To clarify the first item...at the TIME OF INSTALL, if you have more than 2 (yes I know i said 3, it was a typo) logical drives, NT will only allow you to use 1gb of the primary drive. I have seen this myself and have verified it with many others. Post-install it doesn't mind more drives, but it's damn annoying during install, especially since it doesn't tell you WHY you only get to use 1gb of that 9gb drive.
Ok, here's a nice list of reasons NT basically sucks, coming from the viewpoint of someone who has to admin several NT servers:
1) Don't dare try to install NT with more than 3 logical drives. It will only let you use 1GB of the primary drive.
2) Don't ever start up NT with one of your external RAID arrays unattatched. It will basically list the drives as offline, and won't let you do shit about it until you recreate the RAID container. And for the RAID unwashed out there, that means you gotta wipe the drives.
3) Need a BDC due to network growth? Better buy another server, cause you can't make an NT server become a PDC or BDC after installing it as neither. It's either reinstall an existing server or buy a new one.
4) Want to change just about anything? Better schedule a server downtime, cause you're rebooting. And for those of you who say "at least you don't have to reboot after changing the IP address", ever noticed how fucking unstable NT networking gets after you change that there IP without a reboot?
5) Got a wierd problem? Chances are you're gonna be stuck there for a nice long time with many many reboots, almost definitely a reinstall of the software in question, and a strong possibility of reinstalling NT.
I'll take having to know my way around rc scripts over NT shit any day. At least it's really hard to fuck up a *nix box enough to require a reinstall, or at least a big dose of stupidity, in which case what the hell are you doing running a server?
NT means MORE admin time, MORE potential to royally fubar the server, MORE downtime. In the last 9 months, I have been activelty administrating a number of *nix machines and several NT machines. I've never had to stay at work late as a result of the *nix machines. The NT machines have given me many long nights of extreme pain. Especially that one where I was at work till 4 am. I wanted to drive to Redmond right then and slap every member of the NT development team.
"Microsoft. Where do you want to go today? Better be close, 'cause you're walking."
Agreed on the debate tactic comment there. Just, when making examples about technical issues, remember that UNIX-style OS's often have 1,001 ways to do the same thing. Heck, customizability and flexibility are the things I love about this side of the OS fence.
The main reason that FreeBSD is so source-centric is that the source is constantly being updated. This isn't to say that it's necessary to actually track -STABLE or -CURRENT regularly. I know many people with boxes still running off of 2.1. Not because they couldn't update them, but it's stable on their setup, and why fix what isn't broken? And for those of us who like to play with the new toys and features, the CVSup servers make it a breeze to keep our/usr/src up to date. And when there's a bugfix, you'll get it as soon as you cvsup.
As far as non-OS stuff like gimp, it would be simple enough to write a script to check ftp.freebsd.org's package repository, check the version number of the specified program against that which is listed in the installed package database, and if it's newer download and pkg_add it. In fact, it's probably been done already. All binary, no time for compiling.
If NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD all used the same kernel, this statement would make sense. But they don't. Each of the BSD's has their own goal, and most development is done towards the furtherance of those goals. NetBSD has portability, OpenBSD has security, and FreeBSD has stability/performance (at the expense of portability).
>>That opinion overlooks the most valuable natural resource. Time. Many, including myself, will agree that source updates are superior but what if you lack the time? You have 100 PCs that need to be fixed. Do you unzip and recompile on each one of them? A simple rpm -Uvh could do the work with half the time. Does that make it better? Possibly for that situation.
If you make world on all 100 machines, there's something wrong with you. You make buildworld _once_, on _one_ machine. NFS share out the/usr/src and/usr/obj directories of that machine, and make installworld on all your client machines. You get a fresh, proper system build on all the machines, and in a reasonable amount of time.
>>Once again, that is opinion. Lets say that you have a 50 user system and uptime is critical. Do you want to make a change and immediately kill your system? Obviously things being broken is a bad situation but wouldn't it be better if the entire system wasn't broken?
