Tip: the difference between who and whom
is like the difference between he and him,
or she and her.
So, to describe the hypothetical winner in
gender-specific terms, we should say "heever"
or "sheever"?
That "tip" has never made sense to me... Yes,
I understand the difference between subjective
and objective pronouns, but only in a very
few cases where you would use "who" or "whom" could
you do a drop-in replacement of "he" or "him" and
have it make sense. In this particular case, you
can't even use he/she/him/her in a compound
interrogative pronoun at all, so how does
this "classic" tip really help decide which to use?
It's illegal to tell you how to
use WinDVD to copy that disc.
Nonono, you missed my meaning...
This crack now exists for WinDVD. Nothing can
un-do that fact. However, WinDVD's key for
DVD can go on the revocation list. That
won't just break WinDVD for people who use this
patch, it will break it for everyone,
on every disc released after the key revokation.
So that means a few thousand geeks now have the
power to rip DVD-A for any discs pressed before
today, and a few million(?) WinDVD owners need
to buy new software just to play DVD-A
discs pressed after today.
And therein I see the problem - I don't claim to
have a "right" to rip DVD-A (I simply don't give
a damn about whether I have that right or not - If
I can physically do it, I will). But do
the powers-that-DVD have the right to break the
players of a much larger group of innocent legitimate
users?
I bet in another 5 years, they'll come out
with some ultra-new technology that is REALLY
crackproof.
This particular crack makes a nice example
of why that can't happen, ever - The
author didn't actually crack CPPM, he just
convinced an authorized player to do the
dirty work for him.
On the down side, I expect that any DVD-As
created after today will include all previous
versions of WinDVD in their revocation list.
That, however, makes me wonder about the
legal implications of such revocation - If I
have a legal copy of WinDVD, and I buy a
legal DVD-A disc, but through no fault of my
own someone has compromised my particular
player - Who holds the purse-strings that the
resulting lawsuits will dip into?
As of the copyright act of 1976(?), at least
in the US, EVERYTHING you create
automatically has a copyright on it, asigned
to you (unless you have some agreement in
place granting that copyright to someone
else). And, considering the Berne treaty
as spreading such draconian law to basically
the entire world, I presume a similar default
state exists almost everywhere.
So, by banning the download of "copyrighted"
material, this law would prevet the Swedish
from downloading anything at all. Except
perhaps from Vanuatu...
Even GPL'd software has a "copyright" on
it... In fact, the terms of the GPL itself
give us the "right" to "copy" it in
the first place!
I never really thought about this particular
angle before, but perhaps someone more legally
inclined than myself could elaborate on this?
It seems to me that, considering the above,
you cannot avoid downloading copyrighted
material. Under that condition, therefore,
how can one attribute blame to the recipient?
It only makes sense to consider the act
of distribution an offense.
trying to widen the tech gap by eliminating
the trailing end of the curve.
That would actually narrow the gap, since
the trailing end either catrches up, or no longer
exists.
They answered their own question: 33
million households care, asshole!
So?
I don't say that (only) out of callousness..
So 33M people (not households) care? They
hold the rest of us back. Cut them loose.
Before modern radio, we had something called
"sparkgap", a fairly self-descriptive
technology - You make a spark across a gap,
key it like a telegraph, and voila, you can
receive it a good distance away with mindlessly
simple equipment. The problem? It drowns out
anything nearby across the entire useful RF
spectrum.
With DTV, we have a similar problem - Digital
takes a tenth of the bandwidth of analog TV,
for incredibly higher quality. It takes much
more sophisticated decoding equipment, but
in the long run, we'll all benefit as a
result.
Why do HDTVs cost so much right now? Because,
despite their popularity among we middle class,
20-39YO male geeks (any given reader may not
fit that profile, but only an idiot would argue
against it as the vast majority on Slashdot),
they still count as a luxury item. Once the
masses start "needing" better TVs, the prices
will plummet, easily 50% in the second
year after analog goes dark.
So this will hurt, at first. Yes, those who
can least afford to upgrade will temporarily
suffer the most. But everyone, even
those who can't afford an upgrade, will
benefit.
Yeah, let's screw everyone who can afford a
one-time purchase of a TV (analog color TVs are
cheap) but can't afford monthly digital cable
bills.
Call me a Republican (or whatever other bad
names you will), but might I humbly suggest that
people who can't afford a TV, shouldn't waste their
time watching in? Perhaps they should, y'know,
spend their spare time educating themselves so
they can find better work, rather than rotting out
what brains they have listening to talking heads
argue about inconsequential fluff while people
8000 miles away die for no good reason?
Presumably though the algorithm they used in
GPUsort can be made to work on a Pentium IV
Not necessarily...
Their use of the GPU to sort might very well
run something along the lines of assigning
Z-coordinates based on the key values, and
colors based on a simple index , then
asking the GPU to "show" the "pixels" in
Z-order, then just read the "real" data of
any arbitrary size and type in the order
specified by the returned colors/indices.
That would perform a sort using the GPU, very
very rapidly, but you can't really translate
it to run on a CPU - Sure, you could
write code to fake it, but at the lowest level,
you'd end up using something like a quicksort,
rather than dedicated hardware, to emulate the
desired behavior.
Now, admittedly, I don't know that the
method under consideration used such an
approach. But it appears they at least took
the approach of using the GPU for its strong
points, rather than trying to force it to act
as a general-purpose CPU.
As for the choice of Quicksort - Most likely,
they chose it because just about every
C library out there has an implementation of
quicksort. And while personally I prefer
heapsort (in the worst case, quicksort has
Q*O(n^2) behavior, while heapsort always
takes only P*O(n log n), But P >> Q), I'll
admit that for almost all unstructured
input sets, quicksort finishes quite a lot
faster than anything else.
Pick a fictional page. Any page. Set up a
cron job/scheduled task to wget that page every
hour.
There ya go. You have an hourly log of the
laptop's IP address, along with (possibly) a
referrer, a user agent (probably whater it has
on it now), and if you go all out, you can make
the request encode just about as much info as
you want (last few files opened? Last email
sent? Address book?).
As an aside, I've submitted a hell of a
lot better Ask Slashdots, and gotten rejected.
Who's sister did you marry?
Not bitter... Just find this one as close to
"trivial" as we can get. What next, "I told
netscape to make an image my background, how do
I put it back to the fishies?"
If you read and clicked through the
article.... You would see at
And if you read the preceeding sentence, you
would see: "laid end to end they would hit
the 52-mile mark". So yes, the 828' figure
means stacked cover-to-cover, aka linear feet
of shelf space using the most natural way to
shelve a book.
