When I think about script kiddies, I first think about how successful the "Dude, you're getting a Dell" commercials have been.
Then I think about how my parents have always turned to me for computer guidance, and how they have recently started getting help from a 16 year old boy who my little sister knows (I'm 23, she's 16).
I'm starting to think that youthful computer users are respected by older computer illiterate users BECAUSE of their youth. So many people I know have begun their computer using experience with help from someone younger than themselves. Script kiddies are young...they might be respected for it despite their stupid phrases, D00D.
Minion: Sir? Head of XBox Development: Yes? Minion: We've been hearing reports of people hacking the XBox. Apparently its quite easy. Head of XBox Development: (rubs temples) Alright. How many do you think there are? Minion: Pardon? Head of XBox Development: How many developers? Minion: Oh. Couldn't be more than 30, sir. Head of XBox Development: (breathes a sigh of relief) That's all? You had me worried for a minute there. Is the alligator pit and trapdoor working? Minion: Yes sir. I just had maintenence check it over this morning. Head of XBox Development: Excellent. And the other alligators? Minion: The lawyers? Already creating reasonable doubt. Head of XBox Development: Good. Alright, post a job offer with a handsome salary. Make sure you put the word "hacker" in it. Minion: I'll get right on that- Head of XBox Development: One more thing! Minion: Yes, sir? Head of XBox Development: Make sure slashdot finds out. Wouldn't want to miss any developers, now would we? Minion: (smiles evilly) No, sir. I'll give our friends over there a call.
In a surprise announcement, the Republican National Committee has revealed it is bankrupt! A spokesman for the party said they had plenty of money in their accounts last week, but today they just don't know where the money has gone. But not everybody's going begging. Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the United Negro College Fund announced record earnings this week, due mostly to large, anonymous donations.
I find it rather disturbing that an organization whose main business is to keep track of people has trouble keeping track of people on their secondary business.
It makes me think that perhaps they're not doing their main job right - something which is much harder to verify because the main thing people want from VeriSign is a certificate already in NS and IE's databases. People just aren't going to complain much if they can get their key request replies.
Further, it makes me consider that perhaps privately owned business does not have enough vested interest in its clients to ensure accurate record-keeping, since the cash will keep rolling in anyway (for digital certs).
Sorry if you couldn't read my train of thought through the lines. More clear now?
Do you expect a company to keep track of the mailing addresses and names - the very IDENTITY of its clients?
I mean, are there even companies whose business is to guarantee that someone is who they say they are and that they provide accurate information?
The very idea is ludicrious!
Seriously though...why not have government controlled digital signatures? They could use the passport system (not Microsoft's...the kind you get before you go to another country) as a starting point. It seems like one of the rare chances for beneficial government interference. Sure, we'd lose a particular private sector, but it'd give lots of people the same warm, fuzzy feeling that the FDIC does.
They've already got one # to represent each person anyway.
Really looking for (negative) responses here; I can't see anything bad about this (and I'm usually against government intervention).
I am one of the few graduate students who published in a journal as an undergrad, and I think you should know what goes into the publishing process (for IEEE publications, which covers almost all respected peer-reviewed computing journals).
Traditionally, you first have to have the article published in a conference, which requires for you to 1) Write the article 2) Go to the conference and present your work
Submission to a conference usually happens approximately six months before the actual conference. You get acceptance about a month after submission (or you get rejection). Most conferences have an acceptance rate of 50% or worse, meaning that they turn away HALF of the applicants.
The process of selection is done by assigning reviews to major professors in the field who are not submitting to the conference. These professors sometimes pass the review work along to some of their best grad students (this happened several times in a lab that I worked in).
After you are accepted, you send the final version, which includes any changes you may have made to the rough draft, and then go to the conference.
The next step is a journal article. This usually includes some additional fleshing out of the article. Most conference procedings are between 4 and 8 pages; journal articles can be as long as you can get it to be. You want it longer, because the longer it is, the more likely that the people reading it will understand and want to use your idea, because you can explain it upteen ways and provide numerous examples of why your [whatever it is] works well, which always leads to good things for a journal article writer's career.
