The main obstacles to Linux, or any alternative OS, in my opinion are making it easy to use and configure right out of the box for someone with little to know computer knowledge, like me, and not only educating people about the alternatives to the monopoly, but why they should care when there are so many other important things to worry about.
That is exactly why for quite some time, I have NOT wanted Linux to "beat" Windows. Windows already does that. All the unwashed masses can go on, barely accomplishing anything with their computers, because they barely learn how to use them. I, and others, on the opposite end of the spectrum will take the time to learn what we are doing, and massively boost our productivity and reduce our stress.
You can not use numbers in your name, like 911, in order to intentionally confuse people.
Emphasis mine. That's not exactly a legal text, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a direct derivative. If it says 'in order to intentionally confuse people' then you have a strong legal argument on your side.
I'd wondered about using wheel revolutions as a charging source for onboard electric systems myself
Why? You know where the power to turn those wheels is coming from, right? Yeah, the engine! Might as well use your alternator which taps the engine directly, rather than going through all the friction losses et. al. in the transmission and all else between the engine and the wheels.
...when my Mom's computer has a zombie on it? Poor old mom just wants to send email to her family. She doesn't know some dirty spammer has hijacked her computer. Now every customer of her ISP gets cut off for a week or more? Or even if the ISP was responsible, and cut her off.. Can you imagine the volume of tech support calls for people that get their internet service cut off for something "they didn't do" ?
One of the weirdest gifts I ever got was from an ex-girlfriend (who at the time wasn't an ex). A gardenia bush. That in itself might not seem that weird, except I found a book she accidently left at my place on Voodoo spells, with a "love spell" page dog-eared that required placing Gardenia bushes around the target's house as a component!
Accidentally? You don't know the first thing about women.
Statistics can be great. They can also be utterly totally horrible. Sure, perhaps one day, 15% of people will own and use a DVR. But how many of those people previously owned and used a VCR? I've used my VCR for time shifting for years, and I always skipped the commercials there. I doubt 15% of people that have never used a VCR are going to purchase and use a DVR.
Moreover, the 15% prediction number is fluffed up. Oh so many digital cable and satellite providers give you a DVR right in the box they make you use. I wager a significant number of people with DVR boxes do not use them.
First, let's assume that the general public will actually click the warn button. (Note this is likely a bold assumption.) After N, let's say 10, warnings after 100% warn level, the minimum delay to send the next message will grow exponentially with each warning, after 20 people it should take a day's wait. Record the IP used that received these warnings, and it's wait period. Apply this wait period to applying for a new account to that IP. Also, implement a 1 application per IP per hour limit.
I've gotten lots of SPIM through ICQ. I've never gotten one through AIM. And that's with having AIM on almost 24/7 for four years of college, and quite a bit since then. I don't do any of that chat room jazz. Make your own conclusions.
The author is taking his point just a little far, but he's hitting the nail on the head either way. It's pure truth, the vast majority of computer users have no idea what they are truly doing when they use their computer. They have no concept about what the purpose or reason for the tasks they perform are. You may say that knowing how to use grep is a large step forward, based on your observation about how grep is used now. But if you tell my mom to use grep to [insert task here] it won't mean anything to her. She has no understanding of how to use a command line, or how to apply options, or how to supply arguments. Nor, if she was even told exactly what to type, would she have the faintest clue what any of the things she typed meant, and why they were important.
What is necessary, as others have pointed out, is a basic understanding of the mathematical systems underlying computers. Unfortunately, having recently graduated with a degree in computer science, I know that even CS majors taking a semester long class in these concepts often "don't get it."
I think if people could learn all the things that were (supposed to be...) covered in my Operating Systems course in college, they would know 95% of what they needed to be proficient in any computer based task not strongly rooted in another field. (I.E. They could use photoshop but it won't make them artistic.) People think I am a genius, when I simply understand a structured method of getting things done. First, understand at least a basic level of the workings of the system I am using. Second, analyze the problem, and break it into smaller tasks. Complete any task I can, research or recursively (Oh no, there's a mathematical concept coming in! Another one lots of people in a class designed to teach it to them usually miss.) analyze and sub divide the remaining tasks.
It's freakishly simple. The sticking point is the research and understanding. Even if I (to use the classic example yet again) hand my mom the man page for pppd (which I just installed this past weekend, having never actually used dial up on unix before, just broadband), she wouldn't have the ability to grok it. I, on the other hand, approached it with the divide-and-conquer method of computer tasks, making sure I understood each thing I needed to, in order to get my task done.