Of course, I'll agree, the math still seems
VERY off... 1082 titles end-to-end measuring
52 miles would require books 253'9" tall...
I've seen some oversized art books before,
but nothing like that!
I also have a problem with the price...
"Penguin Classics" refers to those ultra-cheap
paperbacks you get for $0.99 to $2.99 on end
caps at Barnes & Noble, correct? That comes out
the around $3k, at most...
Overall, I'd have to say I suspect this as a
joke. Can't say I "get" it, but the description
contains such wild inaccuracies, I just can't
believe this represents a real product.
Having recently faced a similar problem (though
on a much smaller scale), we came up with
almost the same solution.
As one suggestion, though, cardboard (in
4x8ft sheets) proved a lot easier to
work with than plastic sheets. For starters,
the plastic requires attachment at the ceiling,
and will eventually come loose under its
own weight; cardboard, with a single fold in
the sheet, will stand upright and support its
own weight for years, assuming not too high of
a humidity level. For another, cardboard
won't flap around and potentially block air
intakes nearly so easily as plastic
will.
Believe it or not, though, what we found the
most effective way to make use of
barely adequate AC - Don't treat the room as
a closed system. You've basically used the
plastic sheets to build giant chimneys - Now
take advantage of that fact, and along with a
high volume fan above each rack, just exhaust
the air at the top outside rather than recycle
it back into the room... Think of it this way...
You spec your cooling to work to perhaps 110F
ambient, right? At the top of a full rack,
with 50-60F going in the bottom, you probably
have 120-130F going out the top. Does it take
more work to cool 130F, or 110F, back to 50F?
Not to mention, your normal ambient shouldn't
come anywhere near 110F...
Renaming your administrator account gets
you no additional security, only a false sense
of one.
As simple of an improvement as blocking
a "casual" attacker from RD'ing in as
administrator by testing a few weak passwords,
can make all the difference in the world.
No, it won't even slow down a truly skilled
cracker, but in the case of protecting
Joe Sixpack, we want to save them primarily from
themselves, including things Mr. S might do
without knowing it (such as installing spyware
or DRM device drivers on some newer copy
protected CDs). Joe doesn't have elite
international cyberterrorists out to get
him, he just has viral porn popups and the
occasional script-kiddie to deal with.
If you want to secure that account,
disable it.
Not a bad suggestion! Hey, I'll admit, I just
didn't think of it. Thus the usefulness of
sharing information here on Slashdot.
Go ahead, be the first on your block to
harden Windows with naive LUA. Spend the next two
years chasing down truly arcane breakage.
I'll stand at the head of the line complaining
that MS needs to make it a hell of a lot easier
to run with reduced privelage, but really, it
doesn't take that much effort... Not
something Joe Sixpack could do, but something
Joe Sixpack can use once properly set
up for him.
First, you need exactly one third-party tool,
and one nonstandard MS tool... Tweak UI on the
MS side (I won't provide a link because they
seem to move it weekly), and
CPAU as the third-party tool.
Make your normal account a power user
(still a little too powerful, but we'll
take care of that). Install your AV software
as admin, and everything else (except as
noted below) as your normal user (using
RunAs when necessary, but do not
install anything else while actually logged
in directly as admin).
Now, rename your true admin account (via a
group policy). Create a new admin account
(named something other than "administrator"
or "owner", obviously). Create a restricted
user account as well (you'll probably need
to start it as a power user, and downgrade
it once you finish all this annoyance).
Install anything network-related as your
reduced permission user (browser, email
(don't even bother trying to use
Outlook as a non admin), instant messaging
client, P2P app, and anything else you need).
Don't bother configuring them yet, because
for anything that stores its configuration in
your profile, you'll just need to reconfigure
them once you log in normally.
Now, as your normal user, use CPAU to create
job files, to run your network apps as the
reduced privelage user, and anything that
absolutely requires admin rights to run as
your new (but not renamed original!) admin account.
This gets you about 95% functional, and a
hell of a lot safer than just running
as an admin.
Now, you'll notice you can print or see Samba
shares from any of your network apps. Use
Tweak UI's ACL editor to give your reduced
permission user access to your printers
and shares (do a google search on this one...
Not at all difficult, but more steps than I
want to list here).
Now, when you notice a problem with a program,
go to its installed directory, and if applicable,
its profile directory, and give it fairly
promiscuous permissions (ie, give everyone
everything but full control). File permission
wise, that amounts to almost the same thing as
always running as admin, but limits any damage
to the particular program too poorly written
to behave. This alone makes most programs that
demand to run as admin, runnable as a mere
power user.
This really only leaves one problem, which you
can fix, but probably shouldn't... Depending
on what program you run, your "my documents" and
desktop will not point to "your" documents and
desktop. Just keep that in mind when you download
a file to the desktop and then can't find it anywhere.
Meanwhile, I'll be using software on platforms that
figured out most of this stuff a decade ago.
Great point... But like it or not (personally, I do
not), people can't use Linux for everything.
If you like RTS games, for example, you can't escape
the simple fact that Microsoft makes the best of them,
and they sure as hell won't port to Linux any time
soon. The same goes for most popular games,
for that matter; they just don't run on Linux.
First that comes to mind is Tape backup.
They store huge about of data, and are very
cheap these days,
I take it you haven't dealt with many tape
backups systems... I strongly encourage the
world to let those useless piles of crap die,
once and for all!
First, they do NOT come cheap. Using
AIT3, the bese size match to what the parent
mentioned at 100GB raw (DV will not
compress even a little bit, so don't count on
the inflated "after our magic compression
algorithm runs" sizes), the drive alone will
set you back $1700. Then add in a neat $50
per tape - And he needs two per full backup,
just as his current size. Now compare that
to buying a few 200GB IDE drives - $86 each,
and you could probably shave 10-20% off that
if you buy a ten pack.
Second, performance. That particular drive,
the AIT3, gets 12MB/s. Compare that to 30-40MB/s
for a modern HDD, then thow in a seek time best
measured in seconds (or even over a minute in
the worst case)...
Third, durability. A lot of people will say
that you need to treat a HDD more carefully than
a passive blob-o-plastic like a tape. That holds
true to a point, but you can't just toss
a data tape in a box in the attic like old family
photos. I've seen falls from waist-high (ie, on
the corner of a desk) break them. Leaving them in
a hot car while you get lunch will destroy them.
Overall, if you really want to ever recover
data from a tape, you need to treat it just as
delicately as you would a hard drive.
