How long is it going to be before the content you are presented with is altered by the data they have on you? Imagine if a big corporation decided to give pure FUD to clueless newbie managers, and real information to techies?
This might be better than what we tend to get at the moment - namely, that they give pure FUD to clueless newbie managers, an no information to techies.
-- "I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
His complete failure to answer any questions in that interview pissed me off, though. Every single question was answered with an advert for Microsoft, whether it was related to Microsoft or not.
The questions were so open-ended that you could attack him for not answering any of them or defend him for having answered all of them with roughly equal validity.
The bottom line is - as far as interviews go, it was more Jeremy Clarkson than Jeremy Paxman - more talk-show material. Anyone who expected more was bound to be disappointed. I found it interesting because, like it or not, Microsoft does have a lot of say in what appears in the software marketplace (after all, they produce rather a lot of it) and it is interesting to hear what they have their eye on next (you can argue the toss about whether it's innovative or not, of course).
And Paxman didn't badger him! I expected him to nail Billy-boy down to an answer!
"And in related news, Jeremy Paxman is in a critical condition after being electrocuted by his computer during the production of Newsnight. It is not entirely sure what caused the accident, though one cameraman claims that shortly after the incident he heard from the computer the following words: 'That will teach him to mess with ME.' No Microsoft official was available for comment."
-- "I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
Actually, "First be polite, then flame" appears to be accepted practice among political interviewers. Since the interviewer in question is Mr. Paxman, I think that - typo or no typo - it is appropriate.:)
-- "I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
I'm sorry, but I couldn't help but laugh when I read this:
As I said, there's a reason why the US form of government has outlived all the others.
Erm, I've got new for you matey.
It hasn't. The governments in Britain and (I believe) Iceland are two that have outlived that of the US by just a little while - just to name those in Western Europe.
-- "I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
I must admit I am rather confused by all this. The idea of giving permanent Internet connections to people with absolutely no idea about Internet security - I don't know whether I should be amused or horrified.
-- "I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
Just out of curiosity, what are the circumstances under which you wouldn't just hit the "Next" button on the install "wizard" at that point, and would, instead, specify a place to install it other than the default?
I like to keep all my Windows software in C:\Program Files\Vendor\Package, so they're easy to find when Uninstall decides it can't delete everything because the package uninstaller flakes out. (I tend to uninstall stuff quite a lot.) Some vendors like to make their software's default installation directory a subdirectory of C:\, which clutters up my root folder (Acrobat 3 used to do this, as well as the software on my Rage 128 display driver CD IIRC). I don't install StarOffice, CivCTP, et al. in/ or/etc, so I don't install my Windows software in C:\. Therefore I have ended up using this reasonably frequently.
It is possible to do this with Linux/*BSD apps, though more often than not (in my experience) it involves installing from source (and taking config files to bits). When it's a lot quicker to install from an RPM or tarball, I have a tendency to think that perhaps it's not all that essential - as a result/usr/local can become a veritable maze:(
The stuff that offers you various types of installations, including "Custom", is also sometimes a pain
True, but you don't have to use it. Select "Typical install" and go make yourself a coffee, if the Custom option is so daunting.:)
As far as Windows is concerned, it's not the End Of All Things(tm) if you mess up the custom install, anyway. Settings-> Control Panel-> Add/Remove Programs-> Windows Setup got used very heavily after I realised I'd forgotten to check several boxes during my first custom install of Win98. It happens; neither blood nor tears were shed.;) Under FreeBSD,/stand/sysinstall allows pretty much the same functionality. (I can't remember what the equivalent is in RH, I tend to use rpm from the command line to install packages.)
(Moderate to oblivion at will; flames to/dev/null or local equivalent.)
