Point well taken. Kodak was sued over unstable colour images in the sixties (I believe).
Things have improved since then and modern colour photgraphs are quite stable. We really have to wait 100 years to find out.
My point is that the pinkish picture of grandpa will still give you a good idea of what grandpa looked like. An image on a disk that no one can read will keep grandpa's appearence a secret forever.
Kodachrome is a bad example to use as it is very stable mostly because only Kodak will process it. Ektachrome and colour prints are less so. I have seen an improperly processed B&W image degrade in a few months.
I am often asked about digital cameras and it is this exact problem that I like to point out. There are two problems, even if the media is stable enough to keep the data safe for hundreds of years you are relying that technology will available to read the informaion.
If you use a film camera and throw the negatives and prints in a shoe box they will last almost forever and will be viewable as long as there is light.
Even some of the earliest photography has proven to be quite stable, look at the amount of Mathew Brady work that still survives and works just fine.
Digital technology is not the answer to everything.
Check this old article at the Amazing Randi site. The hats are different colours but I think it is the same puzzle. He usually has a great riddle or puzzle every week.
I think Office Suites are really a non-starter in the *nix world as they violate the principal of small applications that do small jobs well. A monster behemoth single one app does all, is and always has been a bad idea. Small offices are buying MS Office and then in reality only using one or two of the included apps. If MS was really sensitive to customer needs they would unbundle these and make them available as stand alone apps.
I have tried Star Office and hate it for exactly the same reasons I don't like MS Office. It's bloated.
Just compare Word to LyX particularly in ease of use. LyX does virtually everything better and has a wider range of output options. I'd pay for LyX.
Think about it, does a distribution that has Word Processors, SQL databases, decent spreadsheets, and several competent programming languages really need an office suite?
Look at a small office of say ten networked users. Ten copies of Office and only two people use word, one person uses Excel and the rest need Office just to read the output. Gee, if those MS apps would just output in PS or PDF then this same office could buy two copies of Word and one copy of Excel. That would be sensitive to customers needs.
My personal experince with Windows users confronting Linux (Gnome or KDE) for the first time suggest that there is zero learning curve as far as the GUI is concerned. Blackbox usually gets responses of "I want that". The look on their face when I launch about seven applications as fast as possible, is priceless. You can see them just waiting for it to crash.
We will see more responses like Alaskan Airlines. I can see it now, on one side I've got some MS guy saying they want six figures so I can improve my system and on the other hand my head IT guy has been saying lets dump MS for a couple of years. Six figures will hire some pretty decent programmers and we can do it all in house because these free systems come complete enough to do the job.
Aware buyers are going to start looking seriously at alternatives.
Guns are absolutely strictly forbidden in Canada's National Parks. Any of them. But you knew that.
I have spent lots of time in the bush. I would never take a gun. One of the stupidest things you can do to a bear is shoot it. It pisses them off. Moose are one of the most dangerous animals you will encounter in the woods here. I can imagine how mad they would get if you shoot one with less than a.30 cal high power rifle. A 9mm handgun will have about the same effect as the bear. The only people who take guns into the bush are looking to kill something.
Gun ownership should be based on population density. Then only the Innuit would have them.
The frequency that the jocks are pointed to as the primary bullies should have tipped people off to the problem. Schools put so much emphasis on sports that they spend a disproportionate amount of money on it. This often has the effect of isolating the geeky even more. When the geeky kid has a hard time getting access to materials and equipment to further his studies it makes it very difficult for him to try to wrap his head around the thousands of dollars his school spends on sports. The school's athletes are often the same from sport to sport so the money is not fairly distributed. Then the star athletes get the impression that they are more important than any one else and they let everyone know it. This creates resentment amongst the non-athletic. The solution here is simple. Get sports out of schools. It has little positive influence and if you believe what I said actually has a negative influence. Sports is plentiful out of school and the school's star athletes usually participate in sports out of school. With so many school boards complaining about lack of funds just cut the sports.
The suggestion that games like Quake or Doom teach kids how to shoot and kill is ludicrous. The skill of packing 40kg of ammunition, weapons and explosives then running around with it is more akin to the skills learned on the fooball field. Many sports reward violence and create a violent lifestyle. The rate of domestic abuse amongst professional athletes is disturbing. Today they are bullying you, tommorrow their smacking their wife around.
Guns
Another reason (and another sacred cow) is guns. I live in Canada and we have almost zero handguns here. I read so many comments that kids have to tolerate bullying and abuse for fear that any type of retaliation will mean that the guns come out. Here, because of the lack of handguns (which conceal easily) if a kid is bullying another he may have to actually put up his dukes and take some licks. This hidden danger of guns negates that recourse. The victim has no choice but to bottle it up inside.
