This will create a new job: flying technical supporter. Think of it: your parttime job will consist of bi-weekly 3 day trips where you fly to Australia and back to help passengers get their connection going, fetch their mail, etc.
I've left my tech support period behind me, luckily. But for the new people this might well be a nice alternative than sitting in a cubicle all day.
That's weird. I'm sure I saw the confirmation that my message was posted.
Anyway, it was about toll roads which I saw on my Swedish holidays. You were expected to pay by putting money in a can yourself (no one was there to check things). A bad person could skip the payment or steal the can. Appearently it worked because we saw several of these toll systems (the last time I went to sweden was about 8 years ago, I think).
In the Netherlands, up to 10 or 20 years ago you could buy fruits and vegetables along the road by taking it from crates and paying the right amount (which was written down on blackboards). There was no person to sell it. Eventually this didn't work anymore, which I think is a shame.
Why would I be convinced that Napster is good and that copyright laws are worthless and should be banned?
Why is 'copying music' with Napster (nice try) so very different from stealing a bike? Bands (e.g. Metallica) have made it clear that do not like it when their work is copied through Napster. Who are you deny them their rights?
Of course everyone copies something sometimes, we all exchanged cassette tapes with one another and now we burn cdrom's and use(d) Napster. But to act as if that should be legalized without any real argumentation is a different story. That's like legalizing exam fraud because it worked so good for you once, and the teachers are assholes.
If what you imply is true, namely that Slashdot is the bastion of the GPL, this community would be in a very sorry state. But I know its not true, there are enough readers who do not without any real consideration see the GPL as the one and only true free software license. Free software has it's merits (I wrote a paper about it which is online on my site, unfortunately its only available in Dutch), but the GPL is only one of the many free licences under which software can be distributed.
I have the impression that a lot of Slashdot readers condemn the music industry because of their own hidden agenda: the possibility to freeload as much mp3 as they can (gives another meaning to Gates' quote "information at your fingertips"). Of course cd prices are (too) high, but that doesn't legalize copyright violations. Defending such a thing only shows the sad state of your argumention, which is really close to non-existent.
Why is it so acceptable in this "community" to use such derogatory terms, when if someone were to use "Linsux" everybody would be up in arms and crying foul?
Personally I don't run an OS because of the OS, but because what I can do with it. A lot of my time is spent in a browser, therefore I have high demands regarding the browser I use.
Unlike you, I am not willing to suffer bad browsing experiences just because I want to run FreeBSD as my desktop (which in your case would be Linux).
I made the decision to use Windows as a desktop OS (as did more than half of/. users, as I heard the statistics showed). That was my point. If that doesn't work for you because you insist on waiting for a good browser on Linux and suffering from Netscape/Mozilla/Konq while doing that, that's your problem. I'm just saying what was my solution.
In the real world FreeBSD has had soft-updates for ages now and deletions are extremely fast. In fact, deleting large directory tries filled with lots of files is done almost instantly.
Although the Crusoe is a low-power chip, a device carrying one might not have a longer battery life than a normal notebook. This is because the Crusoe is usually used in very small devices with a small battery.
For example, I own a Crusoe-powered picturebook which has a battery life of about 2 - 2.5 hours with a standard battery. The older picturebook with PII/400 had about 1 - 1.5 hours life if I'm not mistaken.
So the net result is a gain in battery life due to use of the Crusoe, but it's still not that long a time. Because the picturebook, including standard battery, weighs only 1 kg.
So the advantages of using a low-power chip can also be used for lightness/smallness instead of long use.
In The Netherlands, where you don't have a flat local telephone fee, it was silly to download all day. Especially since some providers also billed per minute of connection time. This could add up to about $3/hour or $6/hour during working hours. For a poor student, this was kind of expensive.
I remember the days before I started my own 14k4 bulletin board. Some of the sysops I knew also traded warez. Usually not online, modems were too slow for that purpose (heck, a lot of us still used 2400 baud modems), but mostly on CD. There were stories about them having large magnets close by, so they could wipe their HDs when the cops arrived. The CDs contents were encrypted and inaccessible without the proper key.
