Timothy: "I wonder if any Wal-Mart manager is brave enough to actually set up a few machines in-store."
FortKnox: "Why is the bravery required?"
Bravery (or at least proper planning) is required because any demo computer set up in Wal-Mart will ultimately be vandalized. Our Wal-Mart used to have demo computers set up in the electronics section back in the 486 days. They inevitably got vandalized to the point of being useless. People would delete the C:\DOS directory and change the Windows 3.1 screensaver passwords so that employees couldn't access the machine. A friend of mine, when he was 14, changed the shutdown message from "It is now safe to shut down your Packard Bell computer" to "It is not safe to shit on your Packard Bell computer." A shelf full of broken Linux computers doesn't make their product look good.
Of course, with Linux, a demo setup could be created that avoids these problems. You could have an unpriviledged user "demo" whose password and home directory are reset upon reboot. And you could make a special in-store demo installation CD-ROM, so that these customizations are installed automatically by default. I suppose this wouldn't solve every problem (Some kid could bring a r00t k1t in on a CD-ROM or diskette), but it would keep causal vandals at bay.
Oh, they made transparent aluminum just like Scotty had showed them. But after Crystal Pepsi flopped, they abandoned the project. It's a shame, really.
I'm serious -- Wilco is fucking awesome, and their newest album is even better than their previous ones. They are also one of the few bands that allow fans to tape their shows.
I haven't read all of the Federalist Papers, but I've read a lot of the good stuff. It's clear that the United States in 2002 isn't what our founders had imagined. The problem is that the Federalist Papers, for better or for worse (or for better and for worse) are not part of the Constitution and is not legally binding in any way whatsoever. Occasionally, Justices look to the Federalist Papers (or other external sources) for wisdom, but the actual basis of their decision ought to be rooted in the Constitution itself.
I don't know when the press or lawyers or whoever construed it into what it is today.
"Whoever" is the Supreme Court itself. From Lemon v. Kurtzman:
"Every analysis in this area must begin with consideration of the cumulative criteria developed by the Court over many years. Three such tests may be gleaned from our cases. First, the statute must have a clear secular purpose; second, it's principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion."
The Supreme Court has been gradually backing down from that (very strict) position ever since Lemon, but they've never managed to agree on anything else, and therefore haven't been able to establish a good precedent to replace Lemon. So, expect lots of Establishment Clause controversy in the future.
I apologize -- I should have been more clear in my original post. The impractical part is getting the university to authorize the purchase of the ticker. We couldn't get them to authorize $50 for an O'Reilly book!
I once had a college work-study job in unix administration. We had a nebulous idea to somehow program one of those tickers with the uptime data of all out important unix servers, kind of like this:
mailhost: up 187 days www: up 87 days erdos.math: up 102 days
It would have been cool to place it in the lobby of the computing center.
It's not something we would have done because it's totally impractical. But it would have been a fun project.
Steve
Re:Real speed improvement?
on
Gentoo Linux 1.2
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"Is there measurable speed increase by using this distribution, or do you really just save a couple microseconds here and there?"
I don't have benchmarks or anything, but I think my workstation runs a good bit faster as a result of switching from Red Hat 7.2 to Gentoo 1.2. Things like Mozilla and KDE, which were fairly slow in Red Hat, run surprisingly fast now. I don't know if this is because Gentoo optimizes them for my machine or if it's just because I have the latest versions now, but the speed increase is real.
I've been extremely happy with Gentoo (though I haven't been at it for that long). I switched because I was tired of a lot of the bloat that comes with recent versions of Red Hat. They have you install a lot of stuff by default, and I'm scared that I'll break something if I go in and start removing things. Gentoo gives you what you need, then you use the ports system (Portage) to install what you want on top of that. So far, this has resulted in less bloat.
Portage is great. If you decide that you want to install the LyX word processor, you just type:
$ emerge app-office/lyx
No RPM dependencies, no screwing around on rpmfind.net, no trouble at all.