The faster you and your ilk die off, the faster and efficient the internet will be, and the content will improve, or at least stay the same.
This one poster runs a site, as pointed out by other posters, which has virtually no recognition yet brings in billions of hits and uses millions of dollars (Doing what, I'm not sure) to produce it.
How, when these millions of dollars are gone, will the site continue to exist? It will not. Vast arrays of content on the internet are produced by people paid to do it. Not paid with wishes, and happy viewers. Paid with dollars, that come from advertisements.
The exact same thing happens on television. TV stars earning a million dollars an episodes don't get it from the smiles or tears they put on our faces. They get it from the advertisers paying for the space. Do you truly believe all of television will remain, were we to eliminate all advertising support? We'd be left with PBS and a few premium stations.
I block pop up/unders because they are too intrusive. I love the idea that a 468x80 pixel part of my screen has paid for me seeing the rest of the site, rather than having to fork my cash over for it.
I'm rather bemused as to why a major business hasn't sued Microsoft over some of the security scandals this past couple of years. Much as I'd like to see it, I don't think any will really vote with their wallets; migrating desktops for plain ordinary business work (mail, Word, Excel) from Windows is never even discussed, no matter what the servers are.
Because MicroSoft, along with anyone making software, has no legal resposibility to make their products secure. If I put screen doors held closed with twist ties on fort knox, and it gets broken in to, I have no legal recourse to sue the screen door maker, or the twist tie maker. It's the consumer's responsibility to evaluate the security of the products they choose to use, and select one that meets their needs.
Most definetly. The college I attended owns an entire class B. That's 64k addresses. They use, perhaps, 6k. And the sysadmin thinks it's nifty that his school has a whole class B to itself.
What makes a human? A lump of cells with homosapien DNA? Or a functioning brain with accumulated memories? The latter I'd say. Certainly not. My dog has a functioning brain with accumulated memories. My dog is not human.
This may not really be on-topic, but you seemed to have a lot of disdain for anyone who might have a lot of ideas but no resources to carry out those ideas.
I think the whole point is that patenting that good idea you have, when you know you don't have the resources to bring that idea to fruition, is bad.
Sure, come up with all the great ideas you want, be productive, that's great. But don't go hording all your ideas. If you have a good idea and no legs, give it to someone else to run with.
# On domestic flights, don't use a don't fly list at all. It's completely unnecessary and serves no useful purpose.
Alright let me preface this by saying I'm in a lazy mood, not looking up but remembering.... Didn't the 9/11 attacks on the trade center use planes departing from NYC headed to San Fransisco? Or... that's it, domestic flights!
I surely have nothing new to say. But nonetheless, I have the right to express myself, surely as much as the original author.
Sure, a lot of EQ sucks. But just like the real world, there's gotta be bad to compare the good to. There's a lot to complain about. But if you are still playing this game, and feeling like it is a chore, why are you playing this _game_ ?
I have been playing EQ for somewhere around three years. I have averaged, over those three years, one third of my time (half of my time if you consider only 2/3 of the day is spent awake) in this game. Why? Because it offers me what I want.
I have met WONDERful people. I have filled my time with something better than staring at the wall. Or the television. I am exersizing my mind, at least a bit, with even the most menial tasks.
Plus, there's the cost. You say, how could I pay thirteen dollars EVERY MONTH for this? Well as I told you, I average eight hours a day, enjoying myself (!!!), in EQ. That means, every month, for my thirteen dollars I can go out and see a movie, two hours of entertainment, or I can play EQ, get between 100 and 150 hours of entertainment as well as meet all sorts of people I likely would never have otherwise met.
The people, by the way, are the primary reason I am still playing. The naysayers may say, "Go to a chat room, it's free!" but what do I do in that chat room, when none of my friends are there? In EQ there's a myriad of things to go do, and while I'm doing those things my friends show up and we have a merry old time!
Yes, I've spent time outraged when CS was slow. And when the nerf bat hit me right in the balls. But you gotta roll with the punches. Bottom line is I'm still spending a lot of time there, and it's because I enjoy it. I'm level 62, but there are only two other people over 50 in my guild. As I said I'm there for the friendships, not the loot. The people in my guild are low level, rather casual players, but I love them.