And speaking of resiliance - True story. At my
workplace recently, we had a rather important
system (one that we really couldn't afford a full
day of downtime on) fail critically (as in, people
coming in that morning complained of the smell of
burning electronics). Not a problem, because it
ran on PC hardware and we had complete backups of
the system. One problem - Guess the source of the
problem? The tape drive itself cooked, taking out
the power supply which in turn took out everything
else (judging by the degree of damage down that
chain). So, we had great backups, alternate hardware,
and no way to restore the backup onto the new machine.
We had a new drive overnighted, but still, it cost us
a day of downtime that really hurt us. And for
those who will say "Well, duh, you didn't truly have a
backup if you didn't have a backup drive, as
well - At a small company, you try to convince
your boss to spend part of your already tight budget on
a $9k drive that will, in all likelhood, never even leave
its original packaging. BTW, yes, we use tapes at my
workplace. I loathe them, for all the reasons I've
mentioned here.
Overall, tapes just suck as a form of backup.
Get yourself a pile of external USB drives (a
little more pricey than EIDE, but you can
hot-swap them), and backup to those. You'll
pay a LOT less up-front, have a backup solution
IMO far superior to tapes, and "the drive" contains
its own reading hardware, so no chance to have the
media but lose the reader. Get 10, do nightly
backups on a rotating set of them, and take one
offsite every Sunday rotated on a monthly schedule.
And the entire collection of them will cost about
half as much as a single drive and pair of tapes.
Of course English is the dominate second
language in the world.
In IT, English holds the majority by
far. And Spanish doesn't even come in
second - You have Japanese and German as distant
seconds, with Hebrew and French as dark-horse
thirds.
Attempts at internationalization simply hinder
the adoption of English as the next ubiquitous
academic language. Much like Greek and Latin
during the Roman empire - The rabble may all
speak Spanish, but those who want to appear
educated speak English. Of course, Latin later
went on to hold the same place, so perhaps some
day Spanish will function as the language of
the academic elite.
Personally, I don't have great hope of us not
blowing up the planet before then. So I code
with English as my target language. Speak it,
or don't use my programs, doesn't much matter
to me
Many of those who care about i18n do not
speak English at all!
I don't think that needs an exclamation mark - It
doesn't come as a particular surprise to anyone.
If you speak English, you don't have the least
interest in "internationalization", which basically
means "Make it accessible to people who don't
speak English".
And I don't write this as a xenophobic rant...
I regularly use programs written by Japanese
coders, and a few in German. And do I sit around
complaining about how those coders, who already
have given me something I find useful, should do
extra work unrelated to the purpose of the program
to make those programs more friendly to me?
No. I recognized my inability to read the
menus and such as a shortcoming in myself,
and made the effort to learn enough Japanese and
German (albeit very little) to navigate
those programs.
Or to put that another way - If Bill Gates only
spoke Italian, a LOT more people would have learned
at least a basic proficiency in it by now.
No. The entire point of this whole topic
involves people no longer needing to
justify their actions.
When we know we want to do something wrong,
and really do care about doing the right thing,
we try to justify our actions.
With copyright, people no longer feel they
do anything wrong... Illegal, perhaps (with
an infinitessimally small risk of getting
caught), but wrong, no.
The argument made by the parent points out
why, under the conditions just described,
people might still choose to pay for
something, when they don't really need
to.
You can pick your own daisies, but you might
buy them from a beggar to give them at least
the small bit of dignity of "selling" something
to you rather than begging you for money.
If that beggar started the transaction by
pissing in your cheerios, would you still
feel inclined to let them keep their dignity?
Seems odd that not one of my three person
sample had a conviction even remotely close
to urinating in public.
As a disclaimer, I think that real
rapists should experience castration for the
first offense... Real child abusers should
experience everything they did to the child
in question, scaled up by a factor equal to
the age difference.
However, the our legal system currently favors
the "victim" (particularly female "victims")
with shockingly few safeguards in place to prevent,
for example, outright lying... Such as third party
corroboration or material evidence (let the shouts
of "But most rapes occur with no witnesses and the
victims take too long to go to the police" begin...)
So playing Devil's advocate:
Case 1) Consensual sex with a 17YO in a state
with an age-of-consent of 18.
Case 2) Acquaintance rape "after-the-fact" occurs
FAR more often than people like to admit.
Case 3) Spanked your child in public lately?
Why can't I just buy a router, plug it in
and have it autosetup everything I need?
For the most part, you can. Most
Cable/DSL routers these days have a
reasonably secure config as the default
(admittedly with horribly insecure default
passwords, but since they only let you admin
them from the LAN side, not too much
risk there). They auto-NAT you, act as a
DHCP server, and provide about as effective
of a firewall as the average person could ask
for.
On the computer side, assuming Joe Sixpack
pretty much exclusively runs Windows - If
XP detects a network card, it configures it,
defaulting to DHCP. Thus, you literally can
just buy a NIC, throw it in your PC, and hook
it up to your shiney new Netgear/DLink/Linksys
router, which in turn goes to your cablemodem,
and poof, you have a home LAN.
Now, will this satisfy most "real" geeks?
Hell no! But except for SSH'ing directly
into my masquerading gateway from the outside,
it provides 99% of the functionality and
security.
...and rival in that use costs the providers
money to keep access available. Forget the
jargon and use some common sense. If all
Slashdot readers stop viewing ads and their
ad revenue disappears, Rob will or will not
keep offering free access?
1) Content costs money to serve, even if
provided basically for free (as with
Slashdot, where the audience equals the
authors, for the most part).
2) Ads cost money to serve - In many (most?)
cases, more than the actual content does
(a single 27Kb ad vs 4k of text and 9k of
"real" images, for example... And how often
do you see just one ad on a page that
uses them?).
3) I will not ever, EVER, EVER buy
something based on advertising. I buy
products based on needing something, doing
research to find the best widget, and then
use a site like Pricewatch to find the best
price on that widget (granted, you could call
Pricewatch a form of advertising in itself,
but I hope anyone reading this has the
capacity to appreciate the difference). At
no step does advertising enter that
process, with one exception - I will deliberately
not buy something or from a store who has
annoyed me with overly obnoxious ads.
So... Would you say Rob (or any site owner)
would do better to let me block ads, thereby
dropping the bandwidth per page roughly in
half (in the case of Slashdot)...
... Or should they force me to double their
bandwidth, with a literally less than
zero chance of my clicking on their ads?