That often takes a while as well. Once you submit the journal article, you get a preliminary acceptance contingent upon making changes after three months of review. Of course, once again acceptance is less than 50%, usually, but if you publish in a conference first, your chances are significantly higher than if you don't. You have an incredibly powerful idea to make it without a conference first. The reviewers in this case are required to make a very careful inspection of the article to ensure that 1) the theories presented are useful 2) the theories make sense 3) the paper is written well enough to be readable
Reviewers are also required to find ALL spelling and grammer mistakes, and they have to understand the methods presented within the paper well enough to make a summary of the journal article. Also, reviewers are the same as before - experts in the field (college professors) who are not submitting to the journal at the time of the review.
These reviewers give you a report, accepting contingent upon meeting their requirements (or defending why you can't).
You then have to submit again and your article is once again edited for approximately 6 months.
If you REALLY rush, this entire process takes one year, however realistically, it usually takes two. (Yeah, I started the game as a junior in college).
Now, I don't care if we do this online. IEEE has a research engine called IEEE Xplore, which is often purchased by research institutions such as Universities. It has the whole database of IEEE publications within it.
But I don't know how to get a much better peer-review process than this; its pretty darn strict. So professors can't just whip of papers like nobody's business - they really have to put some work into it. If they have a lot of papers, it means they've done a lot of stuff that at least six other experts (for each paper - sometimes more) believe to have merit.
Yeah...why, just the other day, a friend of mine was "censored" when the army came and took him away for publically speaking out against the government. Later, there was a report on the news that he was to be imprisoned, tortured, and shot.
He was part of a rally in Times Square, and they arrested him. Sucks that we live in a country without peaceable assembly.
Wait...I think it was actually someone I didn't know who was killed in Tiananmen square for a pro-democracy demonstration.
I think I got it straight now. The US is NOTHING like China when it comes to censorship. We don't imprison and kill people because we don't like what they say. We certainly don't use full force; on the contrary, our main censorship punishment is fines, or at the very most, a minimum security prison sentence. Of course, you have to consider that we are not trying to censor, our goal is to avoid copyright violations. You can say anything you want, as long as it isn't libel (untrue statement of FACTS - all opinions are allowed).
Don't belittle our freedom or China's suffering by such a comparison.
Groovy, man. Rad. Hip. Definitely 86. I'm sure they will. They won't be like the rest of the trends. They're too legit to quit.
Words that catch on like wildfire ALWAYS succeed, except of course, if there are already words to describe the same thing equally well or better which are already commonly used. Forget the connotation. hax0r has the same connotation as hacker, d00d the same as dude, and l337 the same as elite. The only difference is who will say them.
Eventually, the script-kiddie counter culture will get tired of using those words and get some new ones.
Why do I limit this to script kiddies? Among my actual coder friends I have noticed a distinct trend towards good grammar, and an attempt at proper spelling. I suspect that this is a side-effect of working in necessarily stricter languages than English.
Want an example yourself? Go to a linux-related chatroom and figure out who in the room has the most experience. Then check their grammer. More often than not they use full sentences with punctuation and correct spelling, unlike a lot of other people on IRC.
Re:Mindless Google Fanatics Run To Cliff's Edge
on
Mr Anti-Google
·
· Score: 2
Umm...they don't ignore meta information. Read Google's help pages.
And they update the search about once a month. Evidently you haven't had the googlebot come 'round to your page before?
So if there are dead links, that's when they're culled - once a month.
You know, yahoo uses suggested links. It doesn't work because there are too many people who want to suggest their site even though their site is not important. The suggested links system is too easy to take advantage of (in the beginning, people did).
The result of this was that yahoo didn't use suggested links much to rate their pages or searches. Instead, whenever anyone suggested a link, that link would be reviewed by an actual human (whenever they got around to it; certainly much less than once a month by my experience).
Because Yahoo's methods weren't as effective as google in finding information, Yahoo now leases search technology from Google. Since I can't see any moral issues involving not accepting suggested links, and I can't think of any better way to cull dead links, and they produce the most pertinent results (in my experience) of any search engine, I'm certianly not boycotting them.
Of course, if YOU can think of a more effective way to index the web, I'm waiting. The best would be a magical parsing machine that was all wise and all knowing, which could rank pages based upon usefulness within a given search. Since AI doesn't have the ability to produce such a fantastic machine, we settle for a simpler heuristic involving links.
I can think of some people I'd like to be prank phone called by that way. This is one of the few comments where Natalie Portman references actually make sense. Then again, I can think of a lot of people who I wouldn't want to be pranked by.
Did you read the rest of the comments? Its only new for free decoders.
When was the last time you got a free portable mp3 player?
That cost was already factored in.
