The only closed source software on my machine is the Flash plug-in, which lurks behind the no-flash plug-in. Every time I give in to temptation and view some Flash thingie, I expect it to hog half of my CPU, crash Firefox, take away the sound from other apps and refuse to shut down for anything less than a kill signal. Yes, Flash has been gradually getting better, but it still remains the one big sore spot on my computer and the reason I won't let any other proprietary software on it to mess things up even more.
So, hell yeah, I want a pure free software system.
I was dropped into a German kindergarten at the age of five, speaking exactly no German at all, but fluently Finnish. A year later, I had native level fluency in German. The only creature that beats a five year old at language absorption speeds is a three year old human. The natural language assimilation facility of the human brain shuts down by age ten or so. After that, it takes conscious effort, which of course means that an experienced 30 year old learner will be better than a teen at learning new languages, if he/she can be bothered to put in the effort. Since most people equate language learning with galley slave duty, that doesn't happen all that often...
See, that's we went from delicious but tiny wild strawberries and tomatoes to big red water bags traded under the same name: taste always comes last in the industry's priorities. Perhaps someone could clue in the cocoa producers that chocoholics can be just as discerning about taste as wine aficionados...okay, most of us are barely more discerning than your average back alley wino...
Yes, I got the point of apparently RIAA placed links on Google (it's called google-bombing and I suffer from it myself, what with commercial sites selling my public domain music well ahead of its archive.org links. Heh, good luck to those suckers, anyway.), but it's still a useless name and it was that even before search engines. My point was that only huge advertising machines can make bland band names stand out - to the point that we can't even perceive anymore just how brain dead a name like The Beatles is. A small band with next to no advertising budget needs a distinct name to stand out. No? Okay, let's disagree then.
You have a misconception about the scale of earthquakes. China is as big as the USA. While the earthquake did affect a lot of people, since China is four times as populous as the USA, it was still no more significant than hurricane Katrina in America. If there could be an earthquake that could bring all of China to a standstill, it would rattle your windows in America. Your problem is that you think newscasts present a complete picture of a country. They only report what is unusual. In Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong life goes on as usual, so the news report nothing about them. Old reporter saying: "Good news is no news."
And my apologies for the condescending tone. I'm sure you have received a great education. It's not your fault that American schools teach nothing about the outside world - or so it seems.
Um, I'm sorry, are you being funny or just American? If the latter, print out a map of the world, cut out China and superimpose it on the USA. Thank you.
Hello, the 60s called. They want they ultra-generic band name back. Guess Who? The Who? No, The Band! Hey, we're playing beat music, I wonder what we should call our band? I know! The Rockles! A very good Finnish underground band called Dubbing Mixers took at least two years to make the Google front page - they broke up soon afterwards and formed about seven new projects under new names, of course. It's not really cool to be that known, you know... Sure, Nirvana can make it past all the world's Buddhist pages, but I'm not sure even an exhumed and battery operated Kurt Cobain as front man could put The Station on the Google front page. Say, should I mention The Station a few more times to help you out? Remember Altavista? All you had to do to make first link was to put The Station half a million times into your metatags. The next one would be the page that had it just 499,999 times...
Meanwhile, the foreign language skills of your average Anglo-Saxon were surpassed quite a while ago by four monkeys with a typewriter. You know, over here in Finland, a stranger speaking any amount of Finnish is greeted with delirious joy - and then we reply in English, regardless of where he came from, to ease his pain...
It's safe because modern nuclear reactors are basically idiotproof. That's great! Still, when the world builds a better idiot, I'd really prefer having a windmill collapse next door instead of a nuclear reactor. You can get a lot of elegant, white windmills for the price of one new reactor, and when they reach the end of their lives, they don't leave a lot of crap to clean up.
Hmm. For a year or so, I used StarOffice 5.0 on a 60 MHz Pentium with 32 MB main memory and oodles of swap, where most of the program lived (on SuSE Linux, of course). Nothing has felt slow since then. You youngsters just have it too easy.
I suggest you read the Book of Joshua in the Bible. Basically God sends out His people to commit genocide in the promised land, and he gets very angry, if they neglect to slaughter every man, woman, child and sheep of the opposing cities. Now imagine people basing their faith on this part of the Bible. They'd make Al-Qaeda look like hippies.