As for the whole free-ride / piracy / stealing
/ depriving-whomever-of-whatever arguments... I
really just do not care anymore. I can actually
thank the **AA for performing exactly one service
for me - They have helped me get rid of all sense of
guilt regarding how I use or abuse any intangible
"goods". If I can get to it, I consider it "mine"
to do with as a please - Only both the threat
and likelyhood of incarceration in the
nation with the single largest per-capita prison
population limits how I use such information.
While the threat may always exist, the likelyhood
(unless I do something glaringly stupid) simply
doesn't exist.
I'll still buy CDs, books, and what-have you from
my favorite artists - I do so out of a desire
to reward them for providing me pleasure, and as
an incentive to make more. But the idea of an
"obligation" to fork over something of mine, just
to do a taste test of what amounts to pickled dog
shit - Nope. Not even a little.
Some also feel that Microsoft is trying to
strong-arm the industry into the adoption of
an incomplete and not accepted standard.
...And some (like me) feel that anything from
Hotmail most likely counts as spam anyway, and
have the entire domain in my filter list.
So Hotmail can't get mail from me anymore.
Boo-frickin'-hoo. What next, AOL doing the
same? Then perhaps Yahoo?
Sorry, but until a major provider that
matters picks an anti-spam tech,
they will accomplish nothing more than
effectively depriving their customers from
using email.
Wow... THANK YOU for that link. I have
stumbled for years to explain to friends
how the game of "law" doe not equal "logic", nor
even "physical reality", and never come up with
such an eloquent explanation.
Sure, shouting "7" means nothing, but a
better analogy could be shouting "7 is the
first the number of your gym locker combination
from 15 years ago"
With normal P2P, yes.
With the specific example I had in mind,
no... But not totally unrelated
(I actually took it as a 6-digit number
and factored it, so "7" doesn't occur
anywhere in that ancient combo). That
example came the closest to a commonly
understood idea I could think of as an
analogy at the time.
With a Reed-Solomon parity set (or something
similar), you do even better than that. If I
say a 7, without all the rest of the
blocks, it quite literally means nothing.
Not a part of it, not a factor, just random
noise that, given the right context, might
have meaning. Given a different context, you
could get an entirely unrelated (and possible
still meaningful, though not even remotely
similar to the original!) result.
So let's say I encode my locker combination,
and you encode a copyrighted song, but we
both only make a file containing a "7"
available. Which of us has infringed on that
copyright? Both of us? Neither of us?
And if we define it by intent, what if neither
of us actually knows what that "7" goes to,
just an unidentifiable file sitting in our BT
cache?
Perhaps as a better analogy, I give you a 1k
file that contains as close to random data as
anyone could measure. I can, after the fact,
give you another 1k file (also as close to
random as we can determine) that will, with
a simple XOR, turn that first file
into anything. Into the first 1k of an
MP3, into a small jpeg, into classified info
we'd both vanish for knowing (though I'd admittedly
have to know that first). And lest you say that
second file "contains" the information by itself,
I could send you a third file with the same property,
the ability to turn the second into literally any
1k block. So, does that first totally random 1k
block violate anyone's copyrights?
It is far more elegant than that. It is about
making a system where any N packets from any
sources can be combined to the original
file.
So they shifted from sending the actual file, to
sending (basically) a set of PAR2 slices of that
file. If you end up with any n >= N nonidentical
blocks, you have the whole file. Not really all
that new of an idea, though the first time (that
I know of) that anyone applied it to live P2P.
However, we've had a much less live form of
P2P (requiring in-between servers to allow
for time-shifting, of a sort) for decades,
now - Usenet. And in that medium,
PAR2 has a nice long history of use in binary
groups.
Woo-woo. Microsoft made - sorry, proposed
to make - that happen in real time, rather
than a few hours later. Does this sound
useful? Sure. Does it sound like something
Bram could adapt BT to do in under a day's
coding? Yup.
You do, however, have to wonder about the
legal implications of this - in a very real
way, if you have anything short of the
whole solution, even 99 out of 100 blocks,
you have absolutely nothing even remotely
resembling the original file. So could the
**AA bust someone for hosting a single block?
Quite literally, that amounts to busting someone
for shouting "7". Sure, together with 2, 2, 2,
11, 11, and 37, you could obtain my gym locker
combination from 15 years ago. But the "7" alone
means nothing in isolation.
Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted
calculated that there should be 130 autistics
among the Amish. He found only four.
When looking for a good control group (though,
you can't really call them that in a post hoc
study), you want them as similar as possible
to the treatment group.
The Amish live a radically different
lifestyle from your typical American. Does
their low Autism rate result from a low
vaccination rate? Does it result from using
minimal, if any, AC power? Pesticides?
Growth hormones in meat? Formaldahyde from
common modern building materials? I could go
on.
One had been exposed to high levels of
mercury from a power plant. The other
three -- including one child adopted from
outside the Amish community -- had received
their vaccines.
Here, you have a very strong selection bias.
You have four people. Three of them received
immunizations; how many others received
immunizations? Lower than average, but certainly
more than three. One lived near a power plant;
how many others lived near a power plant?
And if none of them lived near a power plant
or received immunizations, do you suppose a
motivated investigator could have found other
potential sources of mercury exposure? How about
a school chemistry lab? An old thermometer?
The ever-popular "high local levels" in the
ground?
Personally, I do suspect a link between
mercury and autism. It might not even have
anything to do with thimerosal, just a side
effect of our massive all-around habit of
polluting the hell out of our water, air,
soil, and food. But a post hoc study of a
radically different so-called "control"
group with findings justified by a glaringly
obvious selection bias - No. Sorry, but even
the Bush administration could spot science
that bad.
i already said this reply, but i am but
a mere anonymous peon;(
Sorry, no sunshine-stealing intended...
Why not just make an account? Free, easy,
fairly privacy-protecting (ie, they don't
care if you lie about your info other than
email addy)... And it instantly gives you
a bonus to posting (not to mention many people,
myself included, tend to browse with ACs
having a -5 modifier).
Not to mention, you get to keep the karma
earned for your good posts...
If you are trying to get a user to switch
over one of the important things you can point
out is that linux works like windows.
"So, um... Why would I switch?"
"Well, you get Linux for free."
"I got Windows for free too, with my new PC"
"Yeah, but not really free, you actually paid for it"
"Hmm, that sucks... But should I just throw that money away???"
"Okay, Linux also has a lot of free software for it..."
"Like WinSite? Or TuCows?"
"Well, yes, but also free as in speech, not just beer!"
"Uhh... You mean like taht whole 'I speak, it types' thing?"
"Mmm, no. With Linux programs, you usually get the source code."
