"Fascinating. I took your point, and pondered the religious implications of this styrofoam cup of coffee. I did not come up with anything significant--perhaps you could enlighten me?"
Styrofoam is a petroleum product. The leading theory of petroleum's origin is that it is "formed from the decayed remains of prehistoric marine animals and terrestrial plants" (Wikipedia).
The age of Earth certainly has many religious implications.
I think small memory problems are extremely common, but not often talked about. I happen to have very poor short term memory and selective long-term memory.
When someone calls for my wife and she isn't home there is almost zero chance I will remember to give her the message, though I sometimes remember a few days later.
I'll often be reading an article on the Net and see a term I want to look up, but by the time I open Wikipedia or Google I can't remember what that term was so I have to go back and read it again, at which point I clearly remember what it was.
I'm also poor with names, but great with faces. I can know somebody for years, but if I don't see them for a couple of years there is a great chance I won't remember their name. I recognize faces in shopping malls or out on the street all the time, but I'm afraid to approach someone whose name I cannot remember.
I often forget tasks at work, but I manage well enough to hold down a great job thanks to a thousand post-it notes and to-do lists. I can also remember passwords very well, including randomly generated passwords from ten years ago. My brain is filled with IPs and passwords for countless servers I don't even manage anymore.
But we either have to learn to live with our problems or fail miserably in life. The amazing thing about the human brain is that it will almost always find a way to compensate for its deficiencies.
The blessing and curse with PCs, and Windows has this problem as well, has always been the plentiful hardware choices. Mac enthusiasts taunted PC users with their superior plug and play that was only made possible because of the limited hardware and controlled environment.
Linux on PowerPC was never big enough nor important enough to reach that level of hardware support.
Linux on Intel Macs might just do that. For one thing, there is a lot less work to do. Presumably Intel Mac Linux apps will be binary compatible with x86 Linux apps. This leaves the Linux developer community to work on hardware specifics and Mac plug and play compatibility. There is no reason why Linux can't work with all the same devices that work on Mac OS.
"history of the Internet, how computers talk to each other, what a hard drive does, etc."
I think you should skip most of that. At least keep them extraordinarily brief. History of the Internet shouldn't be more than two sentences. How computers talk should be about one sentence explaining that it's exactly like how people talk on telephones, but computers use computer sounds instead of voices. A hard drive is a file cabinet where your computer stores documents.
Any more complicated than that and your book won't be any better than existing books. Few new computer users even care about that sort of thing, so get it out of the way in "additional information" bubbles or something like that.
You need to provide the content that techies normally answer for their families:
1. How do I attach a photo to an email (provide examples in Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail, Thunderbird, etc).
2. What are viruses and how can I stop them? Explain a virus in terms of a biological virus that humans get. Some are like colds that go away and others are like cancer that kill your computer. Provide a link to AVG Free with screen captures detailing how to keep it updated.
3. Installing new computer accessories. Everybody buys a digital camera or a printer that comes with a CD. Explain the steps involved for setting up most printers and digital cameras. Show exactly what a USB cable and port looks like as well as a serial cable and port. Most beginners do not know this and many are afraid to plug anything into their computers. Tell them that making a mistake won't harm their computer because cables can't fit where they don't belong.
4. Direct people to places where they can get good free software for things such as creating calendars and photo albums.
5. Keep your book directed at Windows users. Even if you love Macs it's too hard to provide this information about more than one OS without confusing readers who only know their computer is a Dell. You'll need to instruct them how to tell which email client they have, what the icon looks like, etc.
6. Show people how to clean up their desktop by deleting unused icons. Windows sort of does this, but not in an intuitive way. Many beginners and even intermediate users won't delete icons from their desktop and have trouble finding things because of it.
I'm sure I could think of more. I gave my mom an Ubuntu Linux PC in August for her birthday. She's 65 and it's the first computer she's ever used. She has never once asked me how the Net works or about the history of computers. She just wants to send email, look at digital photos she takes and send them to people. Other than for Gmail she doesn't really use the Net at all.
It might be a good idea to separate your book into beginner and advanced topics. Beginner topics discuss how to do basic things like attaching photos to email while advanced topics can include creating online photo albums for family, removing red eye from photos, etc.