HOWEVER, there will probably be an emerging market for free audio file format players based upon this. Especially for the CD player versions (ogg-vorbis CD players must be on the way).
Maybe this will be a chance to finally get away from those horrible artifacts that result from mpeg encoding, and finally use wavelet approaches.
Time slows down relative to the things around you, not just in general. Speed is also relative to the things around you. If you had two objects travelling the same velocity (magnitude and direction), both fractionally close to the speed of light, they would observe the same measurement of time.
Also, if you had one object moving away from another object, you could view this as: 1) #1 is moving at velocity V away from #2 2) #2 is moving at velocity V away from #1 3) #1 has velocity V1, and #2 has velocity V2 such that V1+V2=V (note that one of V1 and V2 would be negative).
"Still" is also relative to the surrounding objects. You have to pick points of reference with which you must remain the same distance from under any given definition of still (for Cartesian modeling of the universe, which is what humans generally use, you need THREE points of reference). Meeting this definition is quite possible.
Hopefully this has increased your understanding of introductory physics.
No, RedHat completely dominates the entire linux market. Here's a poll.
While its not clear who is ahead between Debian, SuSE, and Slackware, it is clear that RedHat leads, followed by Mandrake. This population size is enough to know this rather conclusively despite statistical error.
Of course, you could argue that this is mostly the US market, but then again, the US has slightly less than three times the number of computers with Linux on it than the second largest (according to this poll), so its not really statistically insignificant enough to leave out when talking about who is the leader in Linux.
BTW, this poll rates SuSE as 4th among 102413 machines.
Or, to use a better example, they wouldn't want to appease users by using something slightly unreliable, like linuxconf.
Be realistic. The system that makes sure everything is ready for primetime before it goes into the distro is Debian (and I speak as an impartial non-RH, non-Debian, non-Mandrake, non-Suse, non-Windows user). Redhat has something else going for it - probably the fact that they sell hardware AND offer support for it; I can think of a couple of companies who have an official policy of only buying from other companies who offer support.
As soon as I read a statement of Platonian philosophy that makes me think, "Wow. That was a really clever way to put that," I'll refer to him. But in my experience, he wasn't much of a flowery prose kind of guy; he was more of an idea man.
In short, people who read The Republic can get bored out of their skulls. Then those people write about what they've read, and seem clever and interesting. I still get my Plato without having to leave my skull.
I just went and played Little Blue Men for the first time. Of course that one's a little older - its three years old. I don't think it would run on anything less than an XT with 64K of RAM. Yeah, that's not really a fair comparison.
I suppose I should talk about a more modern game, like All Roads. Oh wait - that one has about the same memory requirements. I guess nothing has changed in three years.
If what you were looking for in games was imagination and inspiration, then you wouldn't need a new machine for it. Obviously that's not what is desired - people want better and better graphics. The gamers drive the game market.
If this were not the case, then gamers would not buy faster computers, or better graphics cards. They would simply play the games that worked on their system, content to settle for fun instead of pretty and fun. After all, its not like there is a shortage of games, no matter how old your system is (and the examples I gave are case in point).
Unless, of course, you need reiserfs. I'm not sure they've added ext3 support to that, either. No devfs, either, AFAIK. This might have changed since last time I checked.
Of course, there aren't many systems that actually do include these things yet, so that could be the only reason.
Violence and the threat of violence are definitely worthy of jail time. Perhaps muggers don't injure their victims, but they certainly threaten to do so. If they go to jail after their first few muggings they won't get a chance to get to the tenth time (based on your statistic approximately 1 out of 10 muggings result in injury), and public safety will be maintained.
I have never bought a CD until recently. Actually, I didn't listen to much recorded music. The question you might ask is why I chose to buy a CD at all.
The answer is that you get what you pay for. The quality of an MP3 is much lower than the quality of a CD. Sure, it is digital. But there are errors made in copying a CD to a computer, and even more errors made when converting from spacial domain to discrete cosine domain (and back during decoding). The truncation of certian frequencies doesn't help much; they cut off a little of the audible range for those of us with more acute senses of hearing.
I bought a CD so that I'd be able to enjoy the song more; it was worth it because I like the song enough to care. Maybe I won't be able to tell the difference between CDs and wavelet transformed copies, but we don't have a lot of those yet. So to me, MP3s are a little like high quality tapes- still not quite as good as having the CD.