Sorry, but how can an ISP with 4300 employees be considered a local company?
I work for an ISP myself. We have about 250 people working here, and we're definately not local. Now, I'm in the Netherlands so that's a difference. But I cannot imagine even in the United States that an ISP is 'local' when it has 4300 people working for it. If you consider the standards tasks and departments of an ISP (network engineering and operations, sales, support, finance/legal, internal IT, etc), you could serve a BIG area with 4300 people.
In any workplace people should be allowed to mail stuff to each other, as long as it doesn't eat up too much work time. Public workers are human too, and some of them actually like to mail a joke or a funny picture to a co-worker every once and a while. This even saves time because you can relax a couple of minutes when you have some humor when working, after which you are more productive. If you expect people to work 8 hour (with lunch/coffee break) and expect them to pay full attention/concentration this full period without a minute of fun every once and a while, you start talking about slavery.
This tax paying thing is just like the typical hypocrite American reaction: we pay taxes and they shouldn't waste it. This is true in essence, but it doesn't mean you can deny a public worker any form of humor. Most programmers like funny stuff in the mail every once in a while, and so do government workers.
This is my first point. My second point is that the fact that bestiality is mentioned, as if this makes it worse. Also starts to look like the typical Americal reaction: violence is no problem, anything that has to do with sex is wrong/illegal/filthy/etc..
The person who told this story can A. not see that public workers are human too and B. doesn't see difference between bestiality and really illegal stuff. Therefore I (and any sane person) cannot take him seriously. It's just so clearly a populistic viewpoint ("look: we cannot do this and they can do this other thing which I personally find vulgar and therefore it must be made punishable to do it"). Sad, really.
I don't know about the online gambling laws in Australia. But I must say I agree that sending bestiality through mail to your co-workers is not illegal. Only the most small-minded, conservative, victorian person would think this is illegal. There is no violence or child porn or whatever involved in such a thing, but just because you think it's gross it must be illegal? Give me a break.
If those people want to have some fun during there work, let them. As if nobody outside the public sector ever sends gross mail to his co-workers to have a laugh. You act like a hypocrite when you want to deny such a thing to public workers (and it's even more hypocritical to act as if it were illegal).
I suspect you're just pissed off about the apperantly unjust gambling laws. Too bad you react on that by calling something which is really harmless illegal. People like you are very dangerous, because if you're upset about something (in this case the gambling laws) you'll mark up anything you don't like as illegal. History has shown that this is not a good way of thinking.
Indeed Tanenbaum was not Linus' teacher. Linus studied in Helsinki, Finland, whereas Tanenbaum teached (and still teaches) at the Free University in Amsterdam (where I am a student and had classes from him on computer organization, computer networks and operating systems).
Did you study the source code at length? Check it personally that it didn't have any back doors whatsoever? Hmmmm?
What are you talking about? How do you know whether I check it or not? In fact, I run exclusively code I've compiled myself, after having read the complete code to check for security reasons.
This has saved me a lot of trouble. On the other hand it takes some time. Since I'm very strict in this thing, I only run a very dumbed down version of MINIX of which I had to study the code for my operating system classes. I hardly uses any utilities (http, smtp, news: everything can be done just fine directly over telnet).
I am preparing to run X and KDE in the future. I estimate I'll be ready in 5 years to start compiling the code. I can hardly wait..
I've heard more people about this. Personally I have no problems typing on my C1. After a couple of days I was almost as fast as on a plain keyboard (and I'm a fast typist). I'm also a touch typist. I think a lot of people try it for a minute and think it will not work out, but in reality you need some time to get used to it. The best thing would be to loan a C1 for a day or so, that way you could get used to the keyboard and see if it's really not for you. But then, who in the world would lend his C1 out?:)
This is not 'we need new benchmarks that we score high on'. This is about a CPU that works different than conventional CPU's.