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It illustrates the biggest problem with software patents - that companies feel obliged to take out patents merely in order to protect themselves from litigation, making the entire patent system a self-perpetuating (and self-evident!) farce. Not least since so much (if not all?) software out there is based on _somebody's_ prior work; very little if any represents a great leap in technology, and much of it is a rehash or combination of someone else's idea(s). (From the article: "Software, especially a complex program, seldom includes substantial leaps in technology, but rather consists of adept combinations of many ideas." I agree.)
I also agree that if we must have patent law for software, it must be global. It is ludicrous in today's global market to have to file seventeen different patents if your target market is in seventeen different countries.
They also raised a good point about the monopoly issue - how many people are still using 17-year-old software that isn't "in-house" (and therefore doesn't need to worry about pesky patent law anyway)?
Of course, a lot of readers may argue that any monopoly at all is a Bad Thing, but I guess commercial software houses have to worry about return on investment, and a monopoly is usually a fairly effective way of protecting that;)
One can be cynical about Oracle's motives for this policy, but then, it doesn't matter why you do the Right Thing, as long as you do it.:)
The question then is: can we expect to see some movement on the part of corporates to lobby governments to do something about patent law?
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Okay, so you have found no evidence of discrimination against women in the classroom (I shall suspend disbelief and take you at your word). That does not make the fact that several women I know have found evidence of discrimination any less valid.
...the fact is that computers becoming a more interesting thing to what little girls are taught to like will be the thing that brings women to the field...
"what little girls are taught to like"?;)
Bravo, sir. I believe you just made my case for me.
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How old does that make Tux?
on
Linux Turns 8
·
· Score: 1
....since I assume that the penguin didn't spring into being the moment Linux was released.
(Whoa, lots of internal server errors today, what gives?)
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A number of European states have been paying attention to the anti-trust case in the United States and quietly investigating Microsoft's business practices this side of the pond - and slowly coming to much the same conclusions as those who filed the US antitrust suit. The European Commission, certainly, has been observing developments with interest. So it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
I'd have thought they'd have waited until the conclusion of the current trial though, as that would give a clearer indication of what to expect. This could get messier for Microsoft. They could be forgiven for thinking everyone really is out to get them, I think.
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I've generally found that these guys are fairly good. They're based in the north of England, and do next-day delivery for a good price. You might have to wait a while before they get the CDs though - they often ship them some time after Walnut Creek, so 3.3 might not be available until November.
(Okay Rob, you got free advertising, where are my discounted CDs? *grin*)
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Don't make me laugh. It's easy to point the finger at men and discrimination but it is not, and was not, true.
I'll grant that there is certainly little problem with discrimination against women in applications for I.T. jobs. The problem starts long before that - in the classroom.
It may have been different elsewhere, of course, but I know several women in the 20-30 age range in the UK who expressed an interest in computers at primary or secondary school and were actively discouraged from pursuing a career in the field.
And for what it's worth, this prejudice was not the sole province of male teachers.
Okay, in these slightly more enlightened days the discrimination against women in I.T. education may no longer hold, but of course for a lot of women the damage has already been done, so to speak.
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This is essentially true. There was a very good BBC Open University programme on the history of computing which seems to be repeated annually which outlined this phenomenon. In the early days of computing when "coding" was very much a menial task, viewed in much the same way as data entry is seen today - often consisting merely of converting machine language into holes in a punch card (for example) - there were a lot of women filling this role. With the advent of assemblers, compilers and larger secondary storage, the need for these coders dwindled, IIRC, and "coding" became more and more the province of engineers and scientists. The original coders were eventually pushed out of the picture, it would seem.
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....about how few women there are in I.T., but with the word "Linux" thrown in to make it sound trendy and up-to-date.
There's a simple reason why there are few women in I.T. A lot of the "alpha geeks" of today (to rip that awful phrase from the article) tend to be in their late twenties and thirties - which means they were first using computers, on average, back in the late Seventies or early Eighties when home computers started coming into the mainstream - and at a time when education was still so backward that even those schools which had any kind of I.T. curriculum certainly wouldn't dream of having girls on their course.