Actually, thats sort of the cheap price. If you check, you'll notice that freeware CDs do sell for about $2 (i.e. recordings of famous symphonies where the artists made the album to gain exposure and nothing else).
But CD makers do have other costs. The price of marketing, the music videos, the failed artists (that would be the number one cost), and the high price of artists. While I'm sure they make money, I'm not quite sure that they would at the $2 price. Perhaps its time for music to become less marketed, and music stars to be paid less.
To me, it seems justified. In a society where modern recording equipment can be purchased (which works nearly as well as a studio) for about $500, and CDs can be made and distributed for cheap, and a large portion of society (at least 1%) is capable of some form of musical ability of their own, demand for paid musicians shouldn't be that high (based upon law of supply and demand).
Somehow...I am not even sure that it is. I've met a lot more talented musicians than I've seen or heard from the "outlets" (and as a lifelong sound tech and singer, I'm somewhat qualified to identify talent; at least vocal talent), barring a handful of exceptions. But I don't think any of those were nearly as attractive as todays singers. Perhaps the music industry could cut prices by distributing good music for cheap, and showing Pr0n stars in the videos rather than the singers.
I open 30 applications at once, and am constantly switching. Usually, I only want one or two windows up at a time, and I'd like the rest minimized.
AFAIK, KDE is the only linux desktop environment that has a "show desktop" (minimize all) shortcut, as well as a minimize one window shortcut. I love those.
And that is the only reason I use kde instead of IceWM. Of course, other people have their important feature, but... they add up.
I wish, though, that compiling kde was more like compiling the kernel - features could be removed and added. For instance, I don't really care about the file manager in KDE, and I'd do just as well without the space it takes.
In fact, if possible, I'd like to have just a panel and the shortcuts; I need no sound manager, no file manager, and no desktop manager. Wouldn't it be nice if such were possible?
Slashdot Mirror
When I think about script kiddies, I first think about how successful the "Dude, you're getting a Dell" commercials have been.
Then I think about how my parents have always turned to me for computer guidance, and how they have recently started getting help from a 16 year old boy who my little sister knows (I'm 23, she's 16).
I'm starting to think that youthful computer users are respected by older computer illiterate users BECAUSE of their youth. So many people I know have begun their computer using experience with help from someone younger than themselves. Script kiddies are young...they might be respected for it despite their stupid phrases, D00D.
I wouldn't really call myself a zealot. I'm an engineer. I'll use whatever I think is best; whatever I like the best.
:)
I like IE best for webpages.
mIRC best for IRC
but
PAN best for newsgroups and
Evolution best for mail.
Gentoo is my favorite operating system, but I'll work for whoever will pay me to do stuff I love -work with math and tinker with computers.
It just seemed like an appropriate exercise in paranoia: big company hiring rivals DOES sound a bit suspicious, doesn't it?
I just pictured this conversation in my head:
Minion: Sir?
Head of XBox Development: Yes?
Minion: We've been hearing reports of people hacking the XBox. Apparently its quite easy.
Head of XBox Development: (rubs temples) Alright. How many do you think there are?
Minion: Pardon?
Head of XBox Development: How many developers?
Minion: Oh. Couldn't be more than 30, sir.
Head of XBox Development: (breathes a sigh of relief) That's all? You had me worried for a minute there. Is the alligator pit and trapdoor working?
Minion: Yes sir. I just had maintenence check it over this morning.
Head of XBox Development: Excellent. And the other alligators?
Minion: The lawyers? Already creating reasonable doubt.
Head of XBox Development: Good. Alright, post a job offer with a handsome salary. Make sure you put the word "hacker" in it.
Minion: I'll get right on that-
Head of XBox Development: One more thing!
Minion: Yes, sir?
Head of XBox Development: Make sure slashdot finds out. Wouldn't want to miss any developers, now would we?
Minion: (smiles evilly) No, sir. I'll give our friends over there a call.
In a surprise announcement, the Republican National Committee has revealed it is bankrupt! A spokesman for the party said they had plenty of money in their accounts last week, but today they just don't know where the money has gone. But not everybody's going begging. Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the United Negro College Fund announced record earnings this week, due mostly to large, anonymous donations.
Ahem. Ever heard of sarcasm?
Let me spell out my view.
I find it rather disturbing that an organization whose main business is to keep track of people has trouble keeping track of people on their secondary business.
It makes me think that perhaps they're not doing their main job right - something which is much harder to verify because the main thing people want from VeriSign is a certificate already in NS and IE's databases. People just aren't going to complain much if they can get their key request replies.