Hm. A list of ad hominems (the plane anecdote) and false attributions ("You cannot sell your code...") is not going to convince me that you are the sensible ones in that exchange. I like free software of all flavors, but getting dragged into byzantine wars of interpretation of the word "free" is not my idea of well-spent time. If your people had simply ignored RMS, you would have had an easier time. The Ubuntu people obviously do, since I don't see flame wars like this over gNewsense. They just made their Gobuntu branch to satisfy the freedom fanatics and continue as before in the main distro.
"Seriously, read the thread. It tells of a *very* unstable person."
Um, I don't see how you can call a person unstable, when he has espoused an unchanged set of beliefs for three decades. That makes him about as unstable as the Rock of Gibraltar. Some other adjective might perhaps serve better in expressing your frustration with him.
Not that it would help, as neither RMS not Theo de Raadt is likely to be moved. By anything. So these altercations are pure entertainment events that will be viewed by coming generations like the medieval fights over the number of angels on the head of a pin.
I seem to recall that here in Finland, you are not allowed to bury a person just anywhere - because human bodies are classed as toxic waste. During our long lives, our fatty tissues collect so much pollution through our food and by breathing that it's not a matter of trace amounts by the time we're dead. Mercury, PCB, lead etc. After all, every food administration in the world still allows *trace amounts* of poison in your food...Don't eat animals from the top of the food chain...
Strange. Why do these constantly repeated defeatist nuclear lobby advertisements get +5 Interesting, while the 18 replies that I actually learned something from wallow between 0 and +2? Moderators suffering from information allergy?
And it's distressing - Minor security incidents that clearly implicate cleared individuals go largely uninvestigated (petty theft, etc.) (I am truly sorry, but the temptation is quite beyond my powers to resist:)
Let me guess. You are distressed because they have stolen your red Swingline stapler.
For me, minimal means maximum usable screen space. When I'm working on text, I want as much of it on screen as possible. Openoffice is already greedy with all its tool bars that tend to pop back at random intervals, if you minimize them. So Fluxbox, taking a quarter inch per window at the top and another for its tool bar at the bottom, looks wasteful. Evilwm takes away just two (2) pixels worth of height, and I can enlarge programs to hide their menus outside the screen to get a full screen effect out of any program: Nothing but my work on screen! What more could I want? But then I don't mind starting all programs from an xterm...
I spent five days trying to find out why archive.org was down. Found out more by accident once an online friend told me his connection was fine. So now I rewrite all addresses that don't work with coralcdn.org's proxy. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned this. Now the bastards will probably try to cut that connection, as well.
Could we please somehow replace these monolithic networks with peer to peer wireless connections or some such? There has to be some way of freeing our internet from the grasp of monopolists.
I had the impression that in both cases the judges have been extremely scrupulous in framing their judgments to rule out successful appeals. It's not as if SCO had any facts to present for consideration, let alone new ones. Appeals to clearly shut cases get dismissed, right?
Yeah. For me "Party like it's 1999" evokes memories of running SuSE Linux 6.1, Netscape and Staroffice 5.1 on an ancient 60 MHz Pentium with 32 MB of memory. But hey, I had 500 MB of swap partition and *lots* of patience. Woooo! So, for me, 'minimum requirements' is a term that wants to be stretched until it squeals.
Note the disclaimer added to the end: "The linked GISS graph was graphed for the months of January only, due to a limitation in the plotting program. Anthony Watts, who kindly provided the graphics, otherwise has no connection with the column. The views and comments are those of the author only."
Smells like massaged data that Mr. Watts does not want to be associated with. (Cue global warming conspiracy theory.) Wild fluctuations between years are normal, anyway and you cannot read much about trends into them.
Besides, this winter, average temperatures here in southern Finland have been 6 degrees Celsius above average. January and February have felt like permanent spring what with the weekly snow melting as soon as the sun rises. So yeah, the climate feels thoroughly out of whack this winter, but I don't know where it is headed.
Could it be that either the kids had their own cells or had the school call first the mother and, when she did not answer, the other parent to pick up the kids? That's how it works in a reasonable world. Kids are not left standing at the school gates until a disappearance has been legally ascertained. When a parent is an hour late, phones start ringing.
But that's just guessing from the other side of the planet and a country where most 7 year olds have their own cell phones...
Surviving an encounter with a moose can have some priority here in Finland (and Sweden and Norway). There are thousands of them wandering our forests. They don't like being seen, so they creep up through the forest as close to the road as they can and then make a mad dash across it. So you might get barely seconds to avoid having 800 lb of 7 foot high moose crash through your windshield. Unless you're driving a tank, it doesn't much matter what car you're in - okay, in a Ferrari, it will probably topple onto your roof and crush you. Anyway, your car is going to be totaled, unless you manage to swerve.