This is where it becomes important to, if you are actively tracking either the -STABLE tree or the -CURRENT tree, you read the appropriate mailing lists. When -CURRENT, my tree of choice for home use, was going through the ELF/CAM/Boot loader changes, I simply waited another week or two till the major problems had been resolved. I cvsup'd my tree, rebuilt world and kernel, ran disklabel to update the bootblocks, and had no problems. Thanks to the freebsd-current list, I knew when things had quieted down for the most part.
>>What was tied up in the bundle of sticks? A piece of Josh? Could we tell what bit? If it was a piece of Josh, did she tell Mike? I didn't think she did. If she did, why would they still be hoping to find him in the house?
Everyone I've talked to so far has a different answer for what's in the bundle. I think she kept the bundle from Mike to keep Mike from freaking out any more than he already had. And there weren't a whole lot of parts in the bundle....Josh could've just been roughed up a bit, not killed.
>>That was Mike standing in the corner? How did he get there so fast? And why was he just standing there? I didn't understand that bit about the legend. If somebody tells me to stand in a corner while he kills my friend, I would think I'd be trying to get away? Maybe it was Josh standing there (if it wasn't a piece of him that she found). But then where did Mike go? She was right behind him coming down the steps.
I think it was Mike in the corner. The build and jacket certainly make it seem so. Remember Mike had been whacked over the head as well, perhaps he was unconcious or under control of some sort. They weren't that close coming down the stairs. When it cuts to the black & white footage of Heather running down the steps, you hear the audio as if from the DAT that Mike has with him, and her screams are quite distant. Mike had torn down the stairs convinced he heard Josh, Heather took a moment longer to get started, and wasn't running quite as fast.
>>What were all the stick figures in the trees? Did they have any connection to anything else we saw in the movie? I would gather that the piles of stones represented the dead -- 7 original disappeared, 7 piles. 3 of them, 3 piles. But all the stick figures were never really explained.
I think they intentionally didn't count the stick figures in the film, but I'm willing to bet that there were 7 small figures and the 1 large "hairy" one (remember Mary's tale about the hairy old woman?). I think they were trying to avoid too many obvious 7 references. One that a lot of people I've talked to didn't catch: the house scene takes place during their 7th night in the woods.
Key escrow essentially renders encryption useless. As long as *somebody* besides you and the person you are communicating with has a copy of the key, that somebody could use it for all the right reasons or all the wrong. Quite simply, there's nobody I trust enough to have the responsibility of making sure it's always the right reasons. And if I were to make a list of large organizations and the trust I give them, I assure you the US govt and any corporations/organizations that work closely with it are nowhere near the top of that list.
Yesterday, myself and 2 coworkers of mine wanted to go see Blair Witch Project. One of the guys was taking a training class that was only a mile or so away from the theater, so he went to go pick up tickets for all of us (it's been sold out constantly around here). They told him he couldn't buy multiple tickets because he's only 20, and they had just instituted a policy that you must be 25 or older to purchase tickets. Never mind that he was buying the tickets for people older than himself (I'm 22, the other guy is 23). Being quite angry at this, we started looking for ways around it. The theater was too far away to possibly make a lunch-hour ticket run.
We called up Moviephone, and purchased 3 tickets with absolutely no problem in 1 order. Anyone with a credit card could do this. At the theater, they asked for the ID of the guy who ordered them, but didn't ask to see my ID or the ID of the other guy I was with. And we weren't too obviously together, we had stood aside while he went through the line to get the tickets.
Now you're probably saying this is all fine and dandy because we were able to see a movie we were legally allowed to see without too much more trouble. And I'd agree. Except that Moviephone charges a $1.50 service charge _per ticket_. Yeah, that's not a lot of money, but it's the principle of the thing. We had to pay extra to see something perfectly legal and allowable for us to see because of a damn stupid rule.
The children don't need any protection mandated by government or corporations. If you don't want your kids to see it, that's fine. If they manage to see it anyway, then you need to work on your parenting skills.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/04/18/222220 2&mode=thread is an earlier article with some links concerning the former CEO's forced resignation and the reasons behind it.
Anyone else remember the Great Crash of 1984, when the console market went to shit? Many of these same issues were brought up then. People started deciding that the price-plummeting early home computers were a better value proposition. Plus, they could feel better about buying an "educational" C-64 than an Atari 7800 or a Colecovision.