"What do I do with that?"
"Well, you can modify it to make new versions of the program yourself."
"I can barely use Excel, that sounds even harder."
"If you don't want to, you don't need to
code, but you at least have that choice."
(Thinks for a moment)
"Riiiiiiight - So instead of using software I already
paid for, with a basically-sane and consistent interface,
I should switch to something that I need to manage these
library things in, just to get an interface that clashes
with itself, for theoretical benefits that I can't
actually use? Thanks, but I'll stick with Windows."
(Awkward silence)
"Say, have you considered a Mac?"
"Don't go there."
"Gotcha."
Slashdot Mirror
Tip: the difference between who and whom is like the difference between he and him, or she and her.
So, to describe the hypothetical winner in gender-specific terms, we should say "heever" or "sheever"?
That "tip" has never made sense to me... Yes, I understand the difference between subjective and objective pronouns, but only in a very few cases where you would use "who" or "whom" could you do a drop-in replacement of "he" or "him" and have it make sense. In this particular case, you can't even use he/she/him/her in a compound interrogative pronoun at all, so how does this "classic" tip really help decide which to use?
It's illegal to tell you how to use WinDVD to copy that disc.
Nonono, you missed my meaning...
This crack now exists for WinDVD. Nothing can un-do that fact. However, WinDVD's key for DVD can go on the revocation list. That won't just break WinDVD for people who use this patch, it will break it for everyone, on every disc released after the key revokation.
So that means a few thousand geeks now have the power to rip DVD-A for any discs pressed before today, and a few million(?) WinDVD owners need to buy new software just to play DVD-A discs pressed after today.
And therein I see the problem - I don't claim to have a "right" to rip DVD-A (I simply don't give a damn about whether I have that right or not - If I can physically do it, I will). But do the powers-that-DVD have the right to break the players of a much larger group of innocent legitimate users?
I bet in another 5 years, they'll come out with some ultra-new technology that is REALLY crackproof.
This particular crack makes a nice example of why that can't happen, ever - The author didn't actually crack CPPM, he just convinced an authorized player to do the dirty work for him.
On the down side, I expect that any DVD-As created after today will include all previous versions of WinDVD in their revocation list. That, however, makes me wonder about the legal implications of such revocation - If I have a legal copy of WinDVD, and I buy a legal DVD-A disc, but through no fault of my own someone has compromised my particular player - Who holds the purse-strings that the resulting lawsuits will dip into?
As of the copyright act of 1976(?), at least in the US, EVERYTHING you create automatically has a copyright on it, asigned to you (unless you have some agreement in place granting that copyright to someone else). And, considering the Berne treaty as spreading such draconian law to basically the entire world, I presume a similar default state exists almost everywhere.
So, by banning the download of "copyrighted" material, this law would prevet the Swedish from downloading anything at all. Except perhaps from Vanuatu...
Even GPL'd software has a "copyright" on it... In fact, the terms of the GPL itself give us the "right" to "copy" it in the first place!
I never really thought about this particular angle before, but perhaps someone more legally inclined than myself could elaborate on this? It seems to me that, considering the above, you cannot avoid downloading copyrighted material. Under that condition, therefore, how can one attribute blame to the recipient? It only makes sense to consider the act of distribution an offense.
trying to widen the tech gap by eliminating the trailing end of the curve.
That would actually narrow the gap, since the trailing end either catrches up, or no longer exists.
They answered their own question: 33 million households care, asshole!
So?
I don't say that (only) out of callousness.. So 33M people (not households) care? They hold the rest of us back. Cut them loose.
Before modern radio, we had something called "sparkgap", a fairly self-descriptive technology - You make a spark across a gap, key it like a telegraph, and voila, you can receive it a good distance away with mindlessly simple equipment. The problem? It drowns out anything nearby across the entire useful RF spectrum.
With DTV, we have a similar problem - Digital takes a tenth of the bandwidth of analog TV, for incredibly higher quality. It takes much more sophisticated decoding equipment, but in the long run, we'll all benefit as a result.
Why do HDTVs cost so much right now? Because, despite their popularity among we middle class, 20-39YO male geeks (any given reader may not fit that profile, but only an idiot would argue against it as the vast majority on Slashdot), they still count as a luxury item. Once the masses start "needing" better TVs, the prices will plummet, easily 50% in the second year after analog goes dark.
So this will hurt, at first. Yes, those who can least afford to upgrade will temporarily suffer the most. But everyone, even those who can't afford an upgrade, will benefit.
Yeah, let's screw everyone who can afford a one-time purchase of a TV (analog color TVs are cheap) but can't afford monthly digital cable bills.
Call me a Republican (or whatever other bad names you will), but might I humbly suggest that people who can't afford a TV, shouldn't waste their time watching in? Perhaps they should, y'know, spend their spare time educating themselves so they can find better work, rather than rotting out what brains they have listening to talking heads argue about inconsequential fluff while people 8000 miles away die for no good reason?
Could we pretty, pretty please have a Roland Piquepaille section, so we can opt-out?
A GreaseMonkey script exists to do provide the same effect.
Of course, I like Rolly's articles... When else does a flamewar count as on-topic?
Presumably though the algorithm they used in GPUsort can be made to work on a Pentium IV
Not necessarily...
Their use of the GPU to sort might very well run something along the lines of assigning Z-coordinates based on the key values, and colors based on a simple index , then asking the GPU to "show" the "pixels" in Z-order, then just read the "real" data of any arbitrary size and type in the order specified by the returned colors/indices. That would perform a sort using the GPU, very very rapidly, but you can't really translate it to run on a CPU - Sure, you could write code to fake it, but at the lowest level, you'd end up using something like a quicksort, rather than dedicated hardware, to emulate the desired behavior.
Now, admittedly, I don't know that the method under consideration used such an approach. But it appears they at least took the approach of using the GPU for its strong points, rather than trying to force it to act as a general-purpose CPU.
As for the choice of Quicksort - Most likely, they chose it because just about every C library out there has an implementation of quicksort. And while personally I prefer heapsort (in the worst case, quicksort has Q*O(n^2) behavior, while heapsort always takes only P*O(n log n), But P >> Q), I'll admit that for almost all unstructured input sets, quicksort finishes quite a lot faster than anything else.
You have access to a website, including its logs?
Pick a fictional page. Any page. Set up a cron job/scheduled task to wget that page every hour.
There ya go. You have an hourly log of the laptop's IP address, along with (possibly) a referrer, a user agent (probably whater it has on it now), and if you go all out, you can make the request encode just about as much info as you want (last few files opened? Last email sent? Address book?).