Further, it makes me consider that perhaps privately owned business does not have enough vested interest in its clients to ensure accurate record-keeping, since the cash will keep rolling in anyway (for digital certs).
Sorry if you couldn't read my train of thought through the lines. More clear now?
Do you expect a company to keep track of the mailing addresses and names - the very IDENTITY of its clients?
I mean, are there even companies whose business is to guarantee that someone is who they say they are and that they provide accurate information?
The very idea is ludicrious!
Seriously though...why not have government controlled digital signatures? They could use the passport system (not Microsoft's...the kind you get before you go to another country) as a starting point. It seems like one of the rare chances for beneficial government interference. Sure, we'd lose a particular private sector, but it'd give lots of people the same warm, fuzzy feeling that the FDIC does.
They've already got one # to represent each person anyway.
Really looking for (negative) responses here; I can't see anything bad about this (and I'm usually against government intervention).
I am one of the few graduate students who published in a journal as an undergrad, and I think you should know what goes into the publishing process (for IEEE publications, which covers almost all respected peer-reviewed computing journals).
Traditionally, you first have to have the article published in a conference, which requires for you to
1) Write the article
2) Go to the conference and present your work
Submission to a conference usually happens approximately six months before the actual conference. You get acceptance about a month after submission (or you get rejection). Most conferences have an acceptance rate of 50% or worse, meaning that they turn away HALF of the applicants.
The process of selection is done by assigning reviews to major professors in the field who are not submitting to the conference. These professors sometimes pass the review work along to some of their best grad students (this happened several times in a lab that I worked in).
After you are accepted, you send the final version, which includes any changes you may have made to the rough draft, and then go to the conference.
The next step is a journal article. This usually includes some additional fleshing out of the article. Most conference procedings are between 4 and 8 pages; journal articles can be as long as you can get it to be. You want it longer, because the longer it is, the more likely that the people reading it will understand and want to use your idea, because you can explain it upteen ways and provide numerous examples of why your [whatever it is] works well, which always leads to good things for a journal article writer's career.
That often takes a while as well. Once you submit the journal article, you get a preliminary acceptance contingent upon making changes after three months of review. Of course, once again acceptance is less than 50%, usually, but if you publish in a conference first, your chances are significantly higher than if you don't. You have an incredibly powerful idea to make it without a conference first.
The reviewers in this case are required to make a very careful inspection of the article to ensure that
1) the theories presented are useful
2) the theories make sense
3) the paper is written well enough to be readable
Reviewers are also required to find ALL spelling and grammer mistakes, and they have to understand the methods presented within the paper well enough to make a summary of the journal article. Also, reviewers are the same as before - experts in the field (college professors) who are not submitting to the journal at the time of the review.
These reviewers give you a report, accepting contingent upon meeting their requirements (or defending why you can't).
You then have to submit again and your article is once again edited for approximately 6 months.
If you REALLY rush, this entire process takes one year, however realistically, it usually takes two. (Yeah, I started the game as a junior in college).
Now, I don't care if we do this online. IEEE has a research engine called IEEE Xplore, which is often purchased by research institutions such as Universities. It has the whole database of IEEE publications within it.
But I don't know how to get a much better peer-review process than this; its pretty darn strict. So professors can't just whip of papers like nobody's business - they really have to put some work into it. If they have a lot of papers, it means they've done a lot of stuff that at least six other experts (for each paper - sometimes more) believe to have merit.
Yeah...why, just the other day, a friend of mine was "censored" when the army came and took him away for publically speaking out against the government. Later, there was a report on the news that he was to be imprisoned, tortured, and shot.
He was part of a rally in Times Square, and they arrested him. Sucks that we live in a country without peaceable assembly.
Wait...I think it was actually someone I didn't know who was killed in Tiananmen square for a pro-democracy demonstration.
I think I got it straight now. The US is NOTHING like China when it comes to censorship. We don't imprison and kill people because we don't like what they say. We certainly don't use full force; on the contrary, our main censorship punishment is fines, or at the very most, a minimum security prison sentence. Of course, you have to consider that we are not trying to censor, our goal is to avoid copyright violations. You can say anything you want, as long as it isn't libel (untrue statement of FACTS - all opinions are allowed).
Don't belittle our freedom or China's suffering by such a comparison.