Current benchmarks are dependant on the working of conventional CPU's, and do not pay attention to increasing performance when repeating cycles. Since repeating cycles is what CPU's do most of the time, this is not a moot point (and certainly not what you suggest).
Slashdot Mirror
I've left my tech support period behind me, luckily. But for the new people this might well be a nice alternative than sitting in a cubicle all day.
Anyway, it was about toll roads which I saw on my Swedish holidays. You were expected to pay by putting money in a can yourself (no one was there to check things). A bad person could skip the payment or steal the can. Appearently it worked because we saw several of these toll systems (the last time I went to sweden was about 8 years ago, I think).
In the Netherlands, up to 10 or 20 years ago you could buy fruits and vegetables along the road by taking it from crates and paying the right amount (which was written down on blackboards). There was no person to sell it. Eventually this didn't work anymore, which I think is a shame.
I wrote a response to this but it never showed up. Checking whether this works..
Why is 'copying music' with Napster (nice try) so very different from stealing a bike? Bands (e.g. Metallica) have made it clear that do not like it when their work is copied through Napster. Who are you deny them their rights?
Of course everyone copies something sometimes, we all exchanged cassette tapes with one another and now we burn cdrom's and use(d) Napster. But to act as if that should be legalized without any real argumentation is a different story. That's like legalizing exam fraud because it worked so good for you once, and the teachers are assholes.
If what you imply is true, namely that Slashdot is the bastion of the GPL, this community would be in a very sorry state. But I know its not true, there are enough readers who do not without any real consideration see the GPL as the one and only true free software license. Free software has it's merits (I wrote a paper about it which is online on my site, unfortunately its only available in Dutch), but the GPL is only one of the many free licences under which software can be distributed.
I have the impression that a lot of Slashdot readers condemn the music industry because of their own hidden agenda: the possibility to freeload as much mp3 as they can (gives another meaning to Gates' quote "information at your fingertips"). Of course cd prices are (too) high, but that doesn't legalize copyright violations. Defending such a thing only shows the sad state of your argumention, which is really close to non-existent.
That should read: "would want it to BE", of course.
Where do you get this? I would like to see some proof. Right now it looks more like this is the way you would want it to me, but not the way it is.
I prefer the term Anux myself. :)
1st AC, 2nd AC, you're both pathetic... Get a life!
really knows his tech stuff.. Hell, the guy invented the Internet!
Unlike you, I am not willing to suffer bad browsing experiences just because I want to run FreeBSD as my desktop (which in your case would be Linux).
I made the decision to use Windows as a desktop OS (as did more than half of /. users, as I heard the statistics showed). That was my point. If that doesn't work for you because you insist on waiting for a good browser on Linux and suffering from Netscape/Mozilla/Konq while doing that, that's your problem. I'm just saying what was my solution.
In the real world FreeBSD has had soft-updates for ages now and deletions are extremely fast. In fact, deleting large directory tries filled with lots of files is done almost instantly.
Note that the VE has 64 MB more ram and an 8 MB ati rage mobility where it predecessor has a 2,5 MB graphic chip.
For example, I own a Crusoe-powered picturebook which has a battery life of about 2 - 2.5 hours with a standard battery. The older picturebook with PII/400 had about 1 - 1.5 hours life if I'm not mistaken.
So the net result is a gain in battery life due to use of the Crusoe, but it's still not that long a time. Because the picturebook, including standard battery, weighs only 1 kg.
So the advantages of using a low-power chip can also be used for lightness/smallness instead of long use.
It seems some of you are having reading problems. I'm not talking about 1990 at all. I'm talking about ~1994.
Actually I was born in 1972. But in a country without flat local telephone fees. US != the world.
Why?
In The Netherlands, where you don't have a flat local telephone fee, it was silly to download all day. Especially since some providers also billed per minute of connection time. This could add up to about $3/hour or $6/hour during working hours. For a poor student, this was kind of expensive.