As an aside, I've submitted a hell of a lot better Ask Slashdots, and gotten rejected. Who's sister did you marry?
Not bitter... Just find this one as close to "trivial" as we can get. What next, "I told netscape to make an image my background, how do I put it back to the fishies?"
If you read and clicked through the article.... You would see at
And if you read the preceeding sentence, you would see: "laid end to end they would hit the 52-mile mark". So yes, the 828' figure means stacked cover-to-cover, aka linear feet of shelf space using the most natural way to shelve a book.
Of course, I'll agree, the math still seems VERY off... 1082 titles end-to-end measuring 52 miles would require books 253'9" tall... I've seen some oversized art books before, but nothing like that!
I also have a problem with the price...
"Penguin Classics" refers to those ultra-cheap paperbacks you get for $0.99 to $2.99 on end caps at Barnes & Noble, correct? That comes out the around $3k, at most...
Overall, I'd have to say I suspect this as a joke. Can't say I "get" it, but the description contains such wild inaccuracies, I just can't believe this represents a real product.
Having recently faced a similar problem (though on a much smaller scale), we came up with almost the same solution.
As one suggestion, though, cardboard (in 4x8ft sheets) proved a lot easier to work with than plastic sheets. For starters, the plastic requires attachment at the ceiling, and will eventually come loose under its own weight; cardboard, with a single fold in the sheet, will stand upright and support its own weight for years, assuming not too high of a humidity level. For another, cardboard won't flap around and potentially block air intakes nearly so easily as plastic will.
Believe it or not, though, what we found the most effective way to make use of barely adequate AC - Don't treat the room as a closed system. You've basically used the plastic sheets to build giant chimneys - Now take advantage of that fact, and along with a high volume fan above each rack, just exhaust the air at the top outside rather than recycle it back into the room... Think of it this way... You spec your cooling to work to perhaps 110F ambient, right? At the top of a full rack, with 50-60F going in the bottom, you probably have 120-130F going out the top. Does it take more work to cool 130F, or 110F, back to 50F? Not to mention, your normal ambient shouldn't come anywhere near 110F...
Renaming your administrator account gets you no additional security, only a false sense of one.
As simple of an improvement as blocking a "casual" attacker from RD'ing in as administrator by testing a few weak passwords, can make all the difference in the world. No, it won't even slow down a truly skilled cracker, but in the case of protecting Joe Sixpack, we want to save them primarily from themselves, including things Mr. S might do without knowing it (such as installing spyware or DRM device drivers on some newer copy protected CDs). Joe doesn't have elite international cyberterrorists out to get him, he just has viral porn popups and the occasional script-kiddie to deal with.
If you want to secure that account, disable it.
Not a bad suggestion! Hey, I'll admit, I just didn't think of it. Thus the usefulness of sharing information here on Slashdot.
Go ahead, be the first on your block to harden Windows with naive LUA. Spend the next two years chasing down truly arcane breakage.
I'll stand at the head of the line complaining that MS needs to make it a hell of a lot easier to run with reduced privelage, but really, it doesn't take that much effort... Not something Joe Sixpack could do, but something Joe Sixpack can use once properly set up for him.
First, you need exactly one third-party tool, and one nonstandard MS tool... Tweak UI on the MS side (I won't provide a link because they seem to move it weekly), and CPAU as the third-party tool.
Make your normal account a power user (still a little too powerful, but we'll take care of that). Install your AV software as admin, and everything else (except as noted below) as your normal user (using RunAs when necessary, but do not install anything else while actually logged in directly as admin).
Now, rename your true admin account (via a group policy). Create a new admin account (named something other than "administrator" or "owner", obviously). Create a restricted user account as well (you'll probably need to start it as a power user, and downgrade it once you finish all this annoyance).
Install anything network-related as your reduced permission user (browser, email (don't even bother trying to use Outlook as a non admin), instant messaging client, P2P app, and anything else you need). Don't bother configuring them yet, because for anything that stores its configuration in your profile, you'll just need to reconfigure them once you log in normally.
Now, as your normal user, use CPAU to create job files, to run your network apps as the reduced privelage user, and anything that absolutely requires admin rights to run as your new (but not renamed original!) admin account.
This gets you about 95% functional, and a hell of a lot safer than just running as an admin.
Now, you'll notice you can print or see Samba shares from any of your network apps. Use Tweak UI's ACL editor to give your reduced permission user access to your printers and shares (do a google search on this one... Not at all difficult, but more steps than I want to list here).
Now, when you notice a problem with a program, go to its installed directory, and if applicable, its profile directory, and give it fairly promiscuous permissions (ie, give everyone everything but full control). File permission wise, that amounts to almost the same thing as always running as admin, but limits any damage to the particular program too poorly written to behave. This alone makes most programs that demand to run as admin, runnable as a mere power user.
This really only leaves one problem, which you can fix, but probably shouldn't... Depending on what program you run, your "my documents" and desktop will not point to "your" documents and desktop. Just keep that in mind when you download a file to the desktop and then can't find it anywhere.
Meanwhile, I'll be using software on platforms that figured out most of this stuff a decade ago.
Great point... But like it or not (personally, I do not), people can't use Linux for everything. If you like RTS games, for example, you can't escape the simple fact that Microsoft makes the best of them, and they sure as hell won't port to Linux any time soon. The same goes for most popular games, for that matter; they just don't run on Linux.
First that comes to mind is Tape backup. They store huge about of data, and are very cheap these days,
I take it you haven't dealt with many tape backups systems... I strongly encourage the world to let those useless piles of crap die, once and for all!
First, they do NOT come cheap. Using AIT3, the bese size match to what the parent mentioned at 100GB raw (DV will not compress even a little bit, so don't count on the inflated "after our magic compression algorithm runs" sizes), the drive alone will set you back $1700. Then add in a neat $50 per tape - And he needs two per full backup, just as his current size. Now compare that to buying a few 200GB IDE drives - $86 each, and you could probably shave 10-20% off that if you buy a ten pack.
Second, performance. That particular drive, the AIT3, gets 12MB/s. Compare that to 30-40MB/s for a modern HDD, then thow in a seek time best measured in seconds (or even over a minute in the worst case)...
Third, durability. A lot of people will say that you need to treat a HDD more carefully than a passive blob-o-plastic like a tape. That holds true to a point, but you can't just toss a data tape in a box in the attic like old family photos. I've seen falls from waist-high (ie, on the corner of a desk) break them. Leaving them in a hot car while you get lunch will destroy them. Overall, if you really want to ever recover data from a tape, you need to treat it just as delicately as you would a hard drive.