"The reason those submitters earn their reputation is because you haven't killed his or her stories before."
I come to Slashdot to read good stories. I don't even bother reading who submitted it because that's not part of the story. If these "troublemakers" are indeed submitting good stories then why should anybody care? Maybe Taco should care because he has to wade through a dozen stories by this one user until he finds a good one, but as a reader you only see the good story.
I would approve of editors changing URLs for personal blogs to the original article URL since nobody wants to read a blog anyway unless it happens to contain relevant content about the story that can't be found in the original article.
Not only have the early deaths of CD-Rs been greatly exaggerated before, but even the lifespan of pressed CDs were (are?) hotly disputed. In the early 80's I heard all about how CDs would last forever because each play didn't degrade the quality ever so slightly like it did with cassette tapes and vinyl records. Then in the late 80's a group of researchers determined that CDs would probably only last ten years, for whatever reason.
I got my first CD-RW drive when it was a $700 2x model well over ten years ago. The first things I burned were a bootleg Tragically Hip CD and a few rented Playstation games. I still play that Hip CD and recently I dugg out my Playstation collection to use with the epsxe emulator and they all still work great, though I can't remember which of my burned games were copied when.
I have had a few CDs and DVDs go bad, but they've always been really cheap media. Even cheap CD-Rs have been ok, but I have noticed that cheap DVD-Rs can be very poor quality and sometimes the data won't last through the night. These are usually identifiable because at least half the time the data will be corrupt straight out of the burner. You don't have to spend a lot to get good media, just don't get the cheapest media you can find.
That depends what distro you use. Red Hat Enterprise certainly isn't designed to run on a low-end computer out of the box, but Vector Linux is and I can guarantee you that Vector will outperform any Windows OS (incl. 95 and 98) on older hardware.
The main difference is that with Windows what you get out of the box is largely what you will end up using. With Linux you can take a RHEL system running a fat desktop and put a light-weight desktop environment or window manager in place of Gnome and you've got yourself a fast machine. Trim down some unneeded services and you're pretty much where Vector Linux takes you by default.
"Because Windows in its infinate wisdom looks beyond the filename and looks at the contents of the file"
MS rightfully gets chastised when Windows handles a file a certain way *only* because of its file extension. Now you're upset that Windows actually does look at the content? That's what it's supposed to do and is why binary filetypes have headers.
The problem is that non-executables shouldn't have executable code in them. Any code that is there shouldn't be run. It's a bad design decision from a simpler day when everyone wasn't networked.
I ran the vulnerability checker from http://www.grc.com/sn/notes-020.htm and it said I am not vulnerable when running under Wine 0.9.4. I'm not sure what it would have meant if it said I *was* vulnerable, but I'm happy all the same. I am scared stiff that one day my ~/.wine directory will become infested with all sorts of Windows viruses and spyware and I'll be forced to run rm -r ~/.wine. *shudder* These things are never easy to fix.
Maybe I should see if Norton Antivirus runs under Wine.
"What's the liability for the 3rd party if their patch screws something up in a bad way? Zippo. That's (part of) the reason why it takes longer to put out an "official" patch."
What's the liability if MS screws up a patch? They do it all the time, but I don't hear anything about them being sued or compensating businesses they've hurt.
And the reason you can't just rip it out is the same reason IE isn't going to support standards: MS needs IE to run all the crap that's already been written for it, especially on intranets.
"No they don't! This time, Canadians can buy them too!"
Yeah, but we're all raging terrorists up here. You guys are *so* screwed now! We've been waiting years to be able to crack your Windows passwords, but now that we can buy Symantec software we can finally bypass the Win98 login screen on all the covert CIA workstations.
This will stop people who actually want their fair use rights from making their own copies, but will do nothing to stop the people selling pirate copies on the street or the release groups putting the content on the net. I doubt there will be even a single day where releases are stopped because of this.
It'd be an interesting move in terms of Google having the client-side portion of their expanding platform. If they make it so other developers can build their own apps on top of the Google platform, Google can become the defacto "live" software vendor.
Want anti-virus? Use Kaspersky's Google app. Word Processor? Sun has Googlized Star Office. It sounds a lot like what MS is doing with MS Live. While I don't agree that it makes sense for MS, it does for Google.
