User-agent strings are not reliable. Some people change them to view IE-only sites. It also does not take into account those who read/. at work but run a different OS at home. Which raises the question - why do I read/. at work and not at home? Sometimes it's busy in this call centre, sometimes it's not.
I would add - document it very well to allay fears that they'll be left high and dry by the under-the-bus or disgruntled-employee scenarios.
That's two forms of documentation - a users manual and a maintainers manual. There's the advantage of open source - it's all open and as long as it's well documented, developers are fungible.
Although I guess most slashdotters would take it out of the house, and go IR-wardriving, looking for devices to control!:-)
How would you know when you've found one. Do appliances give some kind of ACK when they receive a command from an IR remote? Also, I believe IR requires LoS, although I have bounce conventional remotes off living room walls before. If you have LoS to a neighbour's TV or Stereo, they can see you too. Peeping Tom?
The interesting thing about the bootloader article you linked, is that Gassée, the guy from BeOS, was virtually ignored by David Boies when Gassée tried to get the bootloader issue addressed in the antitrust trial where Boies represented the DoJ. Boies is now the samelawyer working against the free world representing Microsoft's proxy, SCO. Interesting.
Better still. If you are the praying sort, do actually pray - but you don't have to tell the person. If you believe God works miracles and wants you to have a happy working life, then let God deal with it. God may or may not change the other person, but giving the situation to Him will change you.
Peaceful co-existance is an option for the OSS crowd but not for Microsoft. Microsoft's current business model relies on the complete elimination of OSS. For Microsoft to allow us to continue to exist would require it to change its business model and settle for less. Since we know that Microsoft is unlikely to relent from its attacks against OSS any time soon, the OSS community needs to defend itself. We didn't choose this war. But Microsoft has not left us the option of peaceful co-existance. We need to be as cunning as they are. We need to continue to produce the best software we can. At the same time, we need to expose Microsoft propoganda for what it is. Educate people without scaring them off by preaching at them. Win mindshare. Offer to install OSS solutions on friends' and familys' computers whenever possible (even if only installing moz & OOo on a windows box).
Every time a worm comes out, it's an opportunity (if handled tactifully and not in-yer-face).
they'd have to drive 15km to the nearest city Here in New Zealand I live on a lifestyle block[1] and have to drive 20km into Christchurch to do anything.
[1] Lifestyle block: A rural property which is owned by someone for the purpose of leaving the urban rat race, rather than for agricultural or horticultural purposes.
It's all relative. NL is not that big a place. What a dutchman calls "far to travel", someone in a larger country would call "a stonethrow away". What is the furthest distance of the remotest place in NL to its nearest city? How many euros does it cost to get from the remotest place in NL to the nearest city by bus, tram or train? Compare that to the USA, Canada, Australia, China, any African nation. The dutch don't know the meaning of remote. You can't travel more than a few hours in a straight line without crossing a border.
I've been back there, only to confirm that I'm glad I'm on the other side of the world (New Zealand). It's a great place to visit, and the people are great, but there's just too many of them in too small a place.
My favourite stories are about the ATMs that have their OS downgraded from OS/2 to WinNT and end up showing a bsod. There are plenty of photos on the net showing bsod ATMs.
At the time TISC released ELF to the public, UNIX belonged either to Novel or old-SCO, both of whom were part of TISC. By the time new-SCO acquired old-SCO's UNIX interests, ELF had already been released to the public by the rightful owners at the time of release.
If you're going to set up a linux box retailer, standardise on one distro, and train your tech support guys on that distro.
Set up an easy to use knowledge-base website for customers (and your own call centre staff) to get their own info on that one standard distro.
Supply a CD with Internet set-up wizards for all the major dial-up, cable and dsl ISPs in your area, that you have developed for your standard distro that comes with all the whiteboxes you sell.
You may need to partner with Mandrake, SuSE or some other major distro, but that would be a worthwhile partnership if you want your computer retailer to succeed.
If I ever get the starting capital together, this is one option for me in my area. I don't mind giving away my business plan because if someone else beats me to it - all the better for the cause.
the Académie française dictates whether or not a word is allowed to be part of 'French'
Meanwhile Jacques Sixpac continues to use "non-words" in everyday conversation, and Jean Septpac has no trouble understanding him, in spite of the Académie française's lack of official approval.
That's because proscibed-french and french-in-actual-use are two totally different things. Same applies to any other language.
If you're driven by the price of the computer (and most budget-crunched schools are), Windows PC's are an easy choice.
That doesn't explain why they won't let him use OpenOffice for wordprocessing and spreadsheet assignments. As long as the files export to.doc and.xls they wouldn't know, unless they require pivot tables or something that OOo doesn't support (yet).
