Re:Are you kidding?
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
All I know is that the last time I tried to set up a wireless nic in windows XP it took 5 hours, 7 different drivers, and 2 reinstalls of service pack 1, and that was with a 2 year old wireless NIC, same nic under linux (since redhat 7.1) comes up during the install, thats the only hardware problem I've had with either system, on 6 different machines... but it was windows that didn't properly support the hardware.. not linux.
As far as desktop apps, the only thing I'm waiting for is good financial software, and then I can totally ditch windows... and so can all of my clients, and all of my family members...
Open Office is very much good enough for at least 90% of computer users... web browsing with mozilla is better, email/calendaring is getting close (if evolution had a server product like exchange, to share calendars it would be much better) but its still passable right now as a small/medium sized business solution and certainly for home use its great.
If Intuit ported Quicken/Quickbooks tomorrow, 4 law offices, and 2 accouting offices that I do IT work for would all be moved to linux by the end of the year. So its really getting close, and its not nearly as far off as you make it sound.
TCO is much lower for linux, 2 of these offices have linux file/email/web servers running on old p200's with 64mb of ram... the other 4 have windows 2000 servers which require much better hardware, and are constantly breaking. I haven't even looked at the two linux boxes for 4 months (well, ok I've ssh'd to them and typed "up2date -u " to get the latest packages...but that takes less than 30 seconds, and is included in my monthly retainer fee), but I've seen each of the win2k servers in the last week... so you figure who's paying me more money... yeah the windows users...
point is, its getting close, closer than I think most people realize...
Granted its a draconian crazy license... but companies are required to cover their butts, people who own their own companies know this... its obscene the amount of things that companies can be sued for...
At any rate, its not even that bad, ever signed up at Ameritrade? Etrade? any of those places, the agreements you have to read/agree to are thousands of times longer than that...
Anyway, the agreement isn't really that long (I signed an 8 page agreement when I got cable internet access... I've signed many many 4 or 5 page agreements, the lease on my apartment was 6..) so the internet is getting more ecommerce, and with that come obligations on the part of companies, and agreements that the consumers must make... fine.. life goes on.
The problem with your approach is that you will be retooling constantly... if someone wants to work on a car, you don't just give them a phillips screw driver and say "Yeah, that will do everything you need", you give them a toolset, and tell them "to do x use y" "to do z use w". Granted people don't often want to "know how a technology works" but that isn't what the original post is calling for, he is calling for a simple education on tool x is good for necessity y, not an indepth discussion of the low level programming of internet protocols. As a sys-admin I often times show people easier/more efficient ways of doing things, and they are very receptive to learn that they can get things done in 1 click that they were doing in 5, or that its easier to use the start/run to open network shares than to browse through the network neighborhood... saying 1 tool in this case email fits all file transfer/messaging needs is pure folly, sure its easy, but ftp is just as easy to use, and for large files much more efficient, you just have to show people how to use it and explain why its better.
What about: You know you've spent too much time reading slashdot when your first reaction isn't "They put a PC in a pumpkin?!?!" But is: "Hmmm, I'm pretty sure they did this last year too!"
OOo = Open Office, its file format is an XML file format, and it is significantly smaller with the same text/formatting as word's binary format. So I disagree with the idea that XML is less efficient that Word's binary format
I dunno, I have multiple documents that I open in word and OOo, and save them in their native formats... OOo's files are consistantly 90% smaller than Words, even large files (granted my largest file is about 60 pages not the 100 you mention, but even it is about 85% smaller in OOo than in Word). So I don't quite see this happening.
Geeze thats another repost of a story less than a week after its initial posting... come on guys... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/ 22/015241 &mode=thread&tid=155 thats ridiculous!! 1 day! come on
I set my brothers computer up with Red Hat 8. he is 13, and certainly not a computer wiz. He uses it to chat with friends, surf, and download music. He plays games too, so I left it dual boot for that, but he was sick of having to call me every week asking why windows (2k) wasn't booting right, or why his games wouldn't start... He hasn't booted into windows in nearly 3 weeks, and he hasn't called me once (I'm happy).