However, Google must know that getting a browser deployed on many desktops is extremely difficult. They only need the browser if they want to customize the rendering with non-standard extensions. In this case, their low G-Opera market share will cripple their apps that require the non-standard stuff. If they don't want to add their own extensions then I don't see why building a custom Firefox browser isn't a better option for them since it still conforms to standards better than Opera (Acid2 notwithstanding).
Perhaps you think games like Mario Sunshine and Mario Strikers are for children without realizing that they're two of the best games on any platform in many years. Just because nearly everybody says that Nintendo only makes kids games doesn't mean it's true.
"There hasn't been a proper next generation since the Sega Saturn."
Yeah... how many bits is the 360 anyway? Bits as a performance measurement sort of went away with the PS2 generation. Nintendo's last try at it was with the N64, but I have no idea how many bits Gamecube is.
I agree. I bought a Gamecube for my son for Christmas. The Cube was $70 (used) and I got six games for under $100 (only one game was over $20 and one was buy 2 get 1 free). There are tons of new $20 games at Wal-Mart or used games at EB from $15. Even Best Buy has a lot of new games for $29. The really big-name games are more expensive, such as most new Mario games going for $59, but that's the standard price for most games on other consoles.
Considering that the next gen games are supposed to cost more to develop on 360 and PS3 while Nintendo is working to make games cheaper, I don't expect this trend to change.
I think you're right, but the interview is from a Playstation magazine so I'm not surprised that the Rev wasn't mentioned.
I suspect XBox and Playstation mags will ignore the Revolution as part of the console battle. They don't want to tip everybody off that something interesting is going on elsewhere. It'll be ok for a PS magazine to mention XBox 360 because the two consoles are essentially twins. There's almost no point in buying both.
Slashdot Mirror
"Fascinating. I took your point, and pondered the religious implications of this styrofoam cup of coffee. I did not come up with anything significant--perhaps you could enlighten me?"
Styrofoam is a petroleum product. The leading theory of petroleum's origin is that it is "formed from the decayed remains of prehistoric marine animals and terrestrial plants" (Wikipedia).
The age of Earth certainly has many religious implications.
In Sovient Russia the Flying Spaghetti Monster damns you!
If it was raining... now *that* would be ironic.
I think small memory problems are extremely common, but not often talked about. I happen to have very poor short term memory and selective long-term memory.
When someone calls for my wife and she isn't home there is almost zero chance I will remember to give her the message, though I sometimes remember a few days later.
I'll often be reading an article on the Net and see a term I want to look up, but by the time I open Wikipedia or Google I can't remember what that term was so I have to go back and read it again, at which point I clearly remember what it was.
I'm also poor with names, but great with faces. I can know somebody for years, but if I don't see them for a couple of years there is a great chance I won't remember their name. I recognize faces in shopping malls or out on the street all the time, but I'm afraid to approach someone whose name I cannot remember.
I often forget tasks at work, but I manage well enough to hold down a great job thanks to a thousand post-it notes and to-do lists. I can also remember passwords very well, including randomly generated passwords from ten years ago. My brain is filled with IPs and passwords for countless servers I don't even manage anymore.
But we either have to learn to live with our problems or fail miserably in life. The amazing thing about the human brain is that it will almost always find a way to compensate for its deficiencies.
Great story. Tragic, scary and depressing, but great nonetheless.
The blessing and curse with PCs, and Windows has this problem as well, has always been the plentiful hardware choices. Mac enthusiasts taunted PC users with their superior plug and play that was only made possible because of the limited hardware and controlled environment.
Linux on PowerPC was never big enough nor important enough to reach that level of hardware support.
Linux on Intel Macs might just do that. For one thing, there is a lot less work to do. Presumably Intel Mac Linux apps will be binary compatible with x86 Linux apps. This leaves the Linux developer community to work on hardware specifics and Mac plug and play compatibility. There is no reason why Linux can't work with all the same devices that work on Mac OS.
Summary: "includes a step-by-step account of how someone goes about setting up an adware business, manages botnets and (thankfully) gets caught."
1. Setup adware company.
2. Manage botnets.
3. Skip getting caught step.
4. Profit!
Of course, because IPs of Slashdotters are probably much more vulnerable than those of random web users.