And speaking of resiliance - True story. At my workplace recently, we had a rather important system (one that we really couldn't afford a full day of downtime on) fail critically (as in, people coming in that morning complained of the smell of burning electronics). Not a problem, because it ran on PC hardware and we had complete backups of the system. One problem - Guess the source of the problem? The tape drive itself cooked, taking out the power supply which in turn took out everything else (judging by the degree of damage down that chain). So, we had great backups, alternate hardware, and no way to restore the backup onto the new machine. We had a new drive overnighted, but still, it cost us a day of downtime that really hurt us. And for those who will say "Well, duh, you didn't truly have a backup if you didn't have a backup drive, as well - At a small company, you try to convince your boss to spend part of your already tight budget on a $9k drive that will, in all likelhood, never even leave its original packaging. BTW, yes, we use tapes at my workplace. I loathe them, for all the reasons I've mentioned here.
Overall, tapes just suck as a form of backup. Get yourself a pile of external USB drives (a little more pricey than EIDE, but you can hot-swap them), and backup to those. You'll pay a LOT less up-front, have a backup solution IMO far superior to tapes, and "the drive" contains its own reading hardware, so no chance to have the media but lose the reader. Get 10, do nightly backups on a rotating set of them, and take one offsite every Sunday rotated on a monthly schedule. And the entire collection of them will cost about half as much as a single drive and pair of tapes.
Of course English is the dominate second language in the world.
In IT, English holds the majority by far. And Spanish doesn't even come in second - You have Japanese and German as distant seconds, with Hebrew and French as dark-horse thirds.
Attempts at internationalization simply hinder the adoption of English as the next ubiquitous academic language. Much like Greek and Latin during the Roman empire - The rabble may all speak Spanish, but those who want to appear educated speak English. Of course, Latin later went on to hold the same place, so perhaps some day Spanish will function as the language of the academic elite.
Personally, I don't have great hope of us not blowing up the planet before then. So I code with English as my target language. Speak it, or don't use my programs, doesn't much matter to me
Many of those who care about i18n do not speak English at all!
I don't think that needs an exclamation mark - It doesn't come as a particular surprise to anyone. If you speak English, you don't have the least interest in "internationalization", which basically means "Make it accessible to people who don't speak English".
And I don't write this as a xenophobic rant... I regularly use programs written by Japanese coders, and a few in German. And do I sit around complaining about how those coders, who already have given me something I find useful, should do extra work unrelated to the purpose of the program to make those programs more friendly to me? No. I recognized my inability to read the menus and such as a shortcoming in myself, and made the effort to learn enough Japanese and German (albeit very little) to navigate those programs.
Or to put that another way - If Bill Gates only spoke Italian, a LOT more people would have learned at least a basic proficiency in it by now.
because we can that justifies the activity?
No. The entire point of this whole topic involves people no longer needing to justify their actions.
When we know we want to do something wrong, and really do care about doing the right thing, we try to justify our actions.
With copyright, people no longer feel they do anything wrong... Illegal, perhaps (with an infinitessimally small risk of getting caught), but wrong, no.
The argument made by the parent points out why, under the conditions just described, people might still choose to pay for something, when they don't really need to.
You can pick your own daisies, but you might buy them from a beggar to give them at least the small bit of dignity of "selling" something to you rather than begging you for money. If that beggar started the transaction by pissing in your cheerios, would you still feel inclined to let them keep their dignity?
Seems odd that not one of my three person sample had a conviction even remotely close to urinating in public.
As a disclaimer, I think that real rapists should experience castration for the first offense... Real child abusers should experience everything they did to the child in question, scaled up by a factor equal to the age difference.
However, the our legal system currently favors the "victim" (particularly female "victims") with shockingly few safeguards in place to prevent, for example, outright lying... Such as third party corroboration or material evidence (let the shouts of "But most rapes occur with no witnesses and the victims take too long to go to the police" begin...)
So playing Devil's advocate:
Case 1) Consensual sex with a 17YO in a state with an age-of-consent of 18.
Case 2) Acquaintance rape "after-the-fact" occurs FAR more often than people like to admit.
Case 3) Spanked your child in public lately?
Seriously, what's the big deal...
I wondered that myself...
Why can't I just buy a router, plug it in and have it autosetup everything I need?
For the most part, you can. Most Cable/DSL routers these days have a reasonably secure config as the default (admittedly with horribly insecure default passwords, but since they only let you admin them from the LAN side, not too much risk there). They auto-NAT you, act as a DHCP server, and provide about as effective of a firewall as the average person could ask for.
On the computer side, assuming Joe Sixpack pretty much exclusively runs Windows - If XP detects a network card, it configures it, defaulting to DHCP. Thus, you literally can just buy a NIC, throw it in your PC, and hook it up to your shiney new Netgear/DLink/Linksys router, which in turn goes to your cablemodem, and poof, you have a home LAN.
Now, will this satisfy most "real" geeks? Hell no! But except for SSH'ing directly into my masquerading gateway from the outside, it provides 99% of the functionality and security.
...and rival in that use costs the providers money to keep access available. Forget the jargon and use some common sense. If all Slashdot readers stop viewing ads and their ad revenue disappears, Rob will or will not keep offering free access?
... Or should they force me to double their
bandwidth, with a literally less than
zero chance of my clicking on their ads?
1) Content costs money to serve, even if provided basically for free (as with Slashdot, where the audience equals the authors, for the most part).
2) Ads cost money to serve - In many (most?) cases, more than the actual content does (a single 27Kb ad vs 4k of text and 9k of "real" images, for example... And how often do you see just one ad on a page that uses them?).
3) I will not ever, EVER, EVER buy something based on advertising. I buy products based on needing something, doing research to find the best widget, and then use a site like Pricewatch to find the best price on that widget (granted, you could call Pricewatch a form of advertising in itself, but I hope anyone reading this has the capacity to appreciate the difference). At no step does advertising enter that process, with one exception - I will deliberately not buy something or from a store who has annoyed me with overly obnoxious ads.
So... Would you say Rob (or any site owner) would do better to let me block ads, thereby dropping the bandwidth per page roughly in half (in the case of Slashdot)...
As for the whole free-ride / piracy / stealing / depriving-whomever-of-whatever arguments... I really just do not care anymore. I can actually thank the **AA for performing exactly one service for me - They have helped me get rid of all sense of guilt regarding how I use or abuse any intangible "goods". If I can get to it, I consider it "mine" to do with as a please - Only both the threat and likelyhood of incarceration in the nation with the single largest per-capita prison population limits how I use such information. While the threat may always exist, the likelyhood (unless I do something glaringly stupid) simply doesn't exist.