Geeks have to be caught at an early age. You want more women in I.T.? Get your four-year-old niece/daughter interested in how to code, and sit back and wait twenty years.
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If the USA has half the world's lawyers, and the population of the EU is somewhere between one-and-a-half times and double that of the USA, I think you've answered your own question.
Bottom line: The EU is nowhere as litigious as the USA. (Though it appears that we're working on it.)
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After having thrown up my hands in disgust at having to use VGA16 and finally going out and buying a RIVA TNT card, my Rage Fury is back where it belongs - in my box's AGP port.:)
One or two bogons though - not in the Rage128 driver itself, but in the XF86Setup code that SuSE suggest that you download to set it up.
The XF86Setup tool on SuSE's FTP site did NOT like me when I tried to tell it I had a Natural Keyboard with a British keyboard layout. "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" was its view on the matter. (Good old CTRL-ALT-BS.) So in the end I had to edit XF86Config by hand, which was a little irritating, but then again I guess it serves me right for being lazy;)
Secondly, the same XF86Setup tool has a _real_ problem with Intellimice(sic) - on saving configuration and re-entering using old config as the default, the mouse settings had reverted to PS/2.
Thirdly, I'm rather confused as to why SuSE insist on their web page that you should effectively replace the SVGA server with the Rage128 one. Symlinking X always worked for me, though I guess this one's for XF86Setup/xf86config users as there's currently no 'Rage128' option in the menus of either of them (not even the SuSE downloadable version of XF86Setup, oddly, which makes me wonder exactly why they suggest you should download it).
The fourth problem I had was trying to locate where my XF86Config file had gone, since I'd only recently migrated from *BSD to RH6.0 and expected to find it in/etc.... silly me:)
But to cut a long story short, it works (though you may have to jump one or two hoops to get it working, YMMV, maybe I was just having a bad day) and it's great. Go SuSE. I might have to add their distro to the collection.
I noticed one post earlier about dual-heading ATI cards in Win98 - I tried this with my PCI RIVA TNT card, and it wouldn't have it. (Blackscreen, just for variety.) I've heard since that ATI cards, and I quote, "don't play well with others". Does anyone have a take on this?
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One possible solution is to allow moderators to moderate only posts which have been entered within a set period of time (for instance, in the last two hours). This is plenty of time for moderators to downgrade the troll posts as they appear; it also makes sure that some of the later posts are noticed and up/downgraded as necessary.
Another is to assign each moderator to one or two threads and allow them to moderate comments only in those threads. (In the same way as MM appears to select moderated posts from one or two [rarely three] threads.) Kill the time limit on moderation points, but moderators won't be able to moderate in another thread until they've used up their points, or the threads they are assigned to are archived.
Simply assigning more moderators won't work unless you can get them to look past the first fifty posts - and in addition, the more moderators you have, the more idiotic moderation you're likely to see. (I saw a post that had been moderated Flamebait -3, Interesting +1, Funny +5, Overrated -1 recently [or thereabouts]. If this isn't a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, I don't know what is - though the net result was about right for the post, ironically. I think a number of moderators decided the MM facility was ineffectual and did their own metamoderation-by-proxy.)
Allocating more moderation points to good moderators is to be welcomed. Five moderation points is often not enough when a thread can contain 500+ comments and there are dozens of threads on the go at once.
This isn't a "my karma is crap because I think before I post" whinge. It's more of a "If post X (#4) gets +4 slapped on it, then that really good post Y (#383) should have at least one or two points on it so that people with their thresholds at +3 will actually see it" whinge, if you like. (Which would disqualify most of my posts anyway.);)
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Prices have certainly taken a hike in the UK as well. PC100 128MB DIMMS were going for around £105 (~US$170) (ex-VAT) back in June, and are now at around £150 (~US$240).
If they're still $170 in the US, maybe it is time to emigrate....