Oh. I happen to love sports. I play and watch with fanatical regularity. I just think schools should focus on academics, have some emphasis on the importance of physical fitness but should not participate in competitive sports.
I have a fantastic DSL provider. My service gets 640Kbs upload and up to 3Mbs download. When I run tests at places like dslreports I see close to 2Mbs download and the full 640Kbs upload all the time. I also get two fixed IP addresses and a bunch of other useless stuff including 5 hrs monthly of dial up. (I was a dial up customer of theirs and NEVER got a busy signal.) It's a little pricey at $150 Cdn but it is considered a business service.
I know several people who switched to cable when it arrived here and only lasted a couple of months before switching back. The cable had better download rates (than the basic DSL) but was regularly down (0 Kbs up or down).
"My only claim is that a common set of frameworks and experiences is valuable for a heterogeneous society,
This strikes me as an oxymoron
and that a system with limitless options, making for diverse choices, will compromise some important social values.
How about the social value of freedom of choice?
... if we believe that a set of common experiences promotes active citizenship
Wasn't this how the second world war got started?
and mutual self-understanding, we will be concerned by any developments that greatly reduce those experiences."
Slashdot and others like it do provide a common social experience. A far greater social experience than sitting at home alone reading the newspaper or watching TV.
I always lusted after Unix. Eventually Linux made it available to me. Apple's OSX is going to create a new awareness of Unix among the masses. Pretty soon *nix compatibility or *nix type of kernel is going to become as important as having Word to read.doc files. I don't view OSX as a competitor to Linux or BSD but as a compatriot. We should encourage people to buy these machines. Eventually it will be MS who is on the outside of compatibility. I have already been advising people who don't list gaming as a priority to consider Apples. Remember the advantages of a heterogenous system.
Re:Hey, would FreeBSD make a good DSL web server?
on
Bringing xMach To Life
·
· Score: 1
If my opinion matters (don't answer that) Open BSD gets my vote as the easiest OS I have ever installed. I don't currently use it but I played with it and I had it installed and running on a P133 with 16m ram via the Internet in about 40 minutes.
Adding packages was equally easy.
I've just about talked myself into another go.
(Even though I'm over 40 and therefore not capable of downloading software. Haven't been for ten years.)
Child Protective Services accompanied by SWAT go door to door checking to see if all the parental controls are in place. V-Chip not properly programmed. Go to Jail. Censorware not installed on the computer. Go to Jail. Playboys not properly locked up. Go to Jail. Guns and ammunition not properly stored. Oh wait, that's probably OK.
I am a single parent and my approach has always been anti-censorship. I let my son watch Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction when he was twelve. The result, he joined the drama club and has developed a disdain for 'special effects' movies. My daughter sees porn on the Internet. The result, she understands that there are freaks out there who would use her like a piece of tissue. Little girls often run into porn simply by placing their name between www and com. My daughter's name is Jenna, try it.
My children are straight A students at the top of their class. They are studious, intelligent and polite. Hiding them from reality does not work.
Censorship is misguided and counterproductive. Forced censorship is the first step to a totalitarian state a short hop away from starting massive wars and committing genocide.
The censors can just shut the fuck up and go away, we don't need you. They should just go home and hit themsleves on the head with their bibles until they come to their senses.
I have MS Win98 edition 1 on a machine with a 100 ata drive. There is a patch for Windows to fix some data loss problem caused by the machine shutting down without saving the cache (or something to that effect). The patch can't be applied to this version of Windows only SE and ME.
The only way to fix it is to pay $$$. Besides I've paid for DOS 3.2 and Win95 at one time.
It works fine in Linux. (It actually fuckin' rocks under Linux.) If these ATA drivers are improved further it will likely be kernel.org not RedHat where I get my update.
I wish that there was a way for me to trade the kilos of junk mail that gets left in my mailbox for spam. I find spam as annoying as the next guy but I just delete it. Physical spam (junk mail) is far more invasive and expensive.
I don't understand this effort to eliminate electronic junk mail, while expensive, hard on the environment, physical junk mail continues. If I'm allowed to mail thousands of unwanted pieces of physical mail to occupant why shouldn't I be allowed to do it with the electronic alternative. (I say stop them both.)
Slashdot Mirror
Point well taken. Kodak was sued over unstable colour images in the sixties (I believe).
Things have improved since then and modern colour photgraphs are quite stable. We really have to wait 100 years to find out.
My point is that the pinkish picture of grandpa will still give you a good idea of what grandpa looked like. An image on a disk that no one can read will keep grandpa's appearence a secret forever.