After a decade of trying to fix the insecure code used to read these file formats, Microsoft has finally hit on a workable solution: "Let's just disable it. Nobody needs it, right?" Right. I plugged those holes myself years ago - by turning to GNU/Linux and OO.org.
Slashdot Mirror
The only closed source software on my machine is the Flash plug-in, which lurks behind the no-flash plug-in. Every time I give in to temptation and view some Flash thingie, I expect it to hog half of my CPU, crash Firefox, take away the sound from other apps and refuse to shut down for anything less than a kill signal. Yes, Flash has been gradually getting better, but it still remains the one big sore spot on my computer and the reason I won't let any other proprietary software on it to mess things up even more.
So, hell yeah, I want a pure free software system.
I was dropped into a German kindergarten at the age of five, speaking exactly no German at all, but fluently Finnish. A year later, I had native level fluency in German. The only creature that beats a five year old at language absorption speeds is a three year old human. The natural language assimilation facility of the human brain shuts down by age ten or so. After that, it takes conscious effort, which of course means that an experienced 30 year old learner will be better than a teen at learning new languages, if he/she can be bothered to put in the effort. Since most people equate language learning with galley slave duty, that doesn't happen all that often...
See, that's we went from delicious but tiny wild strawberries and tomatoes to big red water bags traded under the same name: taste always comes last in the industry's priorities. Perhaps someone could clue in the cocoa producers that chocoholics can be just as discerning about taste as wine aficionados ...okay, most of us are barely more discerning than your average back alley wino...
Yes, I got the point of apparently RIAA placed links on Google (it's called google-bombing and I suffer from it myself, what with commercial sites selling my public domain music well ahead of its archive.org links. Heh, good luck to those suckers, anyway.), but it's still a useless name and it was that even before search engines. My point was that only huge advertising machines can make bland band names stand out - to the point that we can't even perceive anymore just how brain dead a name like The Beatles is. A small band with next to no advertising budget needs a distinct name to stand out. No? Okay, let's disagree then.
You have a misconception about the scale of earthquakes. China is as big as the USA. While the earthquake did affect a lot of people, since China is four times as populous as the USA, it was still no more significant than hurricane Katrina in America. If there could be an earthquake that could bring all of China to a standstill, it would rattle your windows in America.
Your problem is that you think newscasts present a complete picture of a country. They only report what is unusual. In Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong life goes on as usual, so the news report nothing about them. Old reporter saying: "Good news is no news."
And my apologies for the condescending tone. I'm sure you have received a great education. It's not your fault that American schools teach nothing about the outside world - or so it seems.
Um, I'm sorry, are you being funny or just American? If the latter, print out a map of the world, cut out China and superimpose it on the USA. Thank you.
"The Station"???
Hello, the 60s called. They want they ultra-generic band name back. Guess Who? The Who? No, The Band! Hey, we're playing beat music, I wonder what we should call our band? I know! The Rockles!
A very good Finnish underground band called Dubbing Mixers took at least two years to make the Google front page - they broke up soon afterwards and formed about seven new projects under new names, of course. It's not really cool to be that known, you know...
Sure, Nirvana can make it past all the world's Buddhist pages, but I'm not sure even an exhumed and battery operated Kurt Cobain as front man could put The Station on the Google front page. Say, should I mention The Station a few more times to help you out? Remember Altavista? All you had to do to make first link was to put The Station half a million times into your metatags. The next one would be the page that had it just 499,999 times...
Meanwhile, the foreign language skills of your average Anglo-Saxon were surpassed quite a while ago by four monkeys with a typewriter. You know, over here in Finland, a stranger speaking any amount of Finnish is greeted with delirious joy - and then we reply in English, regardless of where he came from, to ease his pain...
Ooh, I like a man with no sense of proportion! I'd ask you to marry me, if I wasn't one myself.
Hmm. For a year or so, I used StarOffice 5.0 on a 60 MHz Pentium with 32 MB main memory and oodles of swap, where most of the program lived (on SuSE Linux, of course). Nothing has felt slow since then. You youngsters just have it too easy.
I suggest you read the Book of Joshua in the Bible. Basically God sends out His people to commit genocide in the promised land, and he gets very angry, if they neglect to slaughter every man, woman, child and sheep of the opposing cities. Now imagine people basing their faith on this part of the Bible. They'd make Al-Qaeda look like hippies.