I think they should hire a better typist over there at the Guardian, I've never seen so many typos in one article in my life, to show just a few: The investigations citedrefer
have been struggling to agree terms
No vember
to force internet prov-iders
I mean really! get a spell checker! And a grammar one too!
you have taken the Insurance companies bait, hook line and sinker. The insurance companies and huge corporations would have you believe that "punative damages" are where they really get hurt, however, this is not the case generally, in most law suits the actual damages are at least 85% of the total award, with barely %15 percent in punative damages (I know my father is an attorney, these are valid statistics of nearly 20 years of his private practice) recently in nevada they passed a tort reform, capping punative damages at 350,000. This means that in Nevada if your child dies because a doctor messes up, or if he dies in a car accident that is not your fault, you will only collect 350,000 (seems like a rather small sum for a lost child to me) because children have no wages, and therefore no "lost wages" and there is no way to guess as to how much they would have made in a lifetime. the insurance companies pushed this law through under the premise that they would then lower premiums, however as soon as it went through they said "sorry, now we'll have to study the effects of the law on our profits for the next 10 years before we can decide whether we can lower premiums". So basically everyone's screwed but the insurance companies. Tort Reform = make rich people richer, at the expense of everyone else.
I don't know if this is what he meant,
but I'll take a stab.
My experience of california is that it is just about the most fake place on the planet. More German automobiles per capita than I bet just about anywhere else, and more consumer debt per capita than any other population on the planet, (I'm not relying on any verifiable statistics, these are just my perceptions of california). Everyone has to have the nicest car/house/clothes, so they can "fit in". Nobody is real, its just a bunch of plastic on the outside of hollow, shallow people. Hence it would be the stupid consumerism gone horribly wrong.
(just my opinion)
Some autism experts think the actual cases to be dramatically more than reported in the UC study
If there is a possibility that the *actual* cases are higher than the *reported* cases, wouldn't this mean that it would be possible that higher awareness could create a statistical anomoly of this kind? If at any time the *actual* cases are higher than what is being reported, then through higher awareness, more cases will be reported, thus skewing the statistics. (Or maybe I'm just sniffing something... its possible)
my business partner has an airport card in his Ti, we have a wireless net at our office, he gets much better range than I do with my laptop and a prism chipset wnic. He can wander all around outside our building, and he never drops his connection, I on the other hand am lucky if I get reception on both floors inside the building (the ap is on the top floor, and generally on the bottom floor I don't connect, he does. So I haven't seen these problems with airport cards not getting good reception.
I'm 1 who wants to pay 50 dollars everytime their little brother drops their brand new ut disc on the ground in front of him, and steps on it? (it happens)
CFCs do not react with Ozone gas you goof. Chlorine does, but CFCs are quite stable, what breaks the CFCs down so that the chlorine can react with ozone? That is a question I have yet to see any enviro-bunny answer, furthermore, how CFCs with an average density of 12 times that of our atmosphere manage to get to the Ozone layer has yet to be explained to me by any enviro-bunnies, (of course, very small rocks do float, as I learned watching Monty Python)... Furthermore they have discovered organic life forms (bacteria mainly) that only live on the ground, and eat purly CFCs, now I'm not a rocket scientist, but if CFCs were going to the Ozone layer, why would bacteria that only eat CFCs live in the soil? How would they sustain themselves?
Unless, as was spoken of in the article, Verizon can raise sufficient Constitutional questions about the DMCA itself (or at least the subpoena process) that they can get the law (or part of it) repealed. This could be a very good thing, finally someone with real money is actually taking on some of the DMCA on constitutional grounds. Just because the DMCA is law, does not mean it is going to stand up to constitutional challeneges, if the law gets repealed then the fact that Verizon didn't follow it is moot, regardless of whether the RIAA followed all of the rules that would force Verizon to hand over the info.
its exactly the same as 7.3. 6 cds actually, 3 binary 2 source and 1 documentation. 7.3 had the exact same number of discs, so don't sweat it you don't have to download 5 discs to install it. Certainly if people downloaded 7.3 they are going to download 8.