The market is getting to the point where another shift in consumer opinion of the value is possible. I think we'll soon see a violent price and feature war between consoles and PCs. Cheap, powerful PCs with upgradability built in to the price or payment plan (but something less lame that Gateway's YourWare). Consoles will get cheaper and push better-than-arcade-quality graphics and sound, while attempting to steal some fire from the PCs with Internet access and more education and productivity titles.
What will really be interesting is which side will give up more of its uniqueness to gain market share. To out-PC the PCs, the consoles have to become less of a console. To out-console the consoles, PCs have to lose some of what makes them not a console.
Should be a wild ride from the consumer perspective, with a whole lot of products that have huge feature lists and easily affordable pric e tags.
Why on earth would you want to kill a big strength like multi-OS compaitibility? You make it just for Linux, excluding even the other open source OS's out there, and are you really any better than a company who writes their program only for Windows? Linux isn't the only thing out there, and it will never be the only thing.
Why does a 19 member committee need $1.9 million to hold 4 meetings? That's just a damn waste and a half if you ask me. And do you really need a damn executive for 4 meetings? I could see hiring someone to take shorthand notes of the meetings, then having a team of people create a report based on the notes afterwards...but this is just damn ridiculous.
They better have the best damn doughnuts in the world for that kind of money.
Little tip for ya, buddy: Rules are generally NOT FOLLOWED. Thieves routinely break into stores, homes and cars...do you EXPECT to have your nice new car stereo stolen? No, but you'll still buy an alarm and always lock your doors. Do you expect your web server to be attacked? No, but you still secure it and keep up with security notices.
This is a perfect argument for encryption. We lock down everything else that's ours. Time to at least have the ability to lock down everything else too.
What was that focus group smoking? I want some...
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K7 Renamed "Athlon"
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· Score: 1
"Athlon" has got to be the most incredibly stupid name for an electronic device i've heard in a while. Athlon for some reason makes me think of the word "apathy", which is certainly not an attribute I want associated with my processor. I'll probably still buy one regardless of the name (What's really in a name, anyway?).
If they've gotta pick a silly name anyway, they could at least play up the humor factor and call it the Pooptron or Funktium or something.
Well, I look at most S3 chipsets the same way I look at cards with Trident chipsets. They're cheap, they're fairly reliable, and they do the job if you don't want to do anything graphics-heavy. But, compared to most other chips out there, they downright suck. They're slow, and often have slight issues (I used to have pallete strangeness all the time with my S3 ViRGE/VX based card).
All in all, if you're building a cheap box that is going to be in console mode 90% of the time and just the occasional jump to X for a quick tour with Netscape, they're fine. Otherwise, get a better chipset.
Re:To all those saying "don't watch it..."
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Bootlegging Buffy
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· Score: 2
If your emotional structure is so flaky that you can't even bear to watch a tv show that strikes close to a situation you've experienced, you have problems.
THINK, people! Emotions and feelings are fine and all, but give me a fucking break. Don't be so damned weak-willed. You want to see the real sign of the degradation of mankind? Look at the people who are too affected by everything, too offended by everything, and too lazy to DO THEIR OWN THING INSTEAD.
And, just so it's clear, I hate that damn show and never watch it anyway. It's a matter of principle.
It was a fun movie. I spent money on it twice (admittedly the second time was because I had nothing to do on a Friday evening and a couple of friends wanted to see it). But, the ultimate geek film Katz portrays it as it is not.
The concept is neat, but not exactly original. Pick up 5 random compilations of sci-fi short stories/novellas, and I can guarantee that you'll find at least one wake-up-from-a-virtual-world story. Keanu Reeve's futile attempts at acting really hurt the movie badly. Not to mention the various plot holes that are too numerous to go into here.
It was a visually stunning movie, although the special effects seemed forced at times. I could almost hear the director saying, "Let's see...how can we work in another slow-mo negligible gravity shot with those cool bullet-path effects?" At least it wasn't as bad on this point as Lost in Space...god what a horrible movie.
Overall, Phantom Menace was a much better geek film in my opinion. At least the Star Wars universe is a world of amazing imaginational creativity. The Matrix was mostly refried old conceptual beans.