Which brings up another point - why are electrical goods so much more expensive in Europe?
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Setting up ipfw[1] to return "ICMP connection refused"[2] (or similar) for all outgoing TCP connection attempts to 209.207.224.220 port 80 seems to work.:) oh, and blocking the host ads09.focalink.com as well....
There are probably others.
[1] under FreeBSD; YMMV in Linux [2] It's better to do this than simply dropping the packets, your browser will hang less waiting for a response.
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It's ok to run Microsoft out of buisiness, but not O'reilly. WHY?
Anyone who thinks the Open Source movement is going to run Our Favourite Software House out of business this side of Armageddon (oh, whoops, that was last month wasn't it?) is deluded. It has a part to play in software development, and is big enough to look after itself in the unlikely event of demand for Windows, Office and other software disappearing overnight - by which time the company would have sensed the change in fortunes and moved on to something else anyway.
And for all people may hate the company, this is a Good Thing, for the simple reason of competition. OFSH cannot use any corporate tactics to buy out or crush the Open Source community, because there is nothing tangible to attack. And marketing/PR tactics can only do so much - and isn't going to do _all_ that well in the face of companies who know they've been running servers on free software quite happily for years. So OFSH is forced to compete with an ephemeral, undefeatable rival.
So, OFSH will bust its guts to make sure that the next Windows release can outperform Linux. The Open Source developers will respond in kind. And so on, ad infinitum. Net result: accelerated growth and innovation. Not only does the Open Source community come out with a better operating system to keep up with what the latest non-free OS has to offer, but OFSH will *shock, horror!* come out with an OS which doesn't suck.
In the end, everybody wins. We get a better OS, they get a better OS - and ours is still free.
Linus and Richard Stallman (and...) don't pay rent or buy food, etc.? Writing software isn't that much different than writing information in terms of workload: You sit in front of the computer and type.
Linus has a day job, I believe. I can't remember what RMS does. Talks at people, probably. Either way, they're now noted enough not to starve.
INFORMATION IS FREE! As in FREE BEER!
Information is power, and power always comes at a price. And beer's one-eighty a pint around here.;)
[Sorry.]
I write articles and put them on the Internet for free because I believe that they might somehow help somebody, and because writing about a subject helps me understand it better. I can't thank the LDP people enough for what they have given the world.
Good for you! However, I think there are a few points to note here.
Firstly it is up to the author how to make his work available. Just as when writing code you may licence it under any terms you wish, unless it is a derivation of someone else's work.
Secondly, I think the work involved in documentation is (a) considerably less collaborative in terms of shared volume of input (there aren't all that many books with more than two or three authors); (b) considerably less fun. Thus, there has to be another incentive, and while altruism is all very well, it's in short supply.
Thirdly, as a customer I have the right to purchase non-free documentation if I so choose. This does not make the producer of said documentation evil. They are merely a company supplying a product in demand. There is, as you noted, a free alternative. Man pages, HOWTOs, FAQs, page upon page of HTML documentation scattered around a thousand websites - It's your call. Personally, I prefer to part with my forty quid and do it the easy way. =)
I don't care about the book, but we are arguing about the information. You know.. the http and ftp protocol.
The authors can easily put their documents online, and tell the publishers to print and distribute it!
True, but that's up to the author. They may choose not to, because (as previously stated) the basic information contained in the books is already available. What you're paying for is the author to make it easier for you to understand. Same way as you pay for a training course, in fact, only one Hell of a lot cheaper.:)
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Slashdot Mirror
Are we talking about the same Pagemill that's on sale on Adobe's web site in Mac and Win9x versions?
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"I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
"I bet you wish you'd eaten the blue leaf."
:)
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How long is it going to be before the content you are presented with is altered by the data they have on you? Imagine if a big corporation decided to give pure FUD to clueless newbie managers, and real information to techies?
This might be better than what we tend to get at the moment - namely, that they give pure FUD to clueless newbie managers, an no information to techies.