Point almost well taken, however, in his same discourse Thoreau states quite plainly that "even voting for the right is doing nothing for it." He quite plainly states that if some law is wrong, the way to fix it is to go out and break the law, and that voting against the law and doing nothing else is plain and simple hypocrisy. Like all those in the 1800's when the piece was written who "opposed" slavery, or "opposed" the mexican war, but who said "there's nothing I can do, Washington has decided".
Please re-read Thoreau before attempting to use his words against his obvious meaning. You attempt to explain away the arguement by saying that the law in and of itself is not flawed, however it is, it takes away my right to tinker with things which I have paid for (DVD encryption, adobe e-book encryption, fonts, DVD players, copy-protected CD's, and soon even my computer hardware, as soon as paladium gets rolling), don't tell me this isn't an invasion of my rights, because it is.
Indeed SP1 for XP does NOT install the.NET framework. I just updated my system yesterday, and in windows update,.NET framework is still there waiting to be downloaded.
I'll agree with you there, I have xp sp1, and the tool is so mindlessly simple, its obscene if someone needs or wants a help file for it. (and I hate the fact that they put the tool on the start menu, annoying!). Now, if (as they allege) setting the defaults in there doesn't really change the settings in some places.. thats a problem. But the tool is easy to use and very intuitive.
yeah, but it says the clients on the windows test had 48 cpus each!! while the linux clients only had 2:) (pretty sure its a typo.. but thats what it says)
Um, register a company (it only costs $20 in Utah, and you have to file sales tax forms, but it takes about 5 minutes a quarter...) Then you get parts wholesale, any decent sized city/town should have a few computer parts wholesalers, and if not, you can order from wholesalers in other cities, and get all the parts from 1 place and pay 1 shipping fee. Someone posted something about not being able to compete with dell because they get parts cheaper.. but I'm confused, when I build my systems I can get better quality parts, and exactly what I want, generally for 300-400 less than a comparable system from Dell... But, whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
All I know is that the last time I tried to set up a wireless nic in windows XP it took 5 hours, 7 different drivers, and 2 reinstalls of service pack 1, and that was with a 2 year old wireless NIC, same nic under linux (since redhat 7.1) comes up during the install, thats the only hardware problem I've had with either system, on 6 different machines... but it was windows that didn't properly support the hardware.. not linux.
As far as desktop apps, the only thing I'm waiting for is good financial software, and then I can totally ditch windows... and so can all of my clients, and all of my family members...
Open Office is very much good enough for at least 90% of computer users... web browsing with mozilla is better, email/calendaring is getting close (if evolution had a server product like exchange, to share calendars it would be much better) but its still passable right now as a small/medium sized business solution and certainly for home use its great.
If Intuit ported Quicken/Quickbooks tomorrow, 4 law offices, and 2 accouting offices that I do IT work for would all be moved to linux by the end of the year. So its really getting close, and its not nearly as far off as you make it sound.
TCO is much lower for linux, 2 of these offices have linux file/email/web servers running on old p200's with 64mb of ram... the other 4 have windows 2000 servers which require much better hardware, and are constantly breaking. I haven't even looked at the two linux boxes for 4 months (well, ok I've ssh'd to them and typed "up2date -u " to get the latest packages...but that takes less than 30 seconds, and is included in my monthly retainer fee), but I've seen each of the win2k servers in the last week... so you figure who's paying me more money... yeah the windows users...
point is, its getting close, closer than I think most people realize...
Granted its a draconian crazy license...
but companies are required to cover their butts, people who own their own companies know this... its obscene the amount of things that companies can be sued for...
At any rate, its not even that bad, ever signed up at Ameritrade? Etrade? any of those places, the agreements you have to read/agree to are thousands of times longer than that...
Anyway, the agreement isn't really that long (I signed an 8 page agreement when I got cable internet access... I've signed many many 4 or 5 page agreements, the lease on my apartment was 6..) so the internet is getting more ecommerce, and with that come obligations on the part of companies, and agreements that the consumers must make... fine.. life goes on.