You can find small aircraft like the Cessna 172 for prices in the $30-$40K range used. Sure, it's not VTOL, and it doesn't have the 'B' sci-fi movie look, but it's available now, plus they've been around forever and for good reason (fairly easy to maintain, pretty reliable).
If it would be legal to just take off from anywhere and land anywhere with one of those SkyCars, it would be kind of nifty. Now if you could just do that AND get out of having to file a flight plan, then I'd start saving my cash for one .
Re:I guess KDE is ok if you really want MS Windows
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The KDE Future
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· Score: 2
I agree with your points (that's why I don't use KDE or Gnome), but, it needs to be said..."If you don't like it, don't use it."
Unfortunately, as open source OS's become mainstream, people are going to want features like that. Joe/Jane Schmoe Secretary doesn't want to remember that.xls means it's an Excel document, they just want to click on it and see it. They simply don't care about what created what or what is able to open/view/edit what.
KDE and Gnome exist primarily for the Schmoes of the world. The goal they seek has little to do with those of us who truely prefer a command line to a GUI. Heck, I only start up XF86 and FVWM to use Netscape or Gimp. 99% of the time I'm in console mode. Does that make KDE and the like less valuable or good? No. Does it make me personally not want to use KDE or Gnome? Yes. But, there's only one me and there's a whole lot of Schmoes.
"Redundant" selection on new moderator thingy
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Slashdot Notes
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· Score: 5
I figured "redundant" would lower a score, not increase it. Found out after I used it that it does indeed give them a +1.
I took redundant to mean "me toos" or "too stupid/lazy/whatever to read the other comments so i didn't realize my point had been made 500 times by other people". Am I wrong?
-CURRENT rocks. Plus, the more people out there using -CURRENT on non-critical machines, the faster bugs can be found and reported to the development team. And the faster that happens, the faster cool and useful features can be stabilized and integrated into -STABLE, where I can feel safe using it on a server.
I tend to cvsup my -CURRENT box at home about once a week and rebuild everything, though often times i'll hold off for a few days if the traffic on the freebsd-current list indicates that doing so will probably break me badly:)
I used to work at a technical support call center sweatshop, working long and odd hours with pay that paid the bills but not much else. Employees were treated like doggie doo on the bottom of the boss' shoe. Management was flaky, bad techs were seldom punished for making the rest of our jobs harder, and repeated promises of raises and benefits took forever to be implemented, if they ever did. I worked there for approximately 3 years, mostly because I felt tied to the place since I helped get it off the ground (I was the first employee). I went through several "burnout" periods at that place. I also didn't think there was much better out there, as the previous jobs I'd had were often similar.
Back in June of last year, I finally got tired of it and quit the hellhole. Before too long, I was hired by the company I work for now. Wonderful benefits package, great pay, intelligent and hard working coworkers, etc. Also, burnout doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a threat with what I do now. Sure, fixing user problems gets mundane now and then, but it's sprinkled with a nice mix of server administration, network planning and implementation, a little programming now and then, and other things that I genuinely like to do. For the first time in my life, I can see myself being with the same company for a long, long time to come. And it feels good.
Back in high school we had a small Tesla coil for use in various physics demonstrations. Being the rather crazy idiot I was in those days, I decided to hold the output of the Tesla coil in my right hand, then pick up a copper pipe with my left hand and touch it to the radiator in the classroom, thereby grounding myself. I have never been in so much pain in my entire life. Well, actually, when I broke my tailbone skydiving it hurt more, but you get the point.
Don't know how you'd do this reliably with a remote device, but I can guarantee you that putting up a fight will be the last thing on someone's mind if you manage to do it. Convulsions will do that.
Not likely that other laws that infringe upon personal liberty would be affected by this sort of thing. Thanks to years of religious and governmental indoctrination on the subjects of drugs, sex, etc., it will be a very long time before Joe Average will be able to admit to himself that a "free" country's government should not overly concern itself with dictating morality for the masses.
M$ has had a "Windows 95 Y2K" patch available for some time, but it has several issues. You can see these issues for yourself at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/year2k/. A patch with this many issues is simply not acceptable. I am willing to bet that if I deployed the existing patch, come Jan 1 I'd be flooded with calls about the "minor" issues this patch leaves behind.