Since you are so honest, your posts are probably worth reading, so I've added you to my friends list (since I browse at +3 or +4 and I don't want to miss your posts).
I leave my religion and politics out of my professional life
I always find this interesting. When you leave your "religion"[1] out of your professional life, does this mean that if your "religion" says it's wrong to lie, but your profession requires you to lie, eg to make that sale or close that deal, that you will do what your profession requires? I'm not trying to flame, I just want to clarify where people are at with this.
[1] I'm using the term "religion" for any belief system or value system, regardless of whether any deity is involved with said beliefs or values.
Consider also Joe, the manager of the mega-corp IT department, who licenses and maintains 10,000 desktops. MS is again arguably a low-cost winner, again, especially considering the simple ROI factors.
Do the ROI figures include worm/virus/spyware cleanup?
I hope Poopwise has improved since last time I had to use it. I'm not trolling or tey to flame, but it was truly awful. Mind you, that was an older version. And on a windows platform. And it was the user interface that sucked - the backend may have been pretty good for all I know.
So, what I would like to know, from all you Gentoo users (since I am considering Gentoo to replace Mandrake 9.1):
How easy is Gentoo to maintain? Does it have a control panel type app? Does it have something like Mdk's HardDrake?
At home I will only ever have dial-up, until rural New Zealand gets broadband. This will somewhat hamper "emerge kde":-( However, the internet cafe near my work will allow me to bring in my own laptop, so I can plug it in there and emerge at will, which brings me to my next question:
If I emerge some package on the laptop while plugged into someone else's broadband, how easily can I then transfer those packages from the laptop to other boxen on the home LAN?
The laptop is a 2GHz P4. The other PCs are old cast-offs, so the laptop will do any compiling with distcc for the slower machines. How hard is this?
Slashdot Mirror
You are über-MCCCXXXVII
User-agent strings are not reliable. Some people change them to view IE-only sites. It also does not take into account those who read /. at work but run a different OS at home. Which raises the question - why do I read /. at work and not at home? Sometimes it's busy in this call centre, sometimes it's not.
What he said.
I would add - document it very well to allay fears that they'll be left high and dry by the under-the-bus or disgruntled-employee scenarios.
That's two forms of documentation - a users manual and a maintainers manual. There's the advantage of open source - it's all open and as long as it's well documented, developers are fungible.
s/coffee/beer/e rnoon/
s/girlfriend/wife/
s/morning/aft
otherwise, yeah, I agree.
Although I guess most slashdotters would take it out of the house, and go IR-wardriving, looking for devices to control! :-)
How would you know when you've found one. Do appliances give some kind of ACK when they receive a command from an IR remote?
Also, I believe IR requires LoS, although I have bounce conventional remotes off living room walls before.
If you have LoS to a neighbour's TV or Stereo, they can see you too. Peeping Tom?
The interesting thing about the bootloader article you linked, is that Gassée, the guy from BeOS, was virtually ignored by David Boies when Gassée tried to get the bootloader issue addressed in the antitrust trial where Boies represented the DoJ. Boies is now the samelawyer working against the free world representing Microsoft's proxy, SCO. Interesting.
Better still. If you are the praying sort, do actually pray - but you don't have to tell the person. If you believe God works miracles and wants you to have a happy working life, then let God deal with it. God may or may not change the other person, but giving the situation to Him will change you.
Peaceful co-existance is an option for the OSS crowd but not for Microsoft. Microsoft's current business model relies on the complete elimination of OSS.
For Microsoft to allow us to continue to exist would require it to change its business model and settle for less.
Since we know that Microsoft is unlikely to relent from its attacks against OSS any time soon, the OSS community needs to defend itself. We didn't choose this war. But Microsoft has not left us the option of peaceful co-existance.
We need to be as cunning as they are. We need to continue to produce the best software we can. At the same time, we need to expose Microsoft propoganda for what it is. Educate people without scaring them off by preaching at them. Win mindshare. Offer to install OSS solutions on friends' and familys' computers whenever possible (even if only installing moz & OOo on a windows box).
Every time a worm comes out, it's an opportunity (if handled tactifully and not in-yer-face).
</rant>
The Brits invent the prototype, then the Americans refine it, market it, and take the credit. From Democracy to ...
... from Trains to Planes.
Good ol' US of A - The best democracy money can buy!
Richard Pearse was a New Zealander.
Pretending there are no differences between men and women might be politically correct, but I don't think it is necessarily helpful.
...