The problem with your approach is that you will be retooling constantly... if someone wants to work on a car, you don't just give them a phillips screw driver and say "Yeah, that will do everything you need", you give them a toolset, and tell them "to do x use y" "to do z use w". Granted people don't often want to "know how a technology works" but that isn't what the original post is calling for, he is calling for a simple education on tool x is good for necessity y, not an indepth discussion of the low level programming of internet protocols. As a sys-admin I often times show people easier/more efficient ways of doing things, and they are very receptive to learn that they can get things done in 1 click that they were doing in 5, or that its easier to use the start/run to open network shares than to browse through the network neighborhood... saying 1 tool in this case email fits all file transfer/messaging needs is pure folly, sure its easy, but ftp is just as easy to use, and for large files much more efficient, you just have to show people how to use it and explain why its better.
What about:
You know you've spent too much time reading slashdot when your first reaction isn't "They put a PC in a pumpkin?!?!"
But is: "Hmmm, I'm pretty sure they did this last year too!"
OOo = Open Office,
its file format is an XML file format,
and it is significantly smaller with the same text/formatting as word's binary format.
So I disagree with the idea that XML is less efficient that Word's binary format
I dunno,
I have multiple documents that I open in word and OOo, and save them in their native formats... OOo's files are consistantly 90% smaller than Words, even large files (granted my largest file is about 60 pages not the 100 you mention, but even it is about 85% smaller in OOo than in Word).
So I don't quite see this happening.
Geeze/ 22/015241 &mode=thread&tid=155
thats another repost of a story less than a week after its initial posting...
come on guys...
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10
thats ridiculous!! 1 day!
come on
I set my brothers computer up with Red Hat 8.
he is 13, and certainly not a computer wiz. He uses it to chat with friends, surf, and download music. He plays games too, so I left it dual boot for that, but he was sick of having to call me every week asking why windows (2k) wasn't booting right, or why his games wouldn't start... He hasn't booted into windows in nearly 3 weeks, and he hasn't called me once (I'm happy).
I think they should hire a better typist over there at the Guardian, I've never seen so many typos in one article in my life, to show just a few:
The investigations citedrefer
have been struggling to agree terms
No vember
to force internet prov-iders
I mean really! get a spell checker! And a grammar one too!
you have taken the Insurance companies bait, hook line and sinker.
The insurance companies and huge corporations would have you believe that "punative damages" are where they really get hurt, however, this is not the case generally,
in most law suits the actual damages are at least 85% of the total award, with barely %15 percent in punative damages (I know my father is an attorney, these are valid statistics of nearly 20 years of his private practice)
recently in nevada they passed a tort reform, capping punative damages at 350,000. This means that in Nevada if your child dies because a doctor messes up, or if he dies in a car accident that is not your fault, you will only collect 350,000 (seems like a rather small sum for a lost child to me) because children have no wages, and therefore no "lost wages" and there is no way to guess as to how much they would have made in a lifetime.
the insurance companies pushed this law through under the premise that they would then lower premiums, however as soon as it went through they said "sorry, now we'll have to study the effects of the law on our profits for the next 10 years before we can decide whether we can lower premiums". So basically everyone's screwed but the insurance companies. Tort Reform = make rich people richer, at the expense of everyone else.
I develop web sites for small businesses, many of them ecommerce or that move some business services to the web,
do I just go to all of my clients and say "Oh btw, this technology is patented, it will cost $5000 more to build the site"?
the patent license alone is more than 5 times what I normally charge for a site design. This is ridiculous.
I don't know if this is what he meant, but I'll take a stab. My experience of california is that it is just about the most fake place on the planet. More German automobiles per capita than I bet just about anywhere else, and more consumer debt per capita than any other population on the planet, (I'm not relying on any verifiable statistics, these are just my perceptions of california). Everyone has to have the nicest car/house/clothes, so they can "fit in". Nobody is real, its just a bunch of plastic on the outside of hollow, shallow people. Hence it would be the stupid consumerism gone horribly wrong. (just my opinion)
Some autism experts think the actual cases to be dramatically more than reported in the UC study If there is a possibility that the *actual* cases are higher than the *reported* cases, wouldn't this mean that it would be possible that higher awareness could create a statistical anomoly of this kind? If at any time the *actual* cases are higher than what is being reported, then through higher awareness, more cases will be reported, thus skewing the statistics. (Or maybe I'm just sniffing something... its possible)
my business partner has an airport card in his Ti, we have a wireless net at our office,
he gets much better range than I do with my laptop and a prism chipset wnic. He can wander all around outside our building, and he never drops his connection, I on the other hand am lucky if I get reception on both floors inside the building (the ap is on the top floor, and generally on the bottom floor I don't connect, he does. So I haven't seen these problems with airport cards not getting good reception.
