I find it hard to believe that anyone would believe that every single Mac is running a webserver by default. I think you are feigning ignorance in a troll attempt.
No.
I was responding to the implication that Apple computers had something "out of the box" that was identical to what I was talking about, when they don't.
On many Linux distros, including most of the popular ones, it's a couple clicks or one line in a terminal to both install and start running at boot an apache webserver. I was responding to, "Or: buy a Mac, and it works out of the box." In point of fact, it installed out of the box, but it does not work out of the box, at least not in any way that is meaningfully different from how Apache "works" in, say, Ubuntu. I'll admit that the Mac way means maybe 30-40 seconds less waiting, but then again the Mac is wasting disc space by having Apache installed but disabled by default, not to mention that you *did* have to wait for it to install, it was just done during the system install--probably a wash, in other words.
There's no need for people to talk up Apple products at every single opportunity, even when it's wrong. In this case, it was even harmful to the Apple cause: "it [Apache] works out of the box". A) No it doesn't. B) if that were true, holy hell what is Apple thinking!
Saying "Or any Mac, which already has Apache installed, and you just have to enable it" would have been fine. We could then discuss which is better, if either. Whatever. The poster instead spread misinformation. THAT is what I was responding to. My feigned ignorance was no troll attempt, it was rather a form of reductio ad absurdum; I illustrated the statement's falsehood by expounding on what it implied.
Macs come with a webserver installed and running at boot by default?
That sounds like a horrible idea.
OTOH, a single command (or a quick search->highlight->install in Synaptic, if you want the GUI route) will download, install, and give a best-guess default configuration for Apache in Ubuntu.
I'm betting it takes at least that much work to get the web server running on a fresh-out-of-the-box Apple machine, since I find it hard to believe that every single Mac out there is throwing away memory and cycles on a webserver by default, even if it's being used for video editing.
Type "apt-get install apache" at the command line.
If that doesn't work, try "yum -i apache" (I think that's it, silly RPM-based distros).
If it's still not working, you may be running Gentoo. Don't worry, it will be OK. Type "emerge apache". Go make some coffee. Maybe see a movie. Come back. Should be done.
If that doesn't work, you're running Slackware. HERE BE DRAGONS!
No, in all likelyhood labels like 'addicted to video games' are the previous generations ways of trying to understand our modern entertainment cycle.
When I was in high school, my parents were worried that I was becoming somehow "addicted" to using the computer.
"You spend all your time on the computer! Why don't you go do something else?"
If, instead, in the same amount of time, I had been reading the newspaper, reading a bit in a book, playing a game or two of solitaire with real cards, making a birdhouse or whatever (analogous to playing around with programming languages), skimming articles in a physical encyclopedia (E2 at the time, Wikipedia wasn't around yet), and listening to a few songs on the radio, they'd have thought I was extremely well-rounded. Of course, I was doing those things, they just didn't get that computers had consolidated such a wide variety of media into one handy device, instead of a dozen.
So, to some degree, I think you're right. "Oh noes, little Johnny's spending all his time on the computer, we'd better watch this 20/20 special on video game addiction!" Never mind that little Johnny is also socializing and learning skills that will make him very employable right out of high school, like, say, digital art and flash animation (I'm thinking of one of my nephews here).
And what if people are spending that time at the computer just playing video games? As long as it's not causing them to lose their jobs or fail school or something, what's the big deal? Would it be better if they spent 2 hours playing the game, then plopped on the couch and watched 2 hours of shitty TV, ate dinner, then spend two hours reading some crappy low-calorie fantasy (or mystery, or thriller, or sci-fi, or romance, or whatever--there are low-value but entertaining books in every genre) novel before bed?
It's more like the equivalent of "bastard", which is usually aimed at guys. Or, to a lesser extent, "son of a bitch". No one calls women "daughter of a bitch."
Man, wikipedia is so terrible for these kinds of things, at least for those of us who don't already know most of it.
I just read most of a half-dozen different articles, trying to find one that didn't descend into (to me) gibberish past the second sentence or so, so that I could bootstrap my way up to understanding it. Mind you, I'm already familiar with Zeno of Elea, so that first article made some sense, but every one I followed, looking for clarification, was harder and harder to understand.
I think that the chief culprit may be the way Wikipedia handles mathematical notation. Every discipline has its own shorthand--small delta means a in this branch of physics, b in another branch, c in general mathematics, d in some specific branch of mathematics, and has a whole set of other meanings in the field of logic.
Often, articles including lots of mathematical shorthand never bother to translate it to English, and the symbols themselves are not (and cannot be, I suspect) linked to articles about themselves, nor do they have some alt-text mouseover glossary. It doesn't need to be intrusive, but it should be there. As a consequence, any Wikipedia articles that rely heavily on such things are entirely worthless to me; maybe if they just had a page for each field of study that gave a dictionary of symbols or something, and linked it on every page where it was relevant... I don't know.