Hm. A list of ad hominems (the plane anecdote) and false attributions ("You cannot sell your code...") is not going to convince me that you are the sensible ones in that exchange. I like free software of all flavors, but getting dragged into byzantine wars of interpretation of the word "free" is not my idea of well-spent time. If your people had simply ignored RMS, you would have had an easier time. The Ubuntu people obviously do, since I don't see flame wars like this over gNewsense. They just made their Gobuntu branch to satisfy the freedom fanatics and continue as before in the main distro.
"Seriously, read the thread. It tells of a *very* unstable person."
Um, I don't see how you can call a person unstable, when he has espoused an unchanged set of beliefs for three decades. That makes him about as unstable as the Rock of Gibraltar. Some other adjective might perhaps serve better in expressing your frustration with him.
Not that it would help, as neither RMS not Theo de Raadt is likely to be moved. By anything. So these altercations are pure entertainment events that will be viewed by coming generations like the medieval fights over the number of angels on the head of a pin.
I seem to recall that here in Finland, you are not allowed to bury a person just anywhere - because human bodies are classed as toxic waste. During our long lives, our fatty tissues collect so much pollution through our food and by breathing that it's not a matter of trace amounts by the time we're dead. Mercury, PCB, lead etc. After all, every food administration in the world still allows *trace amounts* of poison in your food...Don't eat animals from the top of the food chain...
Strange. Why do these constantly repeated defeatist nuclear lobby advertisements get +5 Interesting, while the 18 replies that I actually learned something from wallow between 0 and +2? Moderators suffering from information allergy?
Let me guess. You are distressed because they have stolen your red Swingline stapler.
See http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ or your local Debian repository.
I spent five days trying to find out why archive.org was down. Found out more by accident once an online friend told me his connection was fine. So now I rewrite all addresses that don't work with coralcdn.org's proxy. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned this. Now the bastards will probably try to cut that connection, as well.
Could we please somehow replace these monolithic networks with peer to peer wireless connections or some such? There has to be some way of freeing our internet from the grasp of monopolists.
I had the impression that in both cases the judges have been extremely scrupulous in framing their judgments to rule out successful appeals. It's not as if SCO had any facts to present for consideration, let alone new ones. Appeals to clearly shut cases get dismissed, right?
Yeah. For me "Party like it's 1999" evokes memories of running SuSE Linux 6.1, Netscape and Staroffice 5.1 on an ancient 60 MHz Pentium with 32 MB of memory. But hey, I had 500 MB of swap partition and *lots* of patience. Woooo!
So, for me, 'minimum requirements' is a term that wants to be stretched until it squeals.
Note the disclaimer added to the end:
"The linked GISS graph was graphed for the months of January only, due to a limitation in the plotting program. Anthony Watts, who kindly provided the graphics, otherwise has no connection with the column. The views and comments are those of the author only."
Smells like massaged data that Mr. Watts does not want to be associated with. (Cue global warming conspiracy theory.) Wild fluctuations between years are normal, anyway and you cannot read much about trends into them.
Besides, this winter, average temperatures here in southern Finland have been 6 degrees Celsius above average. January and February have felt like permanent spring what with the weekly snow melting as soon as the sun rises. So yeah, the climate feels thoroughly out of whack this winter, but I don't know where it is headed.
Could it be that either the kids had their own cells or had the school call first the mother and, when she did not answer, the other parent to pick up the kids? That's how it works in a reasonable world. Kids are not left standing at the school gates until a disappearance has been legally ascertained. When a parent is an hour late, phones start ringing.
But that's just guessing from the other side of the planet and a country where most 7 year olds have their own cell phones...
Surviving an encounter with a moose can have some priority here in Finland (and Sweden and Norway). There are thousands of them wandering our forests. They don't like being seen, so they creep up through the forest as close to the road as they can and then make a mad dash across it. So you might get barely seconds to avoid having 800 lb of 7 foot high moose crash through your windshield. Unless you're driving a tank, it doesn't much matter what car you're in - okay, in a Ferrari, it will probably topple onto your roof and crush you. Anyway, your car is going to be totaled, unless you manage to swerve.
After a decade of trying to fix the insecure code used to read these file formats, Microsoft has finally hit on a workable solution: "Let's just disable it. Nobody needs it, right?" Right. I plugged those holes myself years ago - by turning to GNU/Linux and OO.org.