cheap because they're blowing out the obsoleted stock, you need to compare that with a heavily discounted Mac that's etc etc.
I went to the Inspiron E1505 page. I started with the 80GB one, i.e. same size hard drive as the MacBook Pro. I upgraded the processor to 1.83GHz core duo, to match the MacBook Pro. I upgraded the OS to XP Pro with a real reinstall CD, to match the full version of OS X with dev tools that you get on CD with the Mac.
I gave Dell the benefit of the doubt for the LCD quality, and left it with the cheapest. I added a DVD burner and Bluetooth, like the Mac has, and a 128MB Radeon to approximately match the Mac's video. I left the Dell with the cheapest battery, even though it has less capacity than the Mac's.
The resulting price is $1891, vs $1999 for the Mac. That's including an "instant $200 discount" from Dell. So when you actually configure them similarly, the Mac is about 6% more expensive than the Dell.
And I strongly suspect that you really need to go for the better LCD on the Dell, in which case the price premium for the Mac drops to just $8. And that's for a machine that's thinner and weighs less.
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nVidia didn't release the source or specs for their ethernet driver. Care to explain what amazing ethernet technology they needed to keep secret?
Well, generally speaking I find the corporate distributions (SuSE, RedHat) to be far buggier and more painful to administer than the free ones.
Yeah, well, Ruby people aren't going to tell you to RTFM, because for most of the code there is no fscking documentation...
As for Debian, the users are fine, the arrogance there mostly seems to be restricted to the developers.
[I run Debian and write documentation for Ruby.]
That's nothing--the WB and UPN are merging in September, producing a vortex of TV so sucky that not even brain cells will be able to escape.
The interesting question is whether the CW black hole will rotate or not. I for one hope that TV execs will be able to sit on it and spin.
I'm helping someone out with her web site at the moment. The web designer she tried to work with previously threw a hissy fit because he didn't want to work with a site someone else had designed; that was beneath him, apparently.
I'm told I'm unusual in that I actually explain how stuff works, and try to educate the site owner to be as self sufficient as possible. If something is hard to do, I explain why.
I've helped people with Mac and Linux problems too. The main barrier I find to offering assistance to Linux users is that I don't do Windows, and most newbies who want to use Linux, want to dual-boot. But if someone has a spare PC to dedicate to Linux, I'm all over that--I'll help with picking a distro, install and config, explaining how stuff works, and so on.
The physics of baseball changed; the objectives of basketball changed.
And the response is, so what? Reality TV shows are launched and outdated within a year, but millions of people still watch them. People still watch the Olympics, even though sports are regularly cut from the list and new ones added. Football supporters will watch the finals even though completely different teams play every year. People like variety.
1. DS Lite. Not gonna buy the current DS, the screen is bad.
2. Adventures and RPGs. Many of them.
3. Personal organizer software.
Until three months ago? Greetings, time traveler.
So what's your explanation for Linux taking over the free Unix market from BSD? The big difference is the license, so BSD should be running rings around Linux, what with not having the license restrictions, right?
I have an EPIA M10000. Next time I build a PC, I'll probably pick another VIA EPIA. Why? Because VIA released source code for drivers for every piece of hardware in the system, from the S3 UniChrome graphics card to the hardware MPEG decoder, from the ethernet interface (hello, nVidia) to the hardware random number generator.
It's also a nice stable silent mini board with a CPU that runs on 4W of power.
If you don't need gaming-level 3D performance or heavy number crunching power, a VIA EPIA-based system is a great option.
(And no, I have no financial ties to VIA.)
I have no interest in watching other people play video games. I have no interest in watching other people play sports.
My point wasn't that watching either of them was interesting; rather, that the same arguments for boringness applied to both, and that in spite of how we both feel about them being completely uninteresting, there are plenty of people who disagree.
The entry barrier to sport is generally lower than video games, financially speaking. A set of sporting clothes, a bat and a ball can be had for way less cash than a high-end gaming PC.
The entry barrier to the pro leagues, as far as skills are concerned, is the same for both--you need to be one in a few hundred thousand, at least.
You apparently aren't aware that sports rules and physics have changed arbitrarily over the years. One of the big debates in baseball is over the fact that the change of materials used for bat and ball over the years has altered the balance of the game. Similarly, tennis has become a lot more boring, with fewer long rallies, since racket technology led to ever faster balls. Formula 1 racing has rules that have been revised arbitrarily on numerous occasions.
And of course, America made up its own 'football', arbitrarily changing the game completely from that played in other countries--and most play the old games, not the new one. College football and NFL football have arbitrarily different overtime rules. In 2001, the NBA arbitrarily changed the rules of basketball to allow zone defense. And so on.