I do know it's a pain in the ass trying to figure out WTF "The sum of (lower-case delta squared times capital gamma minus 4, divided by lower-case rho)" means on this particular page, since just one or two click might have me on a page where it would mean something entirely different.
Again, it wouldn't matter if the authors went on to describe what they meant in English, but they almost never do. It's frustrating, because there are a lot of topics where I've started to get in to an article, only to find the meat of it 75% filled with labelled-but-unexplained equations, and not a single damned link to a "here's WTF all of this means in this particular context" page, or anything like it.
*ahem*, sorry, that had been stewing for a while. I just hate knowing that there's so much info right in front of me, but that *last* little bit that would dramatically reduce the time it takes me to figure it all out just isn't there.
As I posted higher up, some kind of scripted "extension pack" installers would be nice, especially if they were easy to make/customize.
They already auto-update extensions, so this is probably doable. Even if it were an extension itself, this would be nice; install FF->install extension->browse to site where I've store the script->click link->hit OK
Is there some way to script addon installs? Maybe a meta-addon that installs a bunch of others?
I'd love to be able to make "developer" and "basic" install scripts, so I could just run them on a new machine to get either my development loadout (firebug, webdev toolbar, fireftp, etc.) or my basic extensions that I always install (adblock and the like).
The extensions auto-update, so it seems like this would be possible.
Does "standards mode" comply with standards this time?
Doesn't in IE7, though I'll admit that it's much better than IE6. I can't wait till the user base for that POS drops low enough that I can stop supporting it.
We develop in FF for the tools, and because we know that there's about a 99% chance that a good-looking page in FF will also be a good-looking page in Opera, Safari, Konqueror, etc.
Sure, I could develop in, say, IE7, but there's a good chance I'd then have to fix the site for those other browsers, and I'd still have to fix it for IE6 (screw anything earlier; I know some super-high-traffic sites still need to support IE5, but jesus, that's just too much to worry about)
Certainly true of our ad-hoc office network, and of every other small MS network I've set up and/or used.
Anything that Linux is responsible for is rock-solid. It doesn't break unless YOU break it, and then, the fix is clearly deterministic.
Windows, on the other hand....
Shares drop off the network for no discernible reason (from the POV of one machine, but not the others, or from the POV of all the Windows machines but not any Linux systems, etc.) Shit stops working for no reason, then starts working again when we haven't even done anything. It's all voodoo and seances. Good luck to you if you've got two different versions of Windows trying to communicate--you may be better off setting up a Linux intermediary.
Yeah, I tend to react negatively when I notice people playing stupid little psychological games with me. Forced "fun" at work is one of my least favorite of them (and one of the most common).
Some work environments are genuinely fun. Some work environments are "fun" as defined by whatever "cutting-edge" management book the boss happens to be reading at that time.
I'm partial to the mods that aim to make the game more true to history (e.g. the Egyptian units are basically Greek instead of Pharoic, "barbarians" are more fleshed-out, etc.). Of those, my personal favorite is Europa Barbarorum. Practically every aspect of the game is changed. Loads of fun.
Oh, about half of my recent reading of Palahniuk's Choke was done that way, and I'm working through Descartes' Discourse on the Method while I finish STALKER. Also got through an 8-story sci-fi collection from the 60s, which mostly sucked. If I'd been reading while playing The Witcher I could probably add another 1/2 dozen titles here. I'd still like more of my gaming time to be about gaming, though.
These days, my biggest problem isn't low framerates--it's load times. The Witcher, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., tons of games with loads long enough that I have time to read a page (or two, or five) in a book during load screens.
My next rig will definitely have a raid-0 array, and will hopefully be the last non-flash-storage-based PC I make.
Well, it's the system itself that's at fault. We need something new. Just getting new people in or whatever won't help. It'll eventually come back to this again.
Since that's unlikely to happen and you can't really do anything to affect that change, just try to get yours, you know? If the last 8 years have taught me anything, it's that at least 75% of this country is completely, mind-bogglingly stupid. Therefore, I should be able to bide my time, keep my eyes open, and spot a way to take advantage of that stupidity for profit, sooner or later.
We're too dumb for democracy. At least this kind of democracy. Grab what you can and run, I say.
I don't know why they didn't just key the fscking things. Like, in a way that you can see at a glance or easily feel on the back of that computer crammed under the desk.
Sounds like it's time for someone (better, several someones) to go a little crazy with a Sharpie (clandestinely), until everyone gets so annoyed that they have to drop it.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
I was responding to the implication that Apple computers had something "out of the box" that was identical to what I was talking about, when they don't.