I'm 1
who wants to pay 50 dollars everytime their little brother drops their brand new ut disc on the ground in front of him, and steps on it?
(it happens)
Right,
why would anyone do that?
besides, my palm m505 doesn't sync to linux yet either through usb, so whats he gonna gain?
CFCs do not react with Ozone gas you goof.
Chlorine does, but CFCs are quite stable,
what breaks the CFCs down so that the chlorine can react with ozone? That is a question I have yet to see any enviro-bunny answer, furthermore, how CFCs with an average density of 12 times that of our atmosphere manage to get to the Ozone layer has yet to be explained to me by any enviro-bunnies, (of course, very small rocks do float, as I learned watching Monty Python)... Furthermore they have discovered organic life forms (bacteria mainly) that only live on the ground, and eat purly CFCs, now I'm not a rocket scientist, but if CFCs were going to the Ozone layer, why would bacteria that only eat CFCs live in the soil? How would they sustain themselves?
Unless, as was spoken of in the article, Verizon can raise sufficient Constitutional questions about the DMCA itself (or at least the subpoena process) that they can get the law (or part of it) repealed. This could be a very good thing, finally someone with real money is actually taking on some of the DMCA on constitutional grounds. Just because the DMCA is law, does not mean it is going to stand up to constitutional challeneges, if the law gets repealed then the fact that Verizon didn't follow it is moot, regardless of whether the RIAA followed all of the rules that would force Verizon to hand over the info.
its exactly the same as 7.3. 6 cds actually, 3 binary 2 source and 1 documentation. 7.3 had the exact same number of discs, so don't sweat it you don't have to download 5 discs to install it. Certainly if people downloaded 7.3 they are going to download 8.
I wish my moderator points hadn't expired yesterday!
GREAT POST!
Point almost well taken,
however, in his same discourse Thoreau states quite plainly that "even voting for the right is doing nothing for it." He quite plainly states that if some law is wrong, the way to fix it is to go out and break the law, and that voting against the law and doing nothing else is plain and simple hypocrisy. Like all those in the 1800's when the piece was written who "opposed" slavery, or "opposed" the mexican war, but who said "there's nothing I can do, Washington has decided".
Please re-read Thoreau before attempting to use his words against his obvious meaning. You attempt to explain away the arguement by saying that the law in and of itself is not flawed, however it is, it takes away my right to tinker with things which I have paid for (DVD encryption, adobe e-book encryption, fonts, DVD players, copy-protected CD's, and soon even my computer hardware, as soon as paladium gets rolling), don't tell me this isn't an invasion of my rights, because it is.
Indeed SP1 for XP does NOT install the .NET framework. .NET framework is still there waiting to be downloaded.
I just updated my system yesterday, and in windows update,
I'll agree with you there,
I have xp sp1, and the tool is so mindlessly simple, its obscene if someone needs or wants a help file for it. (and I hate the fact that they put the tool on the start menu, annoying!).
Now, if (as they allege) setting the defaults in there doesn't really change the settings in some places.. thats a problem. But the tool is easy to use and very intuitive.
yeah, but it says the clients on the windows test had 48 cpus each!! while the linux clients only had 2 :)
(pretty sure its a typo.. but thats what it says)
Um,
register a company (it only costs $20 in Utah, and you have to file sales tax forms, but it takes about 5 minutes a quarter...) Then you get parts wholesale, any decent sized city/town should have a few computer parts wholesalers, and if not, you can order from wholesalers in other cities, and get all the parts from 1 place and pay 1 shipping fee. Someone posted something about not being able to compete with dell because they get parts cheaper.. but I'm confused, when I build my systems I can get better quality parts, and exactly what I want, generally for 300-400 less than a comparable system from Dell... But, whatever.