I remember the days before I started my own 14k4 bulletin board. Some of the sysops I knew also traded warez. Usually not online, modems were too slow for that purpose (heck, a lot of us still used 2400 baud modems), but mostly on CD. There were stories about them having large magnets close by, so they could wipe their HDs when the cops arrived. The CDs contents were encrypted and inaccessible without the proper key.
I work for an ISP myself. We have about 250 people working here, and we're definately not local. Now, I'm in the Netherlands so that's a difference. But I cannot imagine even in the United States that an ISP is 'local' when it has 4300 people working for it. If you consider the standards tasks and departments of an ISP (network engineering and operations, sales, support, finance/legal, internal IT, etc), you could serve a BIG area with 4300 people.
If I'm missing something, please enlighten me.
In any workplace people should be allowed to mail stuff to each other, as long as it doesn't eat up too much work time. Public workers are human too, and some of them actually like to mail a joke or a funny picture to a co-worker every once and a while. This even saves time because you can relax a couple of minutes when you have some humor when working, after which you are more productive. If you expect people to work 8 hour (with lunch/coffee break) and expect them to pay full attention/concentration this full period without a minute of fun every once and a while, you start talking about slavery.
This tax paying thing is just like the typical hypocrite American reaction: we pay taxes and they shouldn't waste it. This is true in essence, but it doesn't mean you can deny a public worker any form of humor. Most programmers like funny stuff in the mail every once in a while, and so do government workers.
This is my first point. My second point is that the fact that bestiality is mentioned, as if this makes it worse. Also starts to look like the typical Americal reaction: violence is no problem, anything that has to do with sex is wrong/illegal/filthy/etc..
The person who told this story can A. not see that public workers are human too and B. doesn't see difference between bestiality and really illegal stuff. Therefore I (and any sane person) cannot take him seriously. It's just so clearly a populistic viewpoint ("look: we cannot do this and they can do this other thing which I personally find vulgar and therefore it must be made punishable to do it"). Sad, really.
If those people want to have some fun during there work, let them. As if nobody outside the public sector ever sends gross mail to his co-workers to have a laugh. You act like a hypocrite when you want to deny such a thing to public workers (and it's even more hypocritical to act as if it were illegal).
I suspect you're just pissed off about the apperantly unjust gambling laws. Too bad you react on that by calling something which is really harmless illegal. People like you are very dangerous, because if you're upset about something (in this case the gambling laws) you'll mark up anything you don't like as illegal. History has shown that this is not a good way of thinking.
Indeed Tanenbaum was not Linus' teacher. Linus studied in Helsinki, Finland, whereas Tanenbaum teached (and still teaches) at the Free University in Amsterdam (where I am a student and had classes from him on computer organization, computer networks and operating systems).
What are you talking about? How do you know whether I check it or not? In fact, I run exclusively code I've compiled myself, after having read the complete code to check for security reasons.
This has saved me a lot of trouble. On the other hand it takes some time. Since I'm very strict in this thing, I only run a very dumbed down version of MINIX of which I had to study the code for my operating system classes. I hardly uses any utilities (http, smtp, news: everything can be done just fine directly over telnet).
I am preparing to run X and KDE in the future. I estimate I'll be ready in 5 years to start compiling the code. I can hardly wait..
I've heard more people about this. Personally I have no problems typing on my C1. After a couple of days I was almost as fast as on a plain keyboard (and I'm a fast typist). I'm also a touch typist. I think a lot of people try it for a minute and think it will not work out, but in reality you need some time to get used to it. The best thing would be to loan a C1 for a day or so, that way you could get used to the keyboard and see if it's really not for you. But then, who in the world would lend his C1 out? :)
This is not 'we need new benchmarks that we score high on'. This is about a CPU that works different than conventional CPU's.
Current benchmarks are dependant on the working of conventional CPU's, and do not pay attention to increasing performance when repeating cycles. Since repeating cycles is what CPU's do most of the time, this is not a moot point (and certainly not what you suggest).