On many Linux distros, including most of the popular ones, it's a couple clicks or one line in a terminal to both install and start running at boot an apache webserver. I was responding to, "Or: buy a Mac, and it works out of the box." In point of fact, it installed out of the box, but it does not work out of the box, at least not in any way that is meaningfully different from how Apache "works" in, say, Ubuntu. I'll admit that the Mac way means maybe 30-40 seconds less waiting, but then again the Mac is wasting disc space by having Apache installed but disabled by default, not to mention that you *did* have to wait for it to install, it was just done during the system install--probably a wash, in other words.
There's no need for people to talk up Apple products at every single opportunity, even when it's wrong. In this case, it was even harmful to the Apple cause: "it [Apache] works out of the box". A) No it doesn't. B) if that were true, holy hell what is Apple thinking!
Saying "Or any Mac, which already has Apache installed, and you just have to enable it" would have been fine. We could then discuss which is better, if either. Whatever. The poster instead spread misinformation. THAT is what I was responding to. My feigned ignorance was no troll attempt, it was rather a form of reductio ad absurdum; I illustrated the statement's falsehood by expounding on what it implied.
Macs come with a webserver installed and running at boot by default?
That sounds like a horrible idea.
OTOH, a single command (or a quick search->highlight->install in Synaptic, if you want the GUI route) will download, install, and give a best-guess default configuration for Apache in Ubuntu.
I'm betting it takes at least that much work to get the web server running on a fresh-out-of-the-box Apple machine, since I find it hard to believe that every single Mac out there is throwing away memory and cycles on a webserver by default, even if it's being used for video editing.
To put it (slightly) more consisely:
Pick any distro.
Type "apt-get install apache" at the command line.
If that doesn't work, try "yum -i apache" (I think that's it, silly RPM-based distros).
If it's still not working, you may be running Gentoo. Don't worry, it will be OK. Type "emerge apache". Go make some coffee. Maybe see a movie. Come back. Should be done.
If that doesn't work, you're running Slackware. HERE BE DRAGONS!
When I was in high school, my parents were worried that I was becoming somehow "addicted" to using the computer.
"You spend all your time on the computer! Why don't you go do something else?"
If, instead, in the same amount of time, I had been reading the newspaper, reading a bit in a book, playing a game or two of solitaire with real cards, making a birdhouse or whatever (analogous to playing around with programming languages), skimming articles in a physical encyclopedia (E2 at the time, Wikipedia wasn't around yet), and listening to a few songs on the radio, they'd have thought I was extremely well-rounded. Of course, I was doing those things, they just didn't get that computers had consolidated such a wide variety of media into one handy device, instead of a dozen.
So, to some degree, I think you're right. "Oh noes, little Johnny's spending all his time on the computer, we'd better watch this 20/20 special on video game addiction!" Never mind that little Johnny is also socializing and learning skills that will make him very employable right out of high school, like, say, digital art and flash animation (I'm thinking of one of my nephews here).
And what if people are spending that time at the computer just playing video games? As long as it's not causing them to lose their jobs or fail school or something, what's the big deal? Would it be better if they spent 2 hours playing the game, then plopped on the couch and watched 2 hours of shitty TV, ate dinner, then spend two hours reading some crappy low-calorie fantasy (or mystery, or thriller, or sci-fi, or romance, or whatever--there are low-value but entertaining books in every genre) novel before bed?
For many, many more it's the cheap way out of saying, "you're NOT right, but I don't really care."
It's more like the equivalent of "bastard", which is usually aimed at guys. Or, to a lesser extent, "son of a bitch". No one calls women "daughter of a bitch."
Wikitranslation?
Man, wikipedia is so terrible for these kinds of things, at least for those of us who don't already know most of it.
I just read most of a half-dozen different articles, trying to find one that didn't descend into (to me) gibberish past the second sentence or so, so that I could bootstrap my way up to understanding it. Mind you, I'm already familiar with Zeno of Elea, so that first article made some sense, but every one I followed, looking for clarification, was harder and harder to understand.
I think that the chief culprit may be the way Wikipedia handles mathematical notation. Every discipline has its own shorthand--small delta means a in this branch of physics, b in another branch, c in general mathematics, d in some specific branch of mathematics, and has a whole set of other meanings in the field of logic.
Often, articles including lots of mathematical shorthand never bother to translate it to English, and the symbols themselves are not (and cannot be, I suspect) linked to articles about themselves, nor do they have some alt-text mouseover glossary. It doesn't need to be intrusive, but it should be there. As a consequence, any Wikipedia articles that rely heavily on such things are entirely worthless to me; maybe if they just had a page for each field of study that gave a dictionary of symbols or something, and linked it on every page where it was relevant... I don't know.
I do know it's a pain in the ass trying to figure out WTF "The sum of (lower-case delta squared times capital gamma minus 4, divided by lower-case rho)" means on this particular page, since just one or two click might have me on a page where it would mean something entirely different.