Groovy, man. Rad. Hip. Definitely 86. I'm sure they will. They won't be like the rest of the trends. They're too legit to quit.
Words that catch on like wildfire ALWAYS succeed, except of course, if there are already words to describe the same thing equally well or better which are already commonly used. Forget the connotation.
hax0r has the same connotation as hacker, d00d the same as dude, and l337 the same as elite. The only difference is who will say them.
Eventually, the script-kiddie counter culture will get tired of using those words and get some new ones.
Why do I limit this to script kiddies? Among my actual coder friends I have noticed a distinct trend towards good grammar, and an attempt at proper spelling. I suspect that this is a side-effect of working in necessarily stricter languages than English.
Want an example yourself? Go to a linux-related chatroom and figure out who in the room has the most experience. Then check their grammer. More often than not they use full sentences with punctuation and correct spelling, unlike a lot of other people on IRC.
Umm...they don't ignore meta information. Read Google's help pages.
And they update the search about once a month. Evidently you haven't had the googlebot come 'round to your page before?
So if there are dead links, that's when they're culled - once a month.
You know, yahoo uses suggested links. It doesn't work because there are too many people who want to suggest their site even though their site is not important. The suggested links system is too easy to take advantage of (in the beginning, people did).
The result of this was that yahoo didn't use suggested links much to rate their pages or searches. Instead, whenever anyone suggested a link, that link would be reviewed by an actual human (whenever they got around to it; certainly much less than once a month by my experience).
Because Yahoo's methods weren't as effective as google in finding information, Yahoo now leases search technology from Google. Since I can't see any moral issues involving not accepting suggested links, and I can't think of any better way to cull dead links, and they produce the most pertinent results (in my experience) of any search engine, I'm certianly not boycotting them.
Of course, if YOU can think of a more effective way to index the web, I'm waiting. The best would be a magical parsing machine that was all wise and all knowing, which could rank pages based upon usefulness within a given search. Since AI doesn't have the ability to produce such a fantastic machine, we settle for a simpler heuristic involving links.
I can think of some people I'd like to be prank phone called by that way. This is one of the few comments where Natalie Portman references actually make sense. Then again, I can think of a lot of people who I wouldn't want to be pranked by.
Did you read the rest of the comments? Its only new for free decoders.
When was the last time you got a free portable mp3 player?
That cost was already factored in.
HOWEVER, there will probably be an emerging market for free audio file format players based upon this. Especially for the CD player versions (ogg-vorbis CD players must be on the way).
Maybe this will be a chance to finally get away from those horrible artifacts that result from mpeg encoding, and finally use wavelet approaches.
My bad. Other people sell hardware along with Redhat support.
Close to the same, but not quite.
Time slows down relative to the things around you, not just in general. Speed is also relative to the things around you. If you had two objects travelling the same velocity (magnitude and direction), both fractionally close to the speed of light, they would observe the same measurement of time.
Also, if you had one object moving away from another object, you could view this as:
1) #1 is moving at velocity V away from #2
2) #2 is moving at velocity V away from #1
3) #1 has velocity V1, and #2 has velocity V2 such that V1+V2=V (note that one of V1 and V2 would be negative).
"Still" is also relative to the surrounding objects. You have to pick points of reference with which you must remain the same distance from under any given definition of still (for Cartesian modeling of the universe, which is what humans generally use, you need THREE points of reference). Meeting this definition is quite possible.
Hopefully this has increased your understanding of introductory physics.
No, RedHat completely dominates the entire linux market. Here's a poll.
While its not clear who is ahead between Debian, SuSE, and Slackware, it is clear that RedHat leads, followed by Mandrake. This population size is enough to know this rather conclusively despite statistical error.
Of course, you could argue that this is mostly the US market, but then again, the US has slightly less than three times the number of computers with Linux on it than the second largest (according to this poll), so its not really statistically insignificant enough to leave out when talking about who is the leader in Linux.
BTW, this poll rates SuSE as 4th among 102413 machines.
Yeah. They wouldn't want to appease me with something like a journaling file system.
Or, to use a better example, they wouldn't want to appease users by using something slightly unreliable, like linuxconf.
Be realistic. The system that makes sure everything is ready for primetime before it goes into the distro is Debian (and I speak as an impartial non-RH, non-Debian, non-Mandrake, non-Suse, non-Windows user). Redhat has something else going for it - probably the fact that they sell hardware AND offer support for it; I can think of a couple of companies who have an official policy of only buying from other companies who offer support.