"history of the Internet, how computers talk to each other, what a hard drive does, etc."
I think you should skip most of that. At least keep them extraordinarily brief. History of the Internet shouldn't be more than two sentences. How computers talk should be about one sentence explaining that it's exactly like how people talk on telephones, but computers use computer sounds instead of voices. A hard drive is a file cabinet where your computer stores documents.
Any more complicated than that and your book won't be any better than existing books. Few new computer users even care about that sort of thing, so get it out of the way in "additional information" bubbles or something like that.
You need to provide the content that techies normally answer for their families:
1. How do I attach a photo to an email (provide examples in Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail, Thunderbird, etc).
2. What are viruses and how can I stop them? Explain a virus in terms of a biological virus that humans get. Some are like colds that go away and others are like cancer that kill your computer. Provide a link to AVG Free with screen captures detailing how to keep it updated.
3. Installing new computer accessories. Everybody buys a digital camera or a printer that comes with a CD. Explain the steps involved for setting up most printers and digital cameras. Show exactly what a USB cable and port looks like as well as a serial cable and port. Most beginners do not know this and many are afraid to plug anything into their computers. Tell them that making a mistake won't harm their computer because cables can't fit where they don't belong.
4. Direct people to places where they can get good free software for things such as creating calendars and photo albums.
5. Keep your book directed at Windows users. Even if you love Macs it's too hard to provide this information about more than one OS without confusing readers who only know their computer is a Dell. You'll need to instruct them how to tell which email client they have, what the icon looks like, etc.
6. Show people how to clean up their desktop by deleting unused icons. Windows sort of does this, but not in an intuitive way. Many beginners and even intermediate users won't delete icons from their desktop and have trouble finding things because of it.
I'm sure I could think of more. I gave my mom an Ubuntu Linux PC in August for her birthday. She's 65 and it's the first computer she's ever used. She has never once asked me how the Net works or about the history of computers. She just wants to send email, look at digital photos she takes and send them to people. Other than for Gmail she doesn't really use the Net at all.
It might be a good idea to separate your book into beginner and advanced topics. Beginner topics discuss how to do basic things like attaching photos to email while advanced topics can include creating online photo albums for family, removing red eye from photos, etc.
"WoW ! So other cows "may" have wheels?"
Evolution, man.
"The reason those submitters earn their reputation is because you haven't killed his or her stories before."
I come to Slashdot to read good stories. I don't even bother reading who submitted it because that's not part of the story. If these "troublemakers" are indeed submitting good stories then why should anybody care? Maybe Taco should care because he has to wade through a dozen stories by this one user until he finds a good one, but as a reader you only see the good story.
I would approve of editors changing URLs for personal blogs to the original article URL since nobody wants to read a blog anyway unless it happens to contain relevant content about the story that can't be found in the original article.
Not only have the early deaths of CD-Rs been greatly exaggerated before, but even the lifespan of pressed CDs were (are?) hotly disputed. In the early 80's I heard all about how CDs would last forever because each play didn't degrade the quality ever so slightly like it did with cassette tapes and vinyl records. Then in the late 80's a group of researchers determined that CDs would probably only last ten years, for whatever reason.
I got my first CD-RW drive when it was a $700 2x model well over ten years ago. The first things I burned were a bootleg Tragically Hip CD and a few rented Playstation games. I still play that Hip CD and recently I dugg out my Playstation collection to use with the epsxe emulator and they all still work great, though I can't remember which of my burned games were copied when.
I have had a few CDs and DVDs go bad, but they've always been really cheap media. Even cheap CD-Rs have been ok, but I have noticed that cheap DVD-Rs can be very poor quality and sometimes the data won't last through the night. These are usually identifiable because at least half the time the data will be corrupt straight out of the burner. You don't have to spend a lot to get good media, just don't get the cheapest media you can find.
That depends what distro you use. Red Hat Enterprise certainly isn't designed to run on a low-end computer out of the box, but Vector Linux is and I can guarantee you that Vector will outperform any Windows OS (incl. 95 and 98) on older hardware.
The main difference is that with Windows what you get out of the box is largely what you will end up using. With Linux you can take a RHEL system running a fat desktop and put a light-weight desktop environment or window manager in place of Gnome and you've got yourself a fast machine. Trim down some unneeded services and you're pretty much where Vector Linux takes you by default.