That would totally eliminate the point of providing the source code would it not? Based on the phrase "to protect themselves" it would need to be in a non-proprietary format. Either they need to verify it performs the tasks you claim (and not say, spew out private information somewhere), or they need to feel that they will be able to maintain the product should your firm cease to be able to.
In this post he makes a few supurious comments, then gets to a list of "issues" that seem to concern him. The ones that seem to make any sense are:
Does a company have a legal right to apply it's intellectual property to anyone else's property for the purpose of making an evaluation without consent from the property's owner?
Does an unspoken contract exist between search services and webmasters that allow a search engine to legally build it's business using the content of webmasters without express permission?
Basically, he is asking "are search engines allowed to spider my site, and then tell people what it saw"? And I wonder how could anyone ever ask this question, how does the answer "No" ever come out of someone's mouth in that situation?
Again and again I see articles about controvercial topics in the computer world, and the common underlying thread is that too many people have a set notion of the world which computers and technology do not fit into. I could go on for pages about movies and music and copyright issues and.... ok but I better not. Basic point is, that computers allow for a drastically different economy and social world than we are used to, and many people are unable to cope with it.
Assume Google is not allowed to view your "product" (web site) and apply some rating mechanism to it, then inform "consumers" (people browsing the web) of their judgement, as a result of this lawsuit. Must we then strike down Consumer Reports magazine as well? They do the exact same thing. Sure, it's not an automatic process, it's people evaulating a hard and fast, touch it and see it physical product. Sure, they are very open about their rating mechanisms, they have to fill a magazine you know. But they operate on groups of dozens, not millions.
If anything, Google now has a slander lawsuit against SearchKing for this, this is such tripe. And let's not forget that if they succeed in saying sites are not allowed to index others and choose a set to display based on keyword, well there goes SearchKing too.
And as a closing note, search for "dell" resulted in www.dell.com as number 1 for Google. Number 28 for SK. What a wonderful site.
For you perhaps. But as a warning, go get checked by your doctor for the dreaded I'm-the-only-person-in-the-world disease. Some people don't have kids and don't make terrible messes of their floors. Animal hair, general dust, and such can still collect on a floor and need simple vaccuming.
And give them a break, it's a nice step in an emerging field.:)
Slashdot Mirror
That is exactly why for quite some time, I have NOT wanted Linux to "beat" Windows. Windows already does that. All the unwashed masses can go on, barely accomplishing anything with their computers, because they barely learn how to use them.
I, and others, on the opposite end of the spectrum will take the time to learn what we are doing, and massively boost our productivity and reduce our stress.
You can not use numbers in your name, like 911, in order to intentionally confuse people.
Emphasis mine. That's not exactly a legal text, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a direct derivative. If it says 'in order to intentionally confuse people' then you have a strong legal argument on your side.
It's obligitory, and noone else has posted it yet.
So the answer is simple. Install linux!
Easy if you have a cable modem, some of those patches are huge, service packs require 5+ hours to download on a modem.
Don't you have to sleep at some point? Your computer does not.
Err, this was a PayPal scam, not an E-bay one :)
Who owns PayPal?
42.
Welp, when I search Google for slashdot, I get:t p://sl ashdot.org/&e=747
http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=ht
As the first URL linked.
I'd wondered about using wheel revolutions as a charging source for onboard electric systems myself
Why? You know where the power to turn those wheels is coming from, right?
Yeah, the engine! Might as well use your alternator which taps the engine directly, rather than going through all the friction losses et. al. in the transmission and all else between the engine and the wheels.
...when my Mom's computer has a zombie on it? Poor old mom just wants to send email to her family. She doesn't know some dirty spammer has hijacked her computer. Now every customer of her ISP gets cut off for a week or more? Or even if the ISP was responsible, and cut her off.. Can you imagine the volume of tech support calls for people that get their internet service cut off for something "they didn't do" ?
One of the weirdest gifts I ever got was from an ex-girlfriend (who at the time wasn't an ex). A gardenia bush. That in itself might not seem that weird, except I found a book she accidently left at my place on Voodoo spells, with a "love spell" page dog-eared that required placing Gardenia bushes around the target's house as a component!
Accidentally? You don't know the first thing about women.
Statistics can be great. They can also be utterly totally horrible. Sure, perhaps one day, 15% of people will own and use a DVR. But how many of those people previously owned and used a VCR?
I've used my VCR for time shifting for years, and I always skipped the commercials there. I doubt 15% of people that have never used a VCR are going to purchase and use a DVR.