As soon as I read a statement of Platonian philosophy that makes me think, "Wow. That was a really clever way to put that," I'll refer to him. But in my experience, he wasn't much of a flowery prose kind of guy; he was more of an idea man.
In short, people who read The Republic can get bored out of their skulls. Then those people write about what they've read, and seem clever and interesting. I still get my Plato without having to leave my skull.
I just went and played Little Blue Men for the first time. Of course that one's a little older - its three years old. I don't think it would run on anything less than an XT with 64K of RAM. Yeah, that's not really a fair comparison.
I suppose I should talk about a more modern game, like All Roads. Oh wait - that one has about the same memory requirements. I guess nothing has changed in three years.
If what you were looking for in games was imagination and inspiration, then you wouldn't need a new machine for it. Obviously that's not what is desired - people want better and better graphics. The gamers drive the game market.
If this were not the case, then gamers would not buy faster computers, or better graphics cards. They would simply play the games that worked on their system, content to settle for fun instead of pretty and fun. After all, its not like there is a shortage of games, no matter how old your system is (and the examples I gave are case in point).
Unless, of course, you need reiserfs. I'm not sure they've added ext3 support to that, either. No devfs, either, AFAIK. This might have changed since last time I checked.
Of course, there aren't many systems that actually do include these things yet, so that could be the only reason.
Violence and the threat of violence are definitely worthy of jail time. Perhaps muggers don't injure their victims, but they certainly threaten to do so. If they go to jail after their first few muggings they won't get a chance to get to the tenth time (based on your statistic approximately 1 out of 10 muggings result in injury), and public safety will be maintained.
I have never bought a CD until recently. Actually, I didn't listen to much recorded music. The question you might ask is why I chose to buy a CD at all.
The answer is that you get what you pay for. The quality of an MP3 is much lower than the quality of a CD. Sure, it is digital. But there are errors made in copying a CD to a computer, and even more errors made when converting from spacial domain to discrete cosine domain (and back during decoding). The truncation of certian frequencies doesn't help much; they cut off a little of the audible range for those of us with more acute senses of hearing.
I bought a CD so that I'd be able to enjoy the song more; it was worth it because I like the song enough to care. Maybe I won't be able to tell the difference between CDs and wavelet transformed copies, but we don't have a lot of those yet. So to me, MP3s are a little like high quality tapes- still not quite as good as having the CD.
I would very much like to use it...
Are you sure? How do you set that up?
Yeah, thats how I learned to like it. And its "windows key"+M. Its the same for my key bindings in kde.
Actually, thats sort of the cheap price. If you check, you'll notice that freeware CDs do sell for about $2 (i.e. recordings of famous symphonies where the artists made the album to gain exposure and nothing else).
But CD makers do have other costs. The price of marketing, the music videos, the failed artists (that would be the number one cost), and the high price of artists. While I'm sure they make money, I'm not quite sure that they would at the $2 price. Perhaps its time for music to become less marketed, and music stars to be paid less.
To me, it seems justified. In a society where modern recording equipment can be purchased (which works nearly as well as a studio) for about $500, and CDs can be made and distributed for cheap, and a large portion of society (at least 1%) is capable of some form of musical ability of their own, demand for paid musicians shouldn't be that high (based upon law of supply and demand).
Somehow...I am not even sure that it is. I've met a lot more talented musicians than I've seen or heard from the "outlets" (and as a lifelong sound tech and singer, I'm somewhat qualified to identify talent; at least vocal talent), barring a handful of exceptions. But I don't think any of those were nearly as attractive as todays singers. Perhaps the music industry could cut prices by distributing good music for cheap, and showing Pr0n stars in the videos rather than the singers.
The Minimize shortcuts!
... they add up.
I open 30 applications at once, and am constantly switching. Usually, I only want one or two windows up at a time, and I'd like the rest minimized.
AFAIK, KDE is the only linux desktop environment that has a "show desktop" (minimize all) shortcut, as well as a minimize one window shortcut. I love those.
And that is the only reason I use kde instead of IceWM. Of course, other people have their important feature, but
I wish, though, that compiling kde was more like compiling the kernel - features could be removed and added. For instance, I don't really care about the file manager in KDE, and I'd do just as well without the space it takes.
In fact, if possible, I'd like to have just a panel and the shortcuts; I need no sound manager, no file manager, and no desktop manager. Wouldn't it be nice if such were possible?