That insight has earned you a spot on my friends list. Not much of a prize but still
they'd have to drive 15km to the nearest city
Here in New Zealand I live on a lifestyle block[1] and have to drive 20km into Christchurch to do anything.
[1] Lifestyle block: A rural property which is owned by someone for the purpose of leaving the urban rat race, rather than for agricultural or horticultural purposes.
It's all relative. NL is not that big a place. What a dutchman calls "far to travel", someone in a larger country would call "a stonethrow away".
What is the furthest distance of the remotest place in NL to its nearest city? How many euros does it cost to get from the remotest place in NL to the nearest city by bus, tram or train?
Compare that to the USA, Canada, Australia, China, any African nation.
The dutch don't know the meaning of remote. You can't travel more than a few hours in a straight line without crossing a border.
I've been back there, only to confirm that I'm glad I'm on the other side of the world (New Zealand). It's a great place to visit, and the people are great, but there's just too many of them in too small a place.
My favourite stories are about the ATMs that have their OS downgraded from OS/2 to WinNT and end up showing a bsod. There are plenty of photos on the net showing bsod ATMs.
I only wait in line at wal-mart if the checkout girl is cute enough that I want her to talk to me
:-)
a darn good reason, imho
At the time TISC released ELF to the public, UNIX belonged either to Novel or old-SCO, both of whom were part of TISC.
By the time new-SCO acquired old-SCO's UNIX interests, ELF had already been released to the public by the rightful owners at the time of release.
If you're going to set up a linux box retailer, standardise on one distro, and train your tech support guys on that distro.
Set up an easy to use knowledge-base website for customers (and your own call centre staff) to get their own info on that one standard distro.
Supply a CD with Internet set-up wizards for all the major dial-up, cable and dsl ISPs in your area, that you have developed for your standard distro that comes with all the whiteboxes you sell.
You may need to partner with Mandrake, SuSE or some other major distro, but that would be a worthwhile partnership if you want your computer retailer to succeed.
If I ever get the starting capital together, this is one option for me in my area. I don't mind giving away my business plan because if someone else beats me to it - all the better for the cause.
the Académie française dictates whether or not a word is allowed to be part of 'French'
Meanwhile Jacques Sixpac continues to use "non-words" in everyday conversation, and Jean Septpac has no trouble understanding him, in spite of the Académie française's lack of official approval.
That's because proscibed-french and french-in-actual-use are two totally different things.
Same applies to any other language.
If you're driven by the price of the computer (and most budget-crunched schools are), Windows PC's are an easy choice.
.doc and .xls they wouldn't know, unless they require pivot tables or something that OOo doesn't support (yet).
That doesn't explain why they won't let him use OpenOffice for wordprocessing and spreadsheet assignments.
As long as the files export to
Since you are so honest, your posts are probably worth reading, so I've added you to my friends list (since I browse at +3 or +4 and I don't want to miss your posts).
Linux based routers could be a threat to CISCO.CISCO will not likely do anything to help Linux.
I leave my religion and politics out of my professional life
I always find this interesting.
When you leave your "religion"[1] out of your professional life, does this mean that if your "religion" says it's wrong to lie, but your profession requires you to lie, eg to make that sale or close that deal, that you will do what your profession requires?
I'm not trying to flame, I just want to clarify where people are at with this.
[1] I'm using the term "religion" for any belief system or value system, regardless of whether any deity is involved with said beliefs or values.
Consider also Joe, the manager of the mega-corp IT department, who licenses and maintains 10,000 desktops. MS is again arguably a low-cost winner, again, especially considering the simple ROI factors.
Do the ROI figures include worm/virus/spyware cleanup?
Yes, I cancelled it.
I hope Poopwise has improved since last time I had to use it.
I'm not trolling or tey to flame, but it was truly awful. Mind you, that was an older version. And on a windows platform. And it was the user interface that sucked - the backend may have been pretty good for all I know.
So, what I would like to know, from all you Gentoo users (since I am considering Gentoo to replace Mandrake 9.1):
:-(
How easy is Gentoo to maintain? Does it have a control panel type app? Does it have something like Mdk's HardDrake?
At home I will only ever have dial-up, until rural New Zealand gets broadband. This will somewhat hamper "emerge kde"
However, the internet cafe near my work will allow me to bring in my own laptop, so I can plug it in there and emerge at will, which brings me to my next question:
If I emerge some package on the laptop while plugged into someone else's broadband, how easily can I then transfer those packages from the laptop to other boxen on the home LAN?
The laptop is a 2GHz P4. The other PCs are old cast-offs, so the laptop will do any compiling with distcc for the slower machines. How hard is this?
Thanks
Yuri