Moreover, the 15% prediction number is fluffed up. Oh so many digital cable and satellite providers give you a DVR right in the box they make you use. I wager a significant number of people with DVR boxes do not use them.
First, let's assume that the general public will actually click the warn button. (Note this is likely a bold assumption.)
After N, let's say 10, warnings after 100% warn level, the minimum delay to send the next message will grow exponentially with each warning, after 20 people it should take a day's wait.
Record the IP used that received these warnings, and it's wait period. Apply this wait period to applying for a new account to that IP. Also, implement a 1 application per IP per hour limit.
Holes, flaws?
I've gotten lots of SPIM through ICQ.
I've never gotten one through AIM. And that's with having AIM on almost 24/7 for four years of college, and quite a bit since then. I don't do any of that chat room jazz.
Make your own conclusions.
The author is taking his point just a little far, but he's hitting the nail on the head either way.
...) covered in my Operating Systems course in college, they would know 95% of what they needed to be proficient in any computer based task not strongly rooted in another field. (I.E. They could use photoshop but it won't make them artistic.)
It's pure truth, the vast majority of computer users have no idea what they are truly doing when they use their computer. They have no concept about what the purpose or reason for the tasks they perform are.
You may say that knowing how to use grep is a large step forward, based on your observation about how grep is used now. But if you tell my mom to use grep to [insert task here] it won't mean anything to her. She has no understanding of how to use a command line, or how to apply options, or how to supply arguments. Nor, if she was even told exactly what to type, would she have the faintest clue what any of the things she typed meant, and why they were important.
What is necessary, as others have pointed out, is a basic understanding of the mathematical systems underlying computers. Unfortunately, having recently graduated with a degree in computer science, I know that even CS majors taking a semester long class in these concepts often "don't get it."
I think if people could learn all the things that were (supposed to be
People think I am a genius, when I simply understand a structured method of getting things done. First, understand at least a basic level of the workings of the system I am using. Second, analyze the problem, and break it into smaller tasks. Complete any task I can, research or recursively (Oh no, there's a mathematical concept coming in! Another one lots of people in a class designed to teach it to them usually miss.) analyze and sub divide the remaining tasks.
It's freakishly simple. The sticking point is the research and understanding. Even if I (to use the classic example yet again) hand my mom the man page for pppd (which I just installed this past weekend, having never actually used dial up on unix before, just broadband), she wouldn't have the ability to grok it. I, on the other hand, approached it with the divide-and-conquer method of computer tasks, making sure I understood each thing I needed to, in order to get my task done.
The faster you and your ilk die off, the faster and efficient the internet will be, and the content will improve, or at least stay the same.
This one poster runs a site, as pointed out by other posters, which has virtually no recognition yet brings in billions of hits and uses millions of dollars (Doing what, I'm not sure) to produce it.
How, when these millions of dollars are gone, will the site continue to exist? It will not. Vast arrays of content on the internet are produced by people paid to do it. Not paid with wishes, and happy viewers. Paid with dollars, that come from advertisements.
The exact same thing happens on television. TV stars earning a million dollars an episodes don't get it from the smiles or tears they put on our faces. They get it from the advertisers paying for the space. Do you truly believe all of television will remain, were we to eliminate all advertising support? We'd be left with PBS and a few premium stations.
I block pop up/unders because they are too intrusive. I love the idea that a 468x80 pixel part of my screen has paid for me seeing the rest of the site, rather than having to fork my cash over for it.
I'm rather bemused as to why a major business hasn't sued Microsoft over some of the security scandals this past couple of years. Much as I'd like to see it, I don't think any will really vote with their wallets; migrating desktops for plain ordinary business work (mail, Word, Excel) from Windows is never even discussed, no matter what the servers are.
Because MicroSoft, along with anyone making software, has no legal resposibility to make their products secure. If I put screen doors held closed with twist ties on fort knox, and it gets broken in to, I have no legal recourse to sue the screen door maker, or the twist tie maker.
It's the consumer's responsibility to evaluate the security of the products they choose to use, and select one that meets their needs.
Most definetly. The college I attended owns an entire class B. That's 64k addresses. They use, perhaps, 6k.
And the sysadmin thinks it's nifty that his school has a whole class B to itself.
What makes a human? A lump of cells with homosapien DNA? Or a functioning brain with accumulated memories? The latter I'd say.
Certainly not. My dog has a functioning brain with accumulated memories.
My dog is not human.