The company I work for takes quality and thoroughness very seriously. Issues are not generally accepted. This is why we deploy commercial UNIX variants and Linux whenever possible.
Slashdot Mirror
To clarify the first item...at the TIME OF INSTALL, if you have more than 2 (yes I know i said 3, it was a typo) logical drives, NT will only allow you to use 1gb of the primary drive. I have seen this myself and have verified it with many others. Post-install it doesn't mind more drives, but it's damn annoying during install, especially since it doesn't tell you WHY you only get to use 1gb of that 9gb drive.
Ok, here's a nice list of reasons NT basically sucks, coming from the viewpoint of someone who has to admin several NT servers:
1) Don't dare try to install NT with more than 3 logical drives. It will only let you use 1GB of the primary drive.
2) Don't ever start up NT with one of your external RAID arrays unattatched. It will basically list the drives as offline, and won't let you do shit about it until you recreate the RAID container. And for the RAID unwashed out there, that means you gotta wipe the drives.
3) Need a BDC due to network growth? Better buy another server, cause you can't make an NT server become a PDC or BDC after installing it as neither. It's either reinstall an existing server or buy a new one.
4) Want to change just about anything? Better schedule a server downtime, cause you're rebooting. And for those of you who say "at least you don't have to reboot after changing the IP address", ever noticed how fucking unstable NT networking gets after you change that there IP without a reboot?
5) Got a wierd problem? Chances are you're gonna be stuck there for a nice long time with many many reboots, almost definitely a reinstall of the software in question, and a strong possibility of reinstalling NT.
I'll take having to know my way around rc scripts over NT shit any day. At least it's really hard to fuck up a *nix box enough to require a reinstall, or at least a big dose of stupidity, in which case what the hell are you doing running a server?
NT means MORE admin time, MORE potential to royally fubar the server, MORE downtime. In the last 9 months, I have been activelty administrating a number of *nix machines and several NT machines. I've never had to stay at work late as a result of the *nix machines. The NT machines have given me many long nights of extreme pain. Especially that one where I was at work till 4 am. I wanted to drive to Redmond right then and slap every member of the NT development team.
"Microsoft. Where do you want to go today? Better be close, 'cause you're walking."
Agreed on the debate tactic comment there. Just, when making examples about technical issues, remember that UNIX-style OS's often have 1,001 ways to do the same thing. Heck, customizability and flexibility are the things I love about this side of the OS fence.
/usr/src up to date. And when
The main reason that FreeBSD is so source-centric is that the source is constantly being updated. This isn't to say that it's necessary to actually track -STABLE or -CURRENT regularly. I know many people with boxes still running off of 2.1. Not because they couldn't update them, but it's stable on their setup, and why fix what isn't broken? And for those of us who like to play with the new toys and features, the CVSup servers make it a breeze to keep our
there's a bugfix, you'll get it as soon as you cvsup.
As far as non-OS stuff like gimp, it would be simple enough to write a script to check ftp.freebsd.org's package repository, check the version number of the specified program against that which is listed in the installed package database, and if it's newer download and pkg_add it. In fact, it's probably been done already. All binary, no time for compiling.
If NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD all used the same kernel, this statement would make sense. But they don't. Each of the BSD's has their own goal, and most development is done towards the furtherance of those goals. NetBSD has portability, OpenBSD has security, and FreeBSD has stability/performance (at the expense of portability).
I'd like to respond to your responses...
/usr/src and /usr/obj directories of that machine, and make installworld on all your client machines.
>>That opinion overlooks the most valuable natural resource. Time. Many, including myself, will agree that source updates are superior but what if you lack the time? You have 100 PCs that need to be fixed. Do you unzip and recompile on each one of them? A simple rpm -Uvh could do the work with half the time. Does that make it better? Possibly for that situation.
If you make world on all 100 machines, there's something wrong with you. You make buildworld _once_, on _one_ machine. NFS share out the
You get a fresh, proper system build on all the machines, and in a reasonable amount of time.
>>Once again, that is opinion. Lets say that you have a 50 user system and uptime is critical. Do you want to make a change and immediately kill your system? Obviously things being broken is a bad situation but wouldn't it be better if the entire system wasn't broken?