Another cool thing about Portage is that, if you want, you can set global compile options. For example, you tell it to "use SSL", and then, every time you build something that has optional SSL support, it compiles that in automatically.
The biggest problem with Gentoo is that, when you install something, you have to wait for Portage to download it and any dependencies onto your machine and compile everything. It took my machine an entire afternoon to do emerge kde-base/kde on a 1GHz Athlon with 256 MB of RAM. I didn't mind this so much, because I had plenty of time to wait for it, but a Gentoo install requires a lot of patience (or Playstation games, which the installation guide recommends). You've been warned. Also, configuring the system involves manually editing text files -- I haven't found any graphical wizards yet. Again, that's fine by me, but you may have better things to do with your time.
If you decide to switch, make sure you hang on to your XF86Config-4 file. I had trouble getting X installed and was glad that I had a copy to refer to. However, if you were using Slackware before the 2.0 kernel came out, you're tougher than I am, so you'll probably have better luck than me.
I hope this helps -- good luck with whatever you decide to do.
Markets can ensure that the best products are available for the lowest price, but not in all cases. The competing products have to be drop-in replacements for each other, and there has to actually be competition.
Look at the automobile market. If I buy a Chevrolet and it sucks, I'll buy a Toyota next time. I can do this because cars are totally interchangable. Operating Systems, however, are not. If you buy Windows and hate it, you can't go out and get a drop-in replacement (OS/2 might be an exception). Switching to Linux or MacOS involves purchasing new software and, in the case of MacOS, new hardware.
There have been competitors that were far superior to Windows that simply went belly-up. BeOS was far superior to Microsoft Windows, and so was OS/2 (so I hear). The problem with all competitors, past and present, is that you can't run Windows software on them. In fact, if you define the market to be "platforms to run all my Windows apps" rather than "desktop operating systems", then there's no competition at all.
I agree that, in general, government interference in business matters is a bad thing, but Microsoft has so much power over its markets that it might as well be the government. In this case, government intervention preserves the free market rather than disrupting it.
An In-Dash MP3 player is a good choice if you want to listen to your own music, but radio's big advantage is that it exposes you to new music that you wouldn't have heard otherwise (ideally, at least). There's an independent radio station near where I live called WNCW that years ago turned me on to bluegrass music, which I had never heard before. If all you do is listen to your own MP3's, you'll never get to hear anything new.
My problem with satellite radio is this: you have to pay money AND listen to ads. What a bunch of crap.
I'd support this hypothesis. Where I go to college, the smartest people are bored out of their minds with their schoolwork because it's just so easy for them.
Even I find the work to be too simple. Once, I skipped six consecutive weeks of a philosophy class and ended up with a B+.
I think that this is less of a problem with IT, but the problem exists, even in reputable colleges.
Everyone who has ever listened to Garrison Keillor knows that, in Minnesota, "all the children are above average."
Seriously, when I was a student in Minnesota, I was surprised by how well educated the population was. It wouldn't surprise me if Minnesotans really were more computer literate than Northeasterners.
Steve
No wonder he's using a Mac
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"Linux was a lot like a girl named Allison that I used to date."
...more and more B1s (?).. ie, work visas to immigrants...
I think the term you're looking for is "H1B visa". That's what most of the foreign programmers in the US appear to be here on. It grants temporary residence in the USA for something like six years, after which they have to go home.
Dude, what Taco needs to do to raise money is to sell a "License to Troll." Basically, you pay X dollars a month, and get to post Y troll posts at Score 1 without fear of consequences.
A bad idea? Hell yeah. But it would probably raise a ton of money.
I used to go to a college that had a firewall in place, making it impossible to connect to Battle.net. Furthermore, the admins had it set up so that we couldn't play over an IPX network unless all the computers were in the same building. As a result, we were completely unable to make use of Starcraft's multiplayer capabilities, which is the whole fscking point of having Starcraft. Had we had bnetd, we could have set something up.