Kodachrome is a bad example to use as it is very stable mostly because only Kodak will process it. Ektachrome and colour prints are less so. I have seen an improperly processed B&W image degrade in a few months.
I am often asked about digital cameras and it is this exact problem that I like to point out. There are two problems, even if the media is stable enough to keep the data safe for hundreds of years you are relying that technology will available to read the informaion.
If you use a film camera and throw the negatives and prints in a shoe box they will last almost forever and will be viewable as long as there is light.
Even some of the earliest photography has proven to be quite stable, look at the amount of Mathew Brady work that still survives and works just fine.
Digital technology is not the answer to everything.
A girl here just saw that picture and said 'damn, where are the men?'
Check this old article at the Amazing Randi site. The hats are different colours but I think it is the same puzzle. He usually has a great riddle or puzzle every week.
I think Office Suites are really a non-starter in the *nix world as they violate the principal of small applications that do small jobs well. A monster behemoth single one app does all, is and always has been a bad idea. Small offices are buying MS Office and then in reality only using one or two of the included apps. If MS was really sensitive to customer needs they would unbundle these and make them available as stand alone apps.
I have tried Star Office and hate it for exactly the same reasons I don't like MS Office. It's bloated.
Just compare Word to LyX particularly in ease of use. LyX does virtually everything better and has a wider range of output options. I'd pay for LyX.
Think about it, does a distribution that has Word Processors, SQL databases, decent spreadsheets, and several competent programming languages really need an office suite?
Look at a small office of say ten networked users. Ten copies of Office and only two people use word, one person uses Excel and the rest need Office just to read the output. Gee, if those MS apps would just output in PS or PDF then this same office could buy two copies of Word and one copy of Excel. That would be sensitive to customers needs.
My personal experince with Windows users confronting Linux (Gnome or KDE) for the first time suggest that there is zero learning curve as far as the GUI is concerned. Blackbox usually gets responses of "I want that". The look on their face when I launch about seven applications as fast as possible, is priceless. You can see them just waiting for it to crash.
That would be a good time to switch to metric.
The April fools joke that Jos Verstappen played on Juan Montoya.
You know, you said that out loud.
Caveat Emptor
We will see more responses like Alaskan Airlines. I can see it now, on one side I've got some MS guy saying they want six figures so I can improve my system and on the other hand my head IT guy has been saying lets dump MS for a couple of years. Six figures will hire some pretty decent programmers and we can do it all in house because these free systems come complete enough to do the job.
Aware buyers are going to start looking seriously at alternatives.
404 - File not found
Microsoft IIS Server
Guns are absolutely strictly forbidden in Canada's National Parks. Any of them. But you knew that.
I have spent lots of time in the bush. I would never take a gun. One of the stupidest things you can do to a bear is shoot it. It pisses them off. Moose are one of the most dangerous animals you will encounter in the woods here. I can imagine how mad they would get if you shoot one with less than a .30 cal high power rifle. A 9mm handgun will have about the same effect as the bear. The only people who take guns into the bush are looking to kill something.
Gun ownership should be based on population density. Then only the Innuit would have them.
Sports.
The frequency that the jocks are pointed to as the primary bullies should have tipped people off to the problem. Schools put so much emphasis on sports that they spend a disproportionate amount of money on it. This often has the effect of isolating the geeky even more. When the geeky kid has a hard time getting access to materials and equipment to further his studies it makes it very difficult for him to try to wrap his head around the thousands of dollars his school spends on sports. The school's athletes are often the same from sport to sport so the money is not fairly distributed. Then the star athletes get the impression that they are more important than any one else and they let everyone know it. This creates resentment amongst the non-athletic. The solution here is simple. Get sports out of schools. It has little positive influence and if you believe what I said actually has a negative influence. Sports is plentiful out of school and the school's star athletes usually participate in sports out of school. With so many school boards complaining about lack of funds just cut the sports.
The suggestion that games like Quake or Doom teach kids how to shoot and kill is ludicrous. The skill of packing 40kg of ammunition, weapons and explosives then running around with it is more akin to the skills learned on the fooball field. Many sports reward violence and create a violent lifestyle. The rate of domestic abuse amongst professional athletes is disturbing. Today they are bullying you, tommorrow their smacking their wife around.
Guns
Another reason (and another sacred cow) is guns. I live in Canada and we have almost zero handguns here. I read so many comments that kids have to tolerate bullying and abuse for fear that any type of retaliation will mean that the guns come out. Here, because of the lack of handguns (which conceal easily) if a kid is bullying another he may have to actually put up his dukes and take some licks. This hidden danger of guns negates that recourse. The victim has no choice but to bottle it up inside.