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"I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
His complete failure to answer any questions in that interview pissed me off, though. Every single question was answered with an advert for Microsoft, whether it was related to Microsoft or not.
The questions were so open-ended that you could attack him for not answering any of them or defend him for having answered all of them with roughly equal validity.
The bottom line is - as far as interviews go, it was more Jeremy Clarkson than Jeremy Paxman - more talk-show material. Anyone who expected more was bound to be disappointed. I found it interesting because, like it or not, Microsoft does have a lot of say in what appears in the software marketplace (after all, they produce rather a lot of it) and it is interesting to hear what they have their eye on next (you can argue the toss about whether it's innovative or not, of course).
And Paxman didn't badger him! I expected him to nail Billy-boy down to an answer!
"And in related news, Jeremy Paxman is in a critical condition after being electrocuted by his computer during the production of Newsnight. It is not entirely sure what caused the accident, though one cameraman claims that shortly after the incident he heard from the computer the following words: 'That will teach him to mess with ME.' No Microsoft official was available for comment."
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"I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
Should we first be polite and Then flame ?
:)
Actually, "First be polite, then flame" appears to be accepted practice among political interviewers. Since the interviewer in question is Mr. Paxman, I think that - typo or no typo - it is appropriate.
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"I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
I'm sorry, but I couldn't help but laugh when I read this:
As I said, there's a reason why the US form of government has outlived all the others.
Erm, I've got new for you matey.
It hasn't. The governments in Britain and (I believe) Iceland are two that have outlived that of the US by just a little while - just to name those in Western Europe.
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"I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
I must admit I am rather confused by all this. The idea of giving permanent Internet connections to people with absolutely no idea about Internet security - I don't know whether I should be amused or horrified.
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"I am Blair of EU^H^HBorg. Surrender your currency and prepare to be assimilated."
I'm sorry. You're not allowed to use the Clue Nuke without giving me lots of money. I've patented it. :)
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Just out of curiosity, what are the circumstances under which you wouldn't just hit the "Next" button on the install "wizard" at that point, and would, instead, specify a place to install it other than the default?
/ or /etc, so I don't install my Windows software in C:\. Therefore I have ended up using this reasonably frequently.
/usr/local can become a veritable maze :(
:)
;) Under FreeBSD, /stand/sysinstall allows pretty much the same functionality. (I can't remember what the equivalent is in RH, I tend to use rpm from the command line to install packages.)
/dev/null or local equivalent.)
I like to keep all my Windows software in C:\Program Files\Vendor\Package , so they're easy to find when Uninstall decides it can't delete everything because the package uninstaller flakes out. (I tend to uninstall stuff quite a lot.) Some vendors like to make their software's default installation directory a subdirectory of C:\, which clutters up my root folder (Acrobat 3 used to do this, as well as the software on my Rage 128 display driver CD IIRC). I don't install StarOffice, CivCTP, et al. in
It is possible to do this with Linux/*BSD apps, though more often than not (in my experience) it involves installing from source (and taking config files to bits). When it's a lot quicker to install from an RPM or tarball, I have a tendency to think that perhaps it's not all that essential - as a result
The stuff that offers you various types of installations, including "Custom", is also sometimes a pain
True, but you don't have to use it. Select "Typical install" and go make yourself a coffee, if the Custom option is so daunting.
As far as Windows is concerned, it's not the End Of All Things(tm) if you mess up the custom install, anyway. Settings-> Control Panel-> Add/Remove Programs-> Windows Setup got used very heavily after I realised I'd forgotten to check several boxes during my first custom install of Win98. It happens; neither blood nor tears were shed.
(Moderate to oblivion at will; flames to
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....coming from a commercial organization.