This is where it becomes important to, if you are actively tracking either the -STABLE tree or the -CURRENT tree, you read the appropriate mailing lists. When -CURRENT, my tree of choice for home use, was going through the ELF/CAM/Boot loader changes, I simply waited another week or two till the major problems had been resolved. I cvsup'd my tree, rebuilt world and kernel, ran disklabel to update the bootblocks, and had no problems. Thanks to the freebsd-current list, I knew when things had quieted down for the most part.
>>What was tied up in the bundle of sticks? A piece of Josh? Could we tell what bit? If it was a piece of Josh, did she tell Mike? I didn't think she did. If she did, why would they still be hoping to find him in the house?
Everyone I've talked to so far has a different answer for what's in the bundle. I think she kept the bundle from Mike to keep Mike from freaking out any more than he already had. And there weren't a whole lot of parts in the bundle....Josh could've just been roughed up a bit, not killed.
>>That was Mike standing in the corner? How did he get there so fast? And why was he just standing there? I didn't understand that bit about the legend. If somebody tells me to stand in a corner while he kills my friend, I would think I'd be trying to get away? Maybe it was Josh standing there (if it wasn't a piece of him that she found). But then where did Mike go? She was right behind him coming down the steps.
I think it was Mike in the corner. The build and jacket certainly make it seem so. Remember Mike had been whacked over the head as well, perhaps he was unconcious or under control of some sort. They weren't that close coming down the stairs. When it cuts to the black & white footage of Heather running down the steps, you hear the audio as if from the DAT that Mike has with him, and her screams are quite distant. Mike had torn down the stairs convinced he heard Josh, Heather took a moment longer to get started, and wasn't running quite as fast.
>>What were all the stick figures in the trees? Did they have any connection to anything else we saw in the movie? I would gather that the piles of stones represented the dead -- 7 original disappeared, 7 piles. 3 of them, 3 piles. But all the stick figures were never really explained.
I think they intentionally didn't count the stick figures in the film, but I'm willing to bet that there were 7 small figures and the 1 large "hairy" one (remember Mary's tale about the hairy old woman?). I think they were trying to avoid too many obvious 7 references. One that a lot of people I've talked to didn't catch: the house scene takes place during their 7th night in the woods.
Key escrow essentially renders encryption useless. As long as *somebody* besides you and the person you are communicating with has a copy of the key, that somebody could use it for all the right reasons or all the wrong. Quite simply, there's nobody I trust enough to have the responsibility of making sure it's always the right reasons. And if I were to make a list of large organizations and the trust I give them, I assure you the US govt and any corporations/organizations that work closely with it are nowhere near the top of that list.
Yesterday, myself and 2 coworkers of mine wanted to go see Blair Witch Project. One of the guys was taking a training class that was only a mile or so away from the theater, so he went to go pick up tickets for all of us (it's been sold out constantly around here). They told him he couldn't buy multiple tickets because he's only 20, and they had just instituted a policy that you must be 25 or older to purchase tickets. Never mind that he was buying the tickets for people older than himself (I'm 22, the other guy is 23). Being quite angry at this, we started looking for ways around it. The theater was too far away to possibly make a lunch-hour ticket run.
We called up Moviephone, and purchased 3 tickets with absolutely no problem in 1 order. Anyone with a credit card could do this. At the theater, they asked for the ID of the guy who ordered them, but didn't ask to see my ID or the ID of the other guy I was with. And we weren't too obviously together, we had stood aside while he went through the line to get the tickets.
Now you're probably saying this is all fine and dandy because we were able to see a movie we were legally allowed to see without too much more trouble. And I'd agree. Except that Moviephone charges a $1.50 service charge _per ticket_. Yeah, that's not a lot of money, but it's the principle of the thing. We had to pay extra to see something perfectly legal and allowable for us to see because of a damn stupid rule.
The children don't need any protection mandated by government or corporations. If you don't want your kids to see it, that's fine. If they manage to see it anyway, then you need to work on your parenting skills.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/04/18/222220 2&mode=thread is an earlier article with some links concerning the former CEO's forced resignation and the reasons behind it.