"Because Windows in its infinate wisdom looks beyond the filename and looks at the contents of the file"
MS rightfully gets chastised when Windows handles a file a certain way *only* because of its file extension. Now you're upset that Windows actually does look at the content? That's what it's supposed to do and is why binary filetypes have headers.
The problem is that non-executables shouldn't have executable code in them. Any code that is there shouldn't be run. It's a bad design decision from a simpler day when everyone wasn't networked.
I ran the vulnerability checker from http://www.grc.com/sn/notes-020.htm and it said I am not vulnerable when running under Wine 0.9.4. I'm not sure what it would have meant if it said I *was* vulnerable, but I'm happy all the same. I am scared stiff that one day my ~/.wine directory will become infested with all sorts of Windows viruses and spyware and I'll be forced to run rm -r ~/.wine. *shudder* These things are never easy to fix.
Maybe I should see if Norton Antivirus runs under Wine.
"What's the liability for the 3rd party if their patch screws something up in a bad way? Zippo. That's (part of) the reason why it takes longer to put out an "official" patch."
What's the liability if MS screws up a patch? They do it all the time, but I don't hear anything about them being sued or compensating businesses they've hurt.
And the reason you can't just rip it out is the same reason IE isn't going to support standards: MS needs IE to run all the crap that's already been written for it, especially on intranets.
"No they don't! This time, Canadians can buy them too!"
Yeah, but we're all raging terrorists up here. You guys are *so* screwed now! We've been waiting years to be able to crack your Windows passwords, but now that we can buy Symantec software we can finally bypass the Win98 login screen on all the covert CIA workstations.
Muhahahaaaa
This will stop people who actually want their fair use rights from making their own copies, but will do nothing to stop the people selling pirate copies on the street or the release groups putting the content on the net. I doubt there will be even a single day where releases are stopped because of this.
It'd be an interesting move in terms of Google having the client-side portion of their expanding platform. If they make it so other developers can build their own apps on top of the Google platform, Google can become the defacto "live" software vendor.
Want anti-virus? Use Kaspersky's Google app. Word Processor? Sun has Googlized Star Office. It sounds a lot like what MS is doing with MS Live. While I don't agree that it makes sense for MS, it does for Google.
However, Google must know that getting a browser deployed on many desktops is extremely difficult. They only need the browser if they want to customize the rendering with non-standard extensions. In this case, their low G-Opera market share will cripple their apps that require the non-standard stuff. If they don't want to add their own extensions then I don't see why building a custom Firefox browser isn't a better option for them since it still conforms to standards better than Opera (Acid2 notwithstanding).
Perhaps you think games like Mario Sunshine and Mario Strikers are for children without realizing that they're two of the best games on any platform in many years. Just because nearly everybody says that Nintendo only makes kids games doesn't mean it's true.
"There hasn't been a proper next generation since the Sega Saturn."
Yeah... how many bits is the 360 anyway? Bits as a performance measurement sort of went away with the PS2 generation. Nintendo's last try at it was with the N64, but I have no idea how many bits Gamecube is.
I agree. I bought a Gamecube for my son for Christmas. The Cube was $70 (used) and I got six games for under $100 (only one game was over $20 and one was buy 2 get 1 free). There are tons of new $20 games at Wal-Mart or used games at EB from $15. Even Best Buy has a lot of new games for $29. The really big-name games are more expensive, such as most new Mario games going for $59, but that's the standard price for most games on other consoles.
Considering that the next gen games are supposed to cost more to develop on 360 and PS3 while Nintendo is working to make games cheaper, I don't expect this trend to change.
I think you're right, but the interview is from a Playstation magazine so I'm not surprised that the Rev wasn't mentioned.
I suspect XBox and Playstation mags will ignore the Revolution as part of the console battle. They don't want to tip everybody off that something interesting is going on elsewhere. It'll be ok for a PS magazine to mention XBox 360 because the two consoles are essentially twins. There's almost no point in buying both.
"how many millions of iPods have been sold since last year and iTunes sales have only gone DOWN."
No, iTunes sales have only gone down from the third quarter of this year to so far in the fourth quarter. Year over year they are up.