Again, it wouldn't matter if the authors went on to describe what they meant in English, but they almost never do. It's frustrating, because there are a lot of topics where I've started to get in to an article, only to find the meat of it 75% filled with labelled-but-unexplained equations, and not a single damned link to a "here's WTF all of this means in this particular context" page, or anything like it.
*ahem*, sorry, that had been stewing for a while. I just hate knowing that there's so much info right in front of me, but that *last* little bit that would dramatically reduce the time it takes me to figure it all out just isn't there.
At risk or not?
Also, this sounds like a class-action waiting to happen.
As I posted higher up, some kind of scripted "extension pack" installers would be nice, especially if they were easy to make/customize.
They already auto-update extensions, so this is probably doable. Even if it were an extension itself, this would be nice; install FF->install extension->browse to site where I've store the script->click link->hit OK
Is there some way to script addon installs? Maybe a meta-addon that installs a bunch of others?
I'd love to be able to make "developer" and "basic" install scripts, so I could just run them on a new machine to get either my development loadout (firebug, webdev toolbar, fireftp, etc.) or my basic extensions that I always install (adblock and the like).
The extensions auto-update, so it seems like this would be possible.
Does "standards mode" comply with standards this time?
Doesn't in IE7, though I'll admit that it's much better than IE6. I can't wait till the user base for that POS drops low enough that I can stop supporting it.
Precisely.
We develop in FF for the tools, and because we know that there's about a 99% chance that a good-looking page in FF will also be a good-looking page in Opera, Safari, Konqueror, etc.
Sure, I could develop in, say, IE7, but there's a good chance I'd then have to fix the site for those other browsers, and I'd still have to fix it for IE6 (screw anything earlier; I know some super-high-traffic sites still need to support IE5, but jesus, that's just too much to worry about)
Certainly true of our ad-hoc office network, and of every other small MS network I've set up and/or used.
Anything that Linux is responsible for is rock-solid. It doesn't break unless YOU break it, and then, the fix is clearly deterministic.
Windows, on the other hand....
Shares drop off the network for no discernible reason (from the POV of one machine, but not the others, or from the POV of all the Windows machines but not any Linux systems, etc.) Shit stops working for no reason, then starts working again when we haven't even done anything. It's all voodoo and seances. Good luck to you if you've got two different versions of Windows trying to communicate--you may be better off setting up a Linux intermediary.
Yeah, I tend to react negatively when I notice people playing stupid little psychological games with me. Forced "fun" at work is one of my least favorite of them (and one of the most common).
Some work environments are genuinely fun. Some work environments are "fun" as defined by whatever "cutting-edge" management book the boss happens to be reading at that time.
Tried any mods?
They give it new life.
I'm partial to the mods that aim to make the game more true to history (e.g. the Egyptian units are basically Greek instead of Pharoic, "barbarians" are more fleshed-out, etc.). Of those, my personal favorite is Europa Barbarorum. Practically every aspect of the game is changed. Loads of fun.
Oh, about half of my recent reading of Palahniuk's Choke was done that way, and I'm working through Descartes' Discourse on the Method while I finish STALKER. Also got through an 8-story sci-fi collection from the 60s, which mostly sucked. If I'd been reading while playing The Witcher I could probably add another 1/2 dozen titles here. I'd still like more of my gaming time to be about gaming, though.
These days, my biggest problem isn't low framerates--it's load times. The Witcher, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., tons of games with loads long enough that I have time to read a page (or two, or five) in a book during load screens.
My next rig will definitely have a raid-0 array, and will hopefully be the last non-flash-storage-based PC I make.
Well, it's the system itself that's at fault. We need something new. Just getting new people in or whatever won't help. It'll eventually come back to this again.
Since that's unlikely to happen and you can't really do anything to affect that change, just try to get yours, you know? If the last 8 years have taught me anything, it's that at least 75% of this country is completely, mind-bogglingly stupid. Therefore, I should be able to bide my time, keep my eyes open, and spot a way to take advantage of that stupidity for profit, sooner or later.
We're too dumb for democracy. At least this kind of democracy. Grab what you can and run, I say.
Nothing will change until people start getting punished for this kind of activity.
I'm in favor of hangings, myself. I'm anti-death penalty in every case except for deliberate betrayal of this country from a position of power.
I don't know why they didn't just key the fscking things. Like, in a way that you can see at a glance or easily feel on the back of that computer crammed under the desk.
Sins is real-time.
Sounds like it's time for someone (better, several someones) to go a little crazy with a Sharpie (clandestinely), until everyone gets so annoyed that they have to drop it.
I will been finding your ideas intriguing, and will have been wishing to subscribing to your newsletter.
Playing Nethack, I see.