Anyone else remember the Great Crash of 1984, when the console market went to shit? Many of these same issues were brought up then. People started deciding that the price-plummeting early home computers were a better value proposition. Plus, they could feel better about buying an "educational" C-64 than an Atari 7800 or a Colecovision.
The market is getting to the point where another shift in consumer opinion of the value is possible. I think we'll soon see a violent price and feature war between consoles and PCs. Cheap, powerful PCs with upgradability built in to the price or payment plan (but something less lame that Gateway's YourWare). Consoles will get cheaper and push better-than-arcade-quality graphics and sound, while attempting to steal some fire from the PCs with Internet access and more education and productivity titles.
What will really be interesting is which side will give up more of its uniqueness to gain market share. To out-PC the PCs, the consoles have to become less of a console. To out-console the consoles, PCs have to lose some of what makes them not a console.
Should be a wild ride from the consumer perspective, with a whole lot of products that have huge feature lists and easily affordable pric e tags.
Why on earth would you want to kill a big strength like multi-OS compaitibility? You make it just for Linux, excluding even the other open source OS's out there, and are you really any better than a company who writes their program only for Windows? Linux isn't the only thing out there, and it will never be the only thing.
Why does a 19 member committee need $1.9 million to hold 4 meetings? That's just a damn waste and a half if you ask me. And do you really need a damn executive for 4 meetings? I could see hiring someone to take shorthand notes of the meetings, then having a team of people create a report based on the notes afterwards...but this is just damn ridiculous.
They better have the best damn doughnuts in the world for that kind of money.
Little tip for ya, buddy: Rules are generally NOT FOLLOWED. Thieves routinely break into stores, homes and cars...do you EXPECT to have your nice new car stereo stolen? No, but you'll still buy an alarm and always lock your doors. Do you expect your web server to be attacked? No, but you still secure it and keep up with security notices.
This is a perfect argument for encryption. We lock down everything else that's ours. Time to at least have the ability to lock down everything else too.
"Athlon" has got to be the most incredibly stupid name for an electronic device i've heard in a while. Athlon for some reason makes me think of the word "apathy", which is certainly not an attribute I want associated with my processor. I'll probably still buy one regardless of the name (What's really in a name, anyway?).
If they've gotta pick a silly name anyway, they could at least play up the humor factor and call it the Pooptron or Funktium or something.
Well, I look at most S3 chipsets the same way I look at cards with Trident chipsets. They're cheap, they're fairly reliable, and they do the job if you don't want to do anything graphics-heavy. But, compared to most other chips out there, they downright suck. They're slow, and often have slight issues (I used to have pallete strangeness all the time with my S3 ViRGE/VX based card).
All in all, if you're building a cheap box that is going to be in console mode 90% of the time and just the occasional jump to X for a quick tour with Netscape, they're fine. Otherwise, get a better chipset.
If your emotional structure is so flaky that you can't even bear to watch a tv show that strikes close to a situation you've experienced, you have problems.
THINK, people! Emotions and feelings are fine and all, but give me a fucking break. Don't be so damned weak-willed. You want to see the real sign of the degradation of mankind? Look at the people who are too affected by everything, too offended by everything, and too lazy to DO THEIR OWN THING INSTEAD.
And, just so it's clear, I hate that damn show and never watch it anyway. It's a matter of principle.
It was a fun movie. I spent money on it twice (admittedly the second time was because I had nothing to do on a Friday evening and a couple of friends wanted to see it). But, the ultimate geek film Katz portrays it as it is not.
The concept is neat, but not exactly original. Pick up 5 random compilations of sci-fi short stories/novellas, and I can guarantee that you'll find at least one wake-up-from-a-virtual-world story. Keanu Reeve's futile attempts at acting really hurt the movie badly. Not to mention the various plot holes that are too numerous to go into here.
It was a visually stunning movie, although the special effects seemed forced at times. I could almost hear the director saying, "Let's see...how can we work in another slow-mo negligible gravity shot with those cool bullet-path effects?" At least it wasn't as bad on this point as Lost in Space...god what a horrible movie.
Overall, Phantom Menace was a much better geek film in my opinion. At least the Star Wars universe is a world of amazing imaginational creativity. The Matrix was mostly refried old conceptual beans.