;)
:)
It illustrates the biggest problem with software patents - that companies feel obliged to take out patents merely in order to protect themselves from litigation, making the entire patent system a self-perpetuating (and self-evident!) farce. Not least since so much (if not all?) software out there is based on _somebody's_ prior work; very little if any represents a great leap in technology, and much of it is a rehash or combination of someone else's idea(s). (From the article: "Software, especially a complex program, seldom includes substantial leaps in technology, but rather consists of adept combinations of many ideas." I agree.)
I also agree that if we must have patent law for software, it must be global. It is ludicrous in today's global market to have to file seventeen different patents if your target market is in seventeen different countries.
They also raised a good point about the monopoly issue - how many people are still using 17-year-old software that isn't "in-house" (and therefore doesn't need to worry about pesky patent law anyway)?
Of course, a lot of readers may argue that any monopoly at all is a Bad Thing, but I guess commercial software houses have to worry about return on investment, and a monopoly is usually a fairly effective way of protecting that
One can be cynical about Oracle's motives for this policy, but then, it doesn't matter why you do the Right Thing, as long as you do it.
The question then is: can we expect to see some movement on the part of corporates to lobby governments to do something about patent law?
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*sigh* I sense a circular argument....
...the fact is that computers becoming a more interesting thing to what little girls are taught to like will be the thing that brings women to the field...
;)
Okay, so you have found no evidence of discrimination against women in the classroom (I shall suspend disbelief and take you at your word). That does not make the fact that several women I know have found evidence of discrimination any less valid.
"what little girls are taught to like"?
Bravo, sir. I believe you just made my case for me.
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....since I assume that the penguin didn't spring into being the moment Linux was released.
(Whoa, lots of internal server errors today, what gives?)
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A number of European states have been paying attention to the anti-trust case in the United States and quietly investigating Microsoft's business practices this side of the pond - and slowly coming to much the same conclusions as those who filed the US antitrust suit. The European Commission, certainly, has been observing developments with interest. So it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
I'd have thought they'd have waited until the conclusion of the current trial though, as that would give a clearer indication of what to expect. This could get messier for Microsoft. They could be forgiven for thinking everyone really is out to get them, I think.
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I've generally found that these guys are fairly good. They're based in the north of England, and do next-day delivery for a good price. You might have to wait a while before they get the CDs though - they often ship them some time after Walnut Creek, so 3.3 might not be available until November.
(Okay Rob, you got free advertising, where are my discounted CDs? *grin*)
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Don't make me laugh. It's easy to point the finger at men and discrimination but it is not, and was not, true.
I'll grant that there is certainly little problem with discrimination against women in applications for I.T. jobs. The problem starts long before that - in the classroom.
It may have been different elsewhere, of course, but I know several women in the 20-30 age range in the UK who expressed an interest in computers at primary or secondary school and were actively discouraged from pursuing a career in the field.
And for what it's worth, this prejudice was not the sole province of male teachers.
Okay, in these slightly more enlightened days the discrimination against women in I.T. education may no longer hold, but of course for a lot of women the damage has already been done, so to speak.
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This is essentially true. There was a very good BBC Open University programme on the history of computing which seems to be repeated annually which outlined this phenomenon. In the early days of computing when "coding" was very much a menial task, viewed in much the same way as data entry is seen today - often consisting merely of converting machine language into holes in a punch card (for example) - there were a lot of women filling this role. With the advent of assemblers, compilers and larger secondary storage, the need for these coders dwindled, IIRC, and "coding" became more and more the province of engineers and scientists. The original coders were eventually pushed out of the picture, it would seem.
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....about how few women there are in I.T., but with the word "Linux" thrown in to make it sound trendy and up-to-date.
There's a simple reason why there are few women in I.T. A lot of the "alpha geeks" of today (to rip that awful phrase from the article) tend to be in their late twenties and thirties - which means they were first using computers, on average, back in the late Seventies or early Eighties when home computers started coming into the mainstream - and at a time when education was still so backward that even those schools which had any kind of I.T. curriculum certainly wouldn't dream of having girls on their course.