What Blizzard is doing is absolutely ridiculous. We all had legit copies of the game, so had we run a bnetd server, we would have been totally within our moral rights.
If Blizzard doesn't back down, it'll be a cold day in hell before I buy any more of their games.
Whenever I install Real Audio, and they ask me to register, I give root@127.0.0.1 as my e-mail address. I haven't used Real Player in ages, so I don't know whether that trick still works...
Our Wal Mart is out by itself on the outskirts of town. People that live in town that want to go to Wal Mart driver farther that they would to visit any other store, and in a completely different direction. It's like this in every single town I've been in, except for the suburbs of big cities.
What the original poster said about Wal Mart leaving behind a string of empty buildings is true, too. However, it's common for all big chains to do this. Even though we're going through a lot of growth, the East side of my town consists mostly of empty, decaying supermarkets, gas stations, K-Marts, and the like.
I think the claims that Wal Mart is guilty of theft are far-fetched, but the negative effects of Wal Mart cannot be ignored.
I have a theory. We Americans are the descendents of the people too screwed up to make it in Europe (my anscestors were expelled from Britain for participating in a political revolt). So you have a bunch of crazy Americans living on the East Coast. Some of them were too screwed up to make it there, so they went further and further west. Which is why California is so fucked up.
Think of how reckless and dumb you'd have to be to get on board one of those ships. Do you really want to populate the galaxy with people like that?
That brings us to our possible problem. Do reall you want to populate the world with the kind of people that are reckless and dumb enough to get on board that ship? I don't think so.
Slashdot Mirror
Timothy: "I wonder if any Wal-Mart manager is brave enough to actually set up a few machines in-store."
FortKnox: "Why is the bravery required?"
Bravery (or at least proper planning) is required because any demo computer set up in Wal-Mart will ultimately be vandalized. Our Wal-Mart used to have demo computers set up in the electronics section back in the 486 days. They inevitably got vandalized to the point of being useless. People would delete the C:\DOS directory and change the Windows 3.1 screensaver passwords so that employees couldn't access the machine. A friend of mine, when he was 14, changed the shutdown message from "It is now safe to shut down your Packard Bell computer" to "It is not safe to shit on your Packard Bell computer." A shelf full of broken Linux computers doesn't make their product look good.
Of course, with Linux, a demo setup could be created that avoids these problems. You could have an unpriviledged user "demo" whose password and home directory are reset upon reboot. And you could make a special in-store demo installation CD-ROM, so that these customizations are installed automatically by default. I suppose this wouldn't solve every problem (Some kid could bring a r00t k1t in on a CD-ROM or diskette), but it would keep causal vandals at bay.
why no transparent aluminum then?
Oh, they made transparent aluminum just like Scotty had showed them. But after Crystal Pepsi flopped, they abandoned the project. It's a shame, really.
Steve
I'm serious -- Wilco is fucking awesome, and their newest album is even better than their previous ones. They are also one of the few bands that allow fans to tape their shows.
I haven't read all of the Federalist Papers, but I've read a lot of the good stuff. It's clear that the United States in 2002 isn't what our founders had imagined. The problem is that the Federalist Papers, for better or for worse (or for better and for worse) are not part of the Constitution and is not legally binding in any way whatsoever. Occasionally, Justices look to the Federalist Papers (or other external sources) for wisdom, but the actual basis of their decision ought to be rooted in the Constitution itself.
I don't know when the press or lawyers or whoever construed it into what it is today.
"Whoever" is the Supreme Court itself. From Lemon v. Kurtzman:
"Every analysis in this area must begin with consideration of the cumulative criteria developed by the Court over many years. Three such tests may be gleaned from our cases. First, the statute must have a clear secular purpose; second, it's principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster an excessive government entanglement with religion."
The Supreme Court has been gradually backing down from that (very strict) position ever since Lemon, but they've never managed to agree on anything else, and therefore haven't been able to establish a good precedent to replace Lemon. So, expect lots of Establishment Clause controversy in the future.