Oh. I happen to love sports. I play and watch with fanatical regularity. I just think schools should focus on academics, have some emphasis on the importance of physical fitness but should not participate in competitive sports.
I have a fantastic DSL provider. My service gets 640Kbs upload and up to 3Mbs download. When I run tests at places like dslreports I see close to 2Mbs download and the full 640Kbs upload all the time. I also get two fixed IP addresses and a bunch of other useless stuff including 5 hrs monthly of dial up. (I was a dial up customer of theirs and NEVER got a busy signal.) It's a little pricey at $150 Cdn but it is considered a business service.
You can see what they offer here. SaskTel
I know several people who switched to cable when it arrived here and only lasted a couple of months before switching back. The cable had better download rates (than the basic DSL) but was regularly down (0 Kbs up or down).
McDonalds or Burger King?
This strikes me as an oxymoron
and that a system with limitless options, making for diverse choices, will compromise some important social values.
How about the social value of freedom of choice?
Wasn't this how the second world war got started?
and mutual self-understanding, we will be concerned by any developments that greatly reduce those experiences."
Slashdot and others like it do provide a common social experience. A far greater social experience than sitting at home alone reading the newspaper or watching TV.
I guess some people just don't like change.
Nobody invented zero.
It was never there to begin with.
Proof, once again, that computers and drugs do mix.
I always lusted after Unix. Eventually Linux made it available to me. .doc files.
Apple's OSX is going to create a new awareness of
Unix among the masses. Pretty soon *nix compatibility or *nix type
of kernel is going to become as important as having Word
to read
I don't view OSX as a competitor to Linux or BSD but as
a compatriot.
We should encourage people to buy these machines. Eventually it will
be MS who is on the outside of compatibility.
I have already been advising people who don't list gaming as a priority to consider Apples. Remember the advantages of a heterogenous system.
If my opinion matters (don't answer that) Open BSD gets my vote as the easiest OS I have ever installed. I don't currently use it but I played with it and I had it installed and running on a P133 with 16m ram via the Internet in about 40 minutes.
Adding packages was equally easy.
I've just about talked myself into another go.
(Even though I'm over 40 and therefore not capable of downloading software. Haven't been for ten years.)
Child Protective Services accompanied by SWAT go door to door checking to see if all the parental controls are in place. V-Chip not properly programmed. Go to Jail. Censorware not installed on the computer. Go to Jail. Playboys not properly locked up. Go to Jail. Guns and ammunition not properly stored. Oh wait, that's probably OK.
I am a single parent and my approach has always been anti-censorship. I let my son watch Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction when he was twelve. The result, he joined the drama club and has developed a disdain for 'special effects' movies. My daughter sees porn on the Internet. The result, she understands that there are freaks out there who would use her like a piece of tissue. Little girls often run into porn simply by placing their name between www and com. My daughter's name is Jenna, try it.
My children are straight A students at the top of their class. They are studious, intelligent and polite. Hiding them from reality does not work.
Censorship is misguided and counterproductive. Forced censorship is the first step to a totalitarian state a short hop away from starting massive wars and committing genocide.
The censors can just shut the fuck up and go away, we don't need you. They should just go home and hit themsleves on the head with their bibles until they come to their senses.
(OOOh I am so very angry.)
Ratings do nothing mre than tell certain kids where they should start looking. They can skip all the G labels and go straight to the R stuff.
I have MS Win98 edition 1 on a machine with a 100 ata drive. There is a patch for Windows to fix some data loss problem caused by the machine shutting down without saving the cache (or something to that effect). The patch can't be applied to this version of Windows only SE and ME.
The only way to fix it is to pay $$$. Besides I've paid for DOS 3.2 and Win95 at one time.
It works fine in Linux. (It actually fuckin' rocks under Linux.) If these ATA drivers are improved further it will likely be kernel.org not RedHat where I get my update.
I just accidentally digitized my dog and then deleted him.
I guess we'll file that under "Man bytes dog".
Without benefit of specifications or even permission, the DECSS descrambler has been improved again.
I wish that there was a way for me to trade the kilos of junk mail that gets left in my mailbox for spam. I find spam as annoying as the next guy but I just delete it. Physical spam (junk mail) is far more invasive and expensive.
I don't understand this effort to eliminate electronic junk mail, while expensive, hard on the environment, physical junk mail continues. If I'm allowed to mail thousands of unwanted pieces of physical mail to occupant why shouldn't I be allowed to do it with the electronic alternative. (I say stop them both.)
Recycle? Why cycle in the first place?