You can find small aircraft like the Cessna 172 for prices in the $30-$40K range used. Sure, it's not VTOL, and it doesn't have the 'B' sci-fi movie look, but it's available now, plus they've been around forever and for good reason (fairly easy to maintain, pretty reliable).
If it would be legal to just take off from anywhere and land anywhere with one of those SkyCars, it would be kind of nifty. Now if you could just do that AND get out of having to file a flight plan, then I'd start saving my cash for one .
I agree with your points (that's why I don't use KDE or Gnome), but, it needs to be said..."If you don't like it, don't use it."
.xls means it's an Excel document, they just want to click on it and see it. They simply don't care about what created what or what is able to open/view/edit what.
Unfortunately, as open source OS's become mainstream, people are going to want features like that. Joe/Jane Schmoe Secretary doesn't want to remember that
KDE and Gnome exist primarily for the Schmoes of the world. The goal they seek has little to do with those of us who truely prefer a command line to a GUI. Heck, I only start up XF86 and FVWM to use Netscape or Gimp. 99% of the time I'm in console mode. Does that make KDE and the like less valuable or good? No. Does it make me personally not want to use KDE or Gnome? Yes. But, there's only one me and there's a whole lot of Schmoes.
I figured "redundant" would lower a score, not increase it. Found out after I used it that it does indeed give them a +1.
I took redundant to mean "me toos" or "too stupid/lazy/whatever to read the other comments so i didn't realize my point had been made 500 times by other people". Am I wrong?
-CURRENT rocks. Plus, the more people out there using -CURRENT on non-critical machines, the faster bugs can be found and reported to the development team. And the faster that happens, the faster cool and useful features can be stabilized and integrated into -STABLE, where I can feel safe using it on a server.
:)
I tend to cvsup my -CURRENT box at home about once a week and rebuild everything, though often times i'll hold off for a few days if the traffic on the freebsd-current list indicates that doing so will probably break me badly
I used to work at a technical support call center sweatshop, working long and odd hours with pay that paid the bills but not much else. Employees were treated like doggie doo on the bottom of the boss' shoe. Management was flaky, bad techs were seldom punished for making the rest of our jobs harder, and repeated promises of raises and benefits took forever to be implemented, if they ever did. I worked there for approximately 3 years, mostly because I felt tied to the place since I helped get it off the ground (I was the first employee). I went through several "burnout" periods at that place. I also didn't think there was much better out there, as the previous jobs I'd had were often similar.
Back in June of last year, I finally got tired of it and quit the hellhole. Before too long, I was hired by the company I work for now. Wonderful benefits package, great pay, intelligent and hard working coworkers, etc. Also, burnout doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a threat with what I do now. Sure, fixing user problems gets mundane now and then, but it's sprinkled with a nice mix of server administration, network planning and implementation, a little programming now and then, and other things that I genuinely like to do. For the first time in my life, I can see myself being with the same company for a long, long time to come. And it feels good.
Back in high school we had a small Tesla coil for use in various physics demonstrations. Being the rather crazy idiot I was in those days, I decided to hold the output of the Tesla coil in my right hand, then pick up a copper pipe with my left hand and touch it to the radiator in the classroom, thereby grounding myself. I have never been in so much pain in my entire life. Well, actually, when I broke my tailbone skydiving it hurt more, but you get the point.
Don't know how you'd do this reliably with a remote device, but I can guarantee you that putting up a fight will be the last thing on someone's mind if you manage to do it. Convulsions will do that.
Not likely that other laws that infringe upon personal liberty would be affected by this sort of thing. Thanks to years of religious and governmental indoctrination on the subjects of drugs, sex, etc., it will be a very long time before Joe Average will be able to admit to himself that a "free" country's government should not overly concern itself with dictating morality for the masses.
M$ has had a "Windows 95 Y2K" patch available for some time, but it has several issues. You can see these issues for yourself at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/year2k/. A patch with this many issues is simply not acceptable. I am willing to bet that if I deployed the existing patch, come Jan 1 I'd be flooded with calls about the "minor" issues this patch leaves behind.
The company I work for takes quality and thoroughness very seriously. Issues are not generally accepted. This is why we deploy commercial UNIX variants and Linux whenever possible.