I'll still buy CDs, books, and what-have you from my favorite artists - I do so out of a desire to reward them for providing me pleasure, and as an incentive to make more. But the idea of an "obligation" to fork over something of mine, just to do a taste test of what amounts to pickled dog shit - Nope. Not even a little.
Some also feel that Microsoft is trying to strong-arm the industry into the adoption of an incomplete and not accepted standard.
...And some (like me) feel that anything from
Hotmail most likely counts as spam anyway, and
have the entire domain in my filter list.
So Hotmail can't get mail from me anymore. Boo-frickin'-hoo. What next, AOL doing the same? Then perhaps Yahoo?
Sorry, but until a major provider that matters picks an anti-spam tech, they will accomplish nothing more than effectively depriving their customers from using email.
Also, there is the issue of "color"
Wow... THANK YOU for that link. I have stumbled for years to explain to friends how the game of "law" doe not equal "logic", nor even "physical reality", and never come up with such an eloquent explanation.
Truly amazing. Again, my thanks.
Sure, shouting "7" means nothing, but a better analogy could be shouting "7 is the first the number of your gym locker combination from 15 years ago"
With normal P2P, yes.
With the specific example I had in mind, no... But not totally unrelated (I actually took it as a 6-digit number and factored it, so "7" doesn't occur anywhere in that ancient combo). That example came the closest to a commonly understood idea I could think of as an analogy at the time.
With a Reed-Solomon parity set (or something similar), you do even better than that. If I say a 7, without all the rest of the blocks, it quite literally means nothing. Not a part of it, not a factor, just random noise that, given the right context, might have meaning. Given a different context, you could get an entirely unrelated (and possible still meaningful, though not even remotely similar to the original!) result.
So let's say I encode my locker combination, and you encode a copyrighted song, but we both only make a file containing a "7" available. Which of us has infringed on that copyright? Both of us? Neither of us? And if we define it by intent, what if neither of us actually knows what that "7" goes to, just an unidentifiable file sitting in our BT cache?
Perhaps as a better analogy, I give you a 1k file that contains as close to random data as anyone could measure. I can, after the fact, give you another 1k file (also as close to random as we can determine) that will, with a simple XOR, turn that first file into anything. Into the first 1k of an MP3, into a small jpeg, into classified info we'd both vanish for knowing (though I'd admittedly have to know that first). And lest you say that second file "contains" the information by itself, I could send you a third file with the same property, the ability to turn the second into literally any 1k block. So, does that first totally random 1k block violate anyone's copyrights?
It is far more elegant than that. It is about making a system where any N packets from any sources can be combined to the original file.
So they shifted from sending the actual file, to sending (basically) a set of PAR2 slices of that file. If you end up with any n >= N nonidentical blocks, you have the whole file. Not really all that new of an idea, though the first time (that I know of) that anyone applied it to live P2P.
However, we've had a much less live form of P2P (requiring in-between servers to allow for time-shifting, of a sort) for decades, now - Usenet. And in that medium, PAR2 has a nice long history of use in binary groups.
Woo-woo. Microsoft made - sorry, proposed to make - that happen in real time, rather than a few hours later. Does this sound useful? Sure. Does it sound like something Bram could adapt BT to do in under a day's coding? Yup.
You do, however, have to wonder about the legal implications of this - in a very real way, if you have anything short of the whole solution, even 99 out of 100 blocks, you have absolutely nothing even remotely resembling the original file. So could the **AA bust someone for hosting a single block? Quite literally, that amounts to busting someone for shouting "7". Sure, together with 2, 2, 2, 11, 11, and 37, you could obtain my gym locker combination from 15 years ago. But the "7" alone means nothing in isolation.
Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four.
When looking for a good control group (though, you can't really call them that in a post hoc study), you want them as similar as possible to the treatment group.
The Amish live a radically different lifestyle from your typical American. Does their low Autism rate result from a low vaccination rate? Does it result from using minimal, if any, AC power? Pesticides? Growth hormones in meat? Formaldahyde from common modern building materials? I could go on.
One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three -- including one child adopted from outside the Amish community -- had received their vaccines.
Here, you have a very strong selection bias. You have four people. Three of them received immunizations; how many others received immunizations? Lower than average, but certainly more than three. One lived near a power plant; how many others lived near a power plant? And if none of them lived near a power plant or received immunizations, do you suppose a motivated investigator could have found other potential sources of mercury exposure? How about a school chemistry lab? An old thermometer? The ever-popular "high local levels" in the ground?
Personally, I do suspect a link between mercury and autism. It might not even have anything to do with thimerosal, just a side effect of our massive all-around habit of polluting the hell out of our water, air, soil, and food. But a post hoc study of a radically different so-called "control" group with findings justified by a glaringly obvious selection bias - No. Sorry, but even the Bush administration could spot science that bad.
i already said this reply, but i am but a mere anonymous peon ;(
Sorry, no sunshine-stealing intended...
Why not just make an account? Free, easy, fairly privacy-protecting (ie, they don't care if you lie about your info other than email addy)... And it instantly gives you a bonus to posting (not to mention many people, myself included, tend to browse with ACs having a -5 modifier).
Not to mention, you get to keep the karma earned for your good posts...
If you are trying to get a user to switch over one of the important things you can point out is that linux works like windows.
"So, um... Why would I switch?"
"Well, you get Linux for free."
"I got Windows for free too, with my new PC"
"Yeah, but not really free, you actually paid for it"
"Hmm, that sucks... But should I just throw that money away???"
"Okay, Linux also has a lot of free software for it..."
"Like WinSite? Or TuCows?"
"Well, yes, but also free as in speech, not just beer!"
"Uhh... You mean like taht whole 'I speak, it types' thing?"
"Mmm, no. With Linux programs, you usually get the source code."
"What do I do with that?"
"Well, you can modify it to make new versions of the program yourself."
"I can barely use Excel, that sounds even harder."
"If you don't want to, you don't need to code, but you at least have that choice."
(Thinks for a moment)
"Riiiiiiight - So instead of using software I already paid for, with a basically-sane and consistent interface, I should switch to something that I need to manage these library things in, just to get an interface that clashes with itself, for theoretical benefits that I can't actually use? Thanks, but I'll stick with Windows."
(Awkward silence)
"Say, have you considered a Mac?"
"Don't go there."
"Gotcha."
And we wonder why people don't switch?