Geeks have to be caught at an early age. You want more women in I.T.? Get your four-year-old niece/daughter interested in how to code, and sit back and wait twenty years.
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Well, look at it this way.
If the USA has half the world's lawyers, and the population of the EU is somewhere between one-and-a-half times and double that of the USA, I think you've answered your own question.
Bottom line: The EU is nowhere as litigious as the USA. (Though it appears that we're working on it.)
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After having thrown up my hands in disgust at having to use VGA16 and finally going out and buying a RIVA TNT card, my Rage Fury is back where it belongs - in my box's AGP port. :)
;)
/etc.... silly me :)
One or two bogons though - not in the Rage128 driver itself, but in the XF86Setup code that SuSE suggest that you download to set it up.
The XF86Setup tool on SuSE's FTP site did NOT like me when I tried to tell it I had a Natural Keyboard with a British keyboard layout. "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" was its view on the matter. (Good old CTRL-ALT-BS.) So in the end I had to edit XF86Config by hand, which was a little irritating, but then again I guess it serves me right for being lazy
Secondly, the same XF86Setup tool has a _real_ problem with Intellimice(sic) - on saving configuration and re-entering using old config as the default, the mouse settings had reverted to PS/2.
Thirdly, I'm rather confused as to why SuSE insist on their web page that you should effectively replace the SVGA server with the Rage128 one. Symlinking X always worked for me, though I guess this one's for XF86Setup/xf86config users as there's currently no 'Rage128' option in the menus of either of them (not even the SuSE downloadable version of XF86Setup, oddly, which makes me wonder exactly why they suggest you should download it).
The fourth problem I had was trying to locate where my XF86Config file had gone, since I'd only recently migrated from *BSD to RH6.0 and expected to find it in
But to cut a long story short, it works (though you may have to jump one or two hoops to get it working, YMMV, maybe I was just having a bad day) and it's great. Go SuSE. I might have to add their distro to the collection.
I noticed one post earlier about dual-heading ATI cards in Win98 - I tried this with my PCI RIVA TNT card, and it wouldn't have it. (Blackscreen, just for variety.) I've heard since that ATI cards, and I quote, "don't play well with others". Does anyone have a take on this?
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One possible solution is to allow moderators to moderate only posts which have been entered within a set period of time (for instance, in the last two hours). This is plenty of time for moderators to downgrade the troll posts as they appear; it also makes sure that some of the later posts are noticed and up/downgraded as necessary.
;)
Another is to assign each moderator to one or two threads and allow them to moderate comments only in those threads. (In the same way as MM appears to select moderated posts from one or two [rarely three] threads.) Kill the time limit on moderation points, but moderators won't be able to moderate in another thread until they've used up their points, or the threads they are assigned to are archived.
Simply assigning more moderators won't work unless you can get them to look past the first fifty posts - and in addition, the more moderators you have, the more idiotic moderation you're likely to see. (I saw a post that had been moderated Flamebait -3, Interesting +1, Funny +5, Overrated -1 recently [or thereabouts]. If this isn't a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, I don't know what is - though the net result was about right for the post, ironically. I think a number of moderators decided the MM facility was ineffectual and did their own metamoderation-by-proxy.)
Allocating more moderation points to good moderators is to be welcomed. Five moderation points is often not enough when a thread can contain 500+ comments and there are dozens of threads on the go at once.
This isn't a "my karma is crap because I think before I post" whinge. It's more of a "If post X (#4) gets +4 slapped on it, then that really good post Y (#383) should have at least one or two points on it so that people with their thresholds at +3 will actually see it" whinge, if you like. (Which would disqualify most of my posts anyway.)
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Prices have certainly taken a hike in the UK as well. PC100 128MB DIMMS were going for around £105 (~US$170) (ex-VAT) back in June, and are now at around £150 (~US$240).
If they're still $170 in the US, maybe it is time to emigrate....