I'd say the same about sports, yet the NFL and NHL and NBA seem to find no shortage of viewers.
I'll pay more for a Linux laptop so long as I can be certain that not one penny goes to Microsoft.
If you wanted thin and light, you should have bought an X series. The T series is designed for performance at the cost of heat and weight.
What you describe is, in fact, the original way the web was supposed to work. URLs were supposed to be a hidden layer of server-specific information; users would refer to pages via URIs, Uniform Resource Identifiers, and there would be a mapping layer from URI to the current URL.
Unfortunately, URLs and DNS hacks turned out to be "good enough", nobody saw the need for a global location-independent naming system for web pages, and we ended up with today's system.
Unfortunately, a lot of those remote admin programs have costs associated with them--like the security issues of running any kind of PHP script. Even webmin has had holes.
Then there are ports and firewalls, JDBC versions, having to match ODBC version with server version, and often having another set of IDs and passwords to deal with too.
On the whole I'd rather use the command line database client for admin via SSH than go through all the increased work necessary to provide secure remote database administration through some other means.
Sorry, but I don't buy that Netscape 4's problems were caused by Microsoft. I abandoned Netscape when version 4 came out, and I don't use Windows. IE on the Mac had better standards support, was faster than Netscape, and was less buggy.
Netscape decided to ignore standards and add more and more proprietary hacks. For instance, they didn't want to support CSS at all--they had their own proprietary JavaScript Style Sheets, and when they finally implemented CSS in Navigator 4 it was by translating it to JSSS, so if you turned off JavaScript all your CSS broke. They didn't want to support standard tables either.
Meanwhile, the Navigator code base was becoming a mess, partly because of the focus on adding more and more proprietary NSHTML and JavaScript hacks. When it became clear that web developers weren't interested in building Netscape-only sites, it was too late to go back and undo the damage and implement CSS and tables properly.
They also took the kitchen sink approach of insisting that everyone who wanted a Netscape browser also wanted a Netscape mail reader, news reader, IRC client, and so on. That might have made sense on Linux, but on the Mac there were much better alternatives everyone used (NewsWatcher, Eudora), so nobody wanted the bloat of Netscape. Microsoft did the right thing and made their browser just a browser, and offered separate news reader and IRC clients. (Which nobody wanted, so they were eventually dropped. Anyone even remember Microsoft News?)
Then do some research and discover that Harvard was heavily involved in the ENRON debacle.
Good practice is to avoid running server tasks as root unless absolutely necessary, and there are all kinds of server admin tasks you might need to do, that don't need to involve becoming root. Database administration, for example.
Disallow direct root login.
No, the problem is that all the alternatives to .com are run like .com, with special startup periods when all the people who already own .com domains get to register all the same domains in the new TLD. So they all end up copies of .com. See .eu.
.com. Or a TLD where you weren't allowed to park domains for more than a few weeks. Or a .sucks TLD for protest sites, where trademark owners are specifically prohibited from registering domains to stifle speech.
.museum), the rest are just like .com, with exactly the same problems, only less well known.
A more sensible idea would have been to have a new TLD where you couldn't register a domain you already had in
The best idea of all would be a domain where transfer of ownership was prohibited. That would almost eliminate stupid domain name speculation.
Of course nobody cares about the TLDs they've created. Most are very special purpose (.mobi,
It's clearly not a free market, because there's a monopoly on control of the root servers. The monopoly prevents additional top level domains from being created, and ensures that any which are created follow the same speculation-encouraging rules as .com.
Umm, you get deals on Macs too.
The point here is to compare comparable systems. None of those offers are for comparable systems (no 1.83GHz core duo laptops). If you want to price a heavily discounted Dell that's available cheap because they're blowing out the obsoleted stock, you need to compare that with a heavily discounted Mac that's etc etc.
I went to the Inspiron E1505 page. I started with the 80GB one, i.e. same size hard drive as the MacBook Pro. I upgraded the processor to 1.83GHz core duo, to match the MacBook Pro. I upgraded the OS to XP Pro with a real reinstall CD, to match the full version of OS X with dev tools that you get on CD with the Mac.
I gave Dell the benefit of the doubt for the LCD quality, and left it with the cheapest. I added a DVD burner and Bluetooth, like the Mac has, and a 128MB Radeon to approximately match the Mac's video. I left the Dell with the cheapest battery, even though it has less capacity than the Mac's.
The resulting price is $1891, vs $1999 for the Mac. That's including an "instant $200 discount" from Dell. So when you actually configure them similarly, the Mac is about 6% more expensive than the Dell.
And I strongly suspect that you really need to go for the better LCD on the Dell, in which case the price premium for the Mac drops to just $8. And that's for a machine that's thinner and weighs less.