Steve
I apologize -- I should have been more clear in my original post. The impractical part is getting the university to authorize the purchase of the ticker. We couldn't get them to authorize $50 for an O'Reilly book!
Steve
I once had a college work-study job in unix administration. We had a nebulous idea to somehow program one of those tickers with the uptime data of all out important unix servers, kind of like this:
mailhost: up 187 days www: up 87 days erdos.math: up 102 days
It would have been cool to place it in the lobby of the computing center.
It's not something we would have done because it's totally impractical. But it would have been a fun project.
Steve
"Is there measurable speed increase by using this distribution, or do you really just save a couple microseconds here and there?"
I don't have benchmarks or anything, but I think my workstation runs a good bit faster as a result of switching from Red Hat 7.2 to Gentoo 1.2. Things like Mozilla and KDE, which were fairly slow in Red Hat, run surprisingly fast now. I don't know if this is because Gentoo optimizes them for my machine or if it's just because I have the latest versions now, but the speed increase is real.
I've been extremely happy with Gentoo (though I haven't been at it for that long). I switched because I was tired of a lot of the bloat that comes with recent versions of Red Hat. They have you install a lot of stuff by default, and I'm scared that I'll break something if I go in and start removing things. Gentoo gives you what you need, then you use the ports system (Portage) to install what you want on top of that. So far, this has resulted in less bloat.
Portage is great. If you decide that you want to install the LyX word processor, you just type:
$ emerge app-office/lyx
No RPM dependencies, no screwing around on rpmfind.net, no trouble at all.
Another cool thing about Portage is that, if you want, you can set global compile options. For example, you tell it to "use SSL", and then, every time you build something that has optional SSL support, it compiles that in automatically.
The biggest problem with Gentoo is that, when you install something, you have to wait for Portage to download it and any dependencies onto your machine and compile everything. It took my machine an entire afternoon to do emerge kde-base/kde on a 1GHz Athlon with 256 MB of RAM. I didn't mind this so much, because I had plenty of time to wait for it, but a Gentoo install requires a lot of patience (or Playstation games, which the installation guide recommends). You've been warned. Also, configuring the system involves manually editing text files -- I haven't found any graphical wizards yet. Again, that's fine by me, but you may have better things to do with your time.
If you decide to switch, make sure you hang on to your XF86Config-4 file. I had trouble getting X installed and was glad that I had a copy to refer to. However, if you were using Slackware before the 2.0 kernel came out, you're tougher than I am, so you'll probably have better luck than me.
I hope this helps -- good luck with whatever you decide to do.
Steve
Markets can ensure that the best products are available for the lowest price, but not in all cases. The competing products have to be drop-in replacements for each other, and there has to actually be competition.
Look at the automobile market. If I buy a Chevrolet and it sucks, I'll buy a Toyota next time. I can do this because cars are totally interchangable. Operating Systems, however, are not. If you buy Windows and hate it, you can't go out and get a drop-in replacement (OS/2 might be an exception). Switching to Linux or MacOS involves purchasing new software and, in the case of MacOS, new hardware.
There have been competitors that were far superior to Windows that simply went belly-up. BeOS was far superior to Microsoft Windows, and so was OS/2 (so I hear). The problem with all competitors, past and present, is that you can't run Windows software on them. In fact, if you define the market to be "platforms to run all my Windows apps" rather than "desktop operating systems", then there's no competition at all.
I agree that, in general, government interference in business matters is a bad thing, but Microsoft has so much power over its markets that it might as well be the government. In this case, government intervention preserves the free market rather than disrupting it.
Steve
Exactly. But I wouldn't pay for them, either. I only use my TV for playing movies.
Steve
An In-Dash MP3 player is a good choice if you want to listen to your own music, but radio's big advantage is that it exposes you to new music that you wouldn't have heard otherwise (ideally, at least). There's an independent radio station near where I live called WNCW that years ago turned me on to bluegrass music, which I had never heard before. If all you do is listen to your own MP3's, you'll never get to hear anything new.