I think the whole point is that patenting that good idea you have, when you know you don't have the resources to bring that idea to fruition, is bad.
Sure, come up with all the great ideas you want, be productive, that's great. But don't go hording all your ideas. If you have a good idea and no legs, give it to someone else to run with.
Alright let me preface this by saying I'm in a lazy mood, not looking up but remembering
Didn't the 9/11 attacks on the trade center use planes departing from NYC headed to San Fransisco? Or
I surely have nothing new to say. But nonetheless, I have the right to express myself, surely as much as the original author.
Sure, a lot of EQ sucks. But just like the real world, there's gotta be bad to compare the good to. There's a lot to complain about. But if you are still playing this game, and feeling like it is a chore, why are you playing this _game_ ?
I have been playing EQ for somewhere around three years. I have averaged, over those three years, one third of my time (half of my time if you consider only 2/3 of the day is spent awake) in this game. Why? Because it offers me what I want.
I have met WONDERful people. I have filled my time with something better than staring at the wall. Or the television. I am exersizing my mind, at least a bit, with even the most menial tasks.
Plus, there's the cost. You say, how could I pay thirteen dollars EVERY MONTH for this? Well as I told you, I average eight hours a day, enjoying myself (!!!), in EQ. That means, every month, for my thirteen dollars I can go out and see a movie, two hours of entertainment, or I can play EQ, get between 100 and 150 hours of entertainment as well as meet all sorts of people I likely would never have otherwise met.
The people, by the way, are the primary reason I am still playing. The naysayers may say, "Go to a chat room, it's free!" but what do I do in that chat room, when none of my friends are there? In EQ there's a myriad of things to go do, and while I'm doing those things my friends show up and we have a merry old time!
Yes, I've spent time outraged when CS was slow. And when the nerf bat hit me right in the balls. But you gotta roll with the punches. Bottom line is I'm still spending a lot of time there, and it's because I enjoy it. I'm level 62, but there are only two other people over 50 in my guild. As I said I'm there for the friendships, not the loot. The people in my guild are low level, rather casual players, but I love them.
That would totally eliminate the point of providing the source code would it not?
Based on the phrase "to protect themselves" it would need to be in a non-proprietary format. Either they need to verify it performs the tasks you claim (and not say, spew out private information somewhere), or they need to feel that they will be able to maintain the product should your firm cease to be able to.
A friend of mine called this the bigger butthead principle. Even if you can prove someone else is a bigger butthead, it doesn't mean you're not one.
In this post he makes a few supurious comments, then gets to a list of "issues" that seem to concern him. The ones that seem to make any sense are:
.... ok but I better not. Basic point is, that computers allow for a drastically different economy and social world than we are used to, and many people are unable to cope with it.
Does a company have a legal right to apply it's intellectual property to anyone else's property for the purpose of making an evaluation without consent from the property's owner?
Does an unspoken contract exist between search services and webmasters that allow a search engine to legally build it's business using the content of webmasters without express permission?
Basically, he is asking "are search engines allowed to spider my site, and then tell people what it saw"? And I wonder how could anyone ever ask this question, how does the answer "No" ever come out of someone's mouth in that situation?
Again and again I see articles about controvercial topics in the computer world, and the common underlying thread is that too many people have a set notion of the world which computers and technology do not fit into. I could go on for pages about movies and music and copyright issues and
Assume Google is not allowed to view your "product" (web site) and apply some rating mechanism to it, then inform "consumers" (people browsing the web) of their judgement, as a result of this lawsuit. Must we then strike down Consumer Reports magazine as well? They do the exact same thing. Sure, it's not an automatic process, it's people evaulating a hard and fast, touch it and see it physical product. Sure, they are very open about their rating mechanisms, they have to fill a magazine you know. But they operate on groups of dozens, not millions.
If anything, Google now has a slander lawsuit against SearchKing for this, this is such tripe. And let's not forget that if they succeed in saying sites are not allowed to index others and choose a set to display based on keyword, well there goes SearchKing too.
And as a closing note, search for "dell" resulted in www.dell.com as number 1 for Google. Number 28 for SK. What a wonderful site.
For you perhaps. But as a warning, go get checked by your doctor for the dreaded I'm-the-only-person-in-the-world disease. Some people don't have kids and don't make terrible messes of their floors. Animal hair, general dust, and such can still collect on a floor and need simple vaccuming.
:)
And give them a break, it's a nice step in an emerging field.