Which brings up another point - why are electrical goods so much more expensive in Europe?
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Setting up ipfw[1] to return "ICMP connection refused"[2] (or similar) for all outgoing TCP connection attempts to 209.207.224.220 port 80 seems to work. :) oh, and blocking the host ads09.focalink.com as well....
There are probably others.
[1] under FreeBSD; YMMV in Linux
[2] It's better to do this than simply dropping the packets, your browser will hang less waiting for a response.
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WHY THE HELL did this persons opinion get moderated down???
;)
And you thought the only religious zealots we had here were the my-OS-is-better-than-your-OS types.
Ah well, there goes my karma... I'll be lucky to come back as a GPL virus.
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It's ok to run Microsoft out of buisiness, but not O'reilly. WHY?
...) don't pay rent or buy food, etc.? Writing software isn't that much different than writing information in terms of workload: You sit in front of the computer and type.
;)
:)
Anyone who thinks the Open Source movement is going to run Our Favourite Software House out of business this side of Armageddon (oh, whoops, that was last month wasn't it?) is deluded. It has a part to play in software development, and is big enough to look after itself in the unlikely event of demand for Windows, Office and other software disappearing overnight - by which time the company would have sensed the change in fortunes and moved on to something else anyway.
And for all people may hate the company, this is a Good Thing, for the simple reason of competition. OFSH cannot use any corporate tactics to buy out or crush the Open Source community, because there is nothing tangible to attack. And marketing/PR tactics can only do so much - and isn't going to do _all_ that well in the face of companies who know they've been running servers on free software quite happily for years. So OFSH is forced to compete with an ephemeral, undefeatable rival.
So, OFSH will bust its guts to make sure that the next Windows release can outperform Linux. The Open Source developers will respond in kind. And so on, ad infinitum. Net result: accelerated growth and innovation. Not only does the Open Source community come out with a better operating system to keep up with what the latest non-free OS has to offer, but OFSH will *shock, horror!* come out with an OS which doesn't suck.
In the end, everybody wins. We get a better OS, they get a better OS - and ours is still free.
Linus and Richard Stallman (and
Linus has a day job, I believe. I can't remember what RMS does. Talks at people, probably. Either way, they're now noted enough not to starve.
INFORMATION IS FREE! As in FREE BEER!
Information is power, and power always comes at a price. And beer's one-eighty a pint around here.
[Sorry.]
I write articles and put them on the Internet for free because I believe that they might somehow help somebody, and because writing about a subject helps me understand it better.
I can't thank the LDP people enough for what they have given the world.
Good for you! However, I think there are a few points to note here.
Firstly it is up to the author how to make his work available. Just as when writing code you may licence it under any terms you wish, unless it is a derivation of someone else's work.
Secondly, I think the work involved in documentation is
(a) considerably less collaborative in terms of shared volume of input (there aren't all that many books with more than two or three authors);
(b) considerably less fun.
Thus, there has to be another incentive, and while altruism is all very well, it's in short supply.
Thirdly, as a customer I have the right to purchase non-free documentation if I so choose. This does not make the producer of said documentation evil. They are merely a company supplying a product in demand. There is, as you noted, a free alternative. Man pages, HOWTOs, FAQs, page upon page of HTML documentation scattered around a thousand websites - It's your call. Personally, I prefer to part with my forty quid and do it the easy way. =)
I don't care about the book, but we are arguing about the information.
You know.. the http and ftp protocol.
Erm, have you heard of RFCs?
The authors can easily put their documents online, and tell the publishers to print and distribute it!
True, but that's up to the author. They may choose not to, because (as previously stated) the basic information contained in the books is already available. What you're paying for is the author to make it easier for you to understand. Same way as you pay for a training course, in fact, only one Hell of a lot cheaper.
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If we're to believe the recent stories about IRIX, there's your 5% right there for the taking... (Albeit slightly out of date.)
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