My problem with satellite radio is this: you have to pay money AND listen to ads. What a bunch of crap.
Steve
I'd support this hypothesis. Where I go to college, the smartest people are bored out of their minds with their schoolwork because it's just so easy for them.
Even I find the work to be too simple. Once, I skipped six consecutive weeks of a philosophy class and ended up with a B+.
I think that this is less of a problem with IT, but the problem exists, even in reputable colleges.
Steve
Everyone who has ever listened to Garrison Keillor knows that, in Minnesota, "all the children are above average."
Seriously, when I was a student in Minnesota, I was surprised by how well educated the population was. It wouldn't surprise me if Minnesotans really were more computer literate than Northeasterners.
Steve
"Linux was a lot like a girl named Allison that I used to date."
Since when do Linux geeks go out on dates?
Only kidding,
Steve
Let's try your karma whoring strategy:
It's NOT a pink elephant!
The scary thing is that this strategy worked twice in the same thread. It's 2 for 2!
...more and more B1s (?) .. ie, work visas to immigrants...
I think the term you're looking for is "H1B visa". That's what most of the foreign programmers in the US appear to be here on. It grants temporary residence in the USA for something like six years, after which they have to go home.
Steve
Dude, what Taco needs to do to raise money is to sell a "License to Troll." Basically, you pay X dollars a month, and get to post Y troll posts at Score 1 without fear of consequences.
A bad idea? Hell yeah. But it would probably raise a ton of money.
Steve
Perhaps public policy makers should stay away from gaming technology. Look what it's done to us. Imagine the headline:
Orrin Hatch changes name to "DethGod", vows to "V3T0 J00R A$$3$"
On second thought, that might be kind of cool....
Steve
Score: -1 (Pissed-off Rant)
I used to go to a college that had a firewall in place, making it impossible to connect to Battle.net. Furthermore, the admins had it set up so that we couldn't play over an IPX network unless all the computers were in the same building. As a result, we were completely unable to make use of Starcraft's multiplayer capabilities, which is the whole fscking point of having Starcraft. Had we had bnetd, we could have set something up.
What Blizzard is doing is absolutely ridiculous. We all had legit copies of the game, so had we run a bnetd server, we would have been totally within our moral rights.
If Blizzard doesn't back down, it'll be a cold day in hell before I buy any more of their games.
Steve
Whenever I install Real Audio, and they ask me to register, I give root@127.0.0.1 as my e-mail address. I haven't used Real Player in ages, so I don't know whether that trick still works...
Steve
Articles on Slashdot will tell us how to install sp33d h0lez on our Segways.
Steve
Our Wal Mart is out by itself on the outskirts of town. People that live in town that want to go to Wal Mart driver farther that they would to visit any other store, and in a completely different direction. It's like this in every single town I've been in, except for the suburbs of big cities.
What the original poster said about Wal Mart leaving behind a string of empty buildings is true, too. However, it's common for all big chains to do this. Even though we're going through a lot of growth, the East side of my town consists mostly of empty, decaying supermarkets, gas stations, K-Marts, and the like.
I think the claims that Wal Mart is guilty of theft are far-fetched, but the negative effects of Wal Mart cannot be ignored.
Steve
(What follows is a joke. Laugh)
I have a theory. We Americans are the descendents of the people too screwed up to make it in Europe (my anscestors were expelled from Britain for participating in a political revolt). So you have a bunch of crazy Americans living on the East Coast. Some of them were too screwed up to make it there, so they went further and further west. Which is why California is so fucked up.
Think of how reckless and dumb you'd have to be to get on board one of those ships. Do you really want to populate the galaxy with people like that?
That brings us to our possible problem. Do reall you want to populate the world with the kind of people that are reckless and dumb enough to get on board that ship? I don't think so.
Steve