Granted, you're right - "you cannot conclusively prove that any new thing will do no harm" and often you can't prove that it will, either.
However, our technology has so far outstripped our culture that it's not funny. We're still arguing about whether or not it's okay to have abortion (and some about birth control) while we're freezing embryos and working on same-sex parenting and genetic manipulation and cloning and...well, quite a few technologies that we've barely paused to examine the ethical and practical complications of. Frankly, we haven't even dealt with the invention of the car from a cultural perspective. Think about it - how fragile the nuclear family is now that you can be in another state by nightfall and across the country in a day or two.
We have an insanely bad habit of doing something just because we can. Is it great that we can clone sheep? Yeah, it's really cool. Is it something we should be practicing...um, I dunno. I really don't, and I doubt that anyone else really does either. But we are. Should we be cloning extinct animals. Maybe. Should we be worrying about why they're extinct in the first place? I'd say so. I bet it has a lot to do with the fact that we didn't stop to think of the consequences of our actions.
It's imperitive that when we as humans invent a new technology that someone ask the question "is this going to help or hurt us? or both?" This should happen before the technology has been spread all over the world and then someone notices - "oh, look, all those exhaust fumes doing massive damage to the ecosystem" "oh, bother, all the lead in discarded computer monitors is polluting the water table." "Hmmm...that's funny, all those women who took thalidomide (sp?) for morning sickness are having babies with birth defects..." Get the picture?
Would it be that terrible if we invented something, and then said "yup, it's neat, but we're not quite ready for it yet. Let's shelve it and come back in five years." By all means, we should do research, but you have to consider the consequences of inventions as well as chugging along and spewing out new technologies.
This is great, we'll find a way to bring back animals from extinction...after they've been killed off because we keep expanding to fill all the available habitats on Earth and ruin their ecosystem and...so - what happens when we bring them back? Keep a few choice samples in zoos and preserves so we can pretend that we've done something wonderful by recreating a species just for our own amusement?
Fact is, if we don't get our stuff together, the numbers of animals going extinct is going to rapidly increase until we end up being the one going extinct - and no other species of animal would be willing to bring us back, even if they could. (Except maybe dogs, we've been pretty nice to them overall and they're generally forgiving. But they just don't have the technology, so forget it...)
In any other species, when the population overruns the food supply then some of the population dies off and the cycle continues - generally the species reaches homeostasis. They become part of their environment, and too many or too few create an imbalance. Predators or lack of food (or both) work to make sure that overpopulation doesn't last long. Similarly, if an animal is being preyed on too much, eventually some of the predators die off and then they can repopulate. Before humans start coming on to the scene, extinction is rare. Not unheard of, but rare.
However, we've been breaking the laws of nature by producing more and more food and more and more people. It is a cycle that cannot last - we are not above nature just because we are "smarter" than other animals. Yes, I said "other" animals because we are, like it or not, part of the animal kingdom. We're not exempt just because we have tools and written language and bank accounts and other things...we're still animals. And, if we don't change our ways and learn to become part of nature again, we'll be an extinct animal.
To quote George Carlin "Save the planet? How arrogant! The planet doesn't need saving. The planet is fine. The people are f@#$ed, but the planet is fine. It'll be here long after we're gone."
Want a different perspective? Check out http://www.ishmael.org/ and get hold of Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" or "Story of B" or "My Ishmael" - they should be required reading in second grade.
When a statement like this comes from a CEO of a second or third-tier company, it probably means that they're about to merge with one of the big boys...it looks like a save-face move to me. TurboLinux is not one of the distinctive distros - they don't have the name recognition of Red Hat, or the reputation of Slackware and Debian.
Turbo has done well in the Asian market (is that the correct term? I don't want to be non-PC...) but there numbers in the U.S.A. and Europe aren't worth diddly. I'd say that they're about to pull a SCO and their distro is going to be absorbed by another company.
On the topic of an Uber-distro - never happen. It's possible that the field will narrow to two or three commercial market-leaders, but Debian has a fairly solid user base that isn't going anywhere. Slackware has a fairly committed following as well. As long as there is Linux, I imagine you'll see three to five major commercial distros and the smattering of free or minor commercial variants you find now. (For instance, the KRUD distro that is based on Red Hat, but with bug fixes and such isn't going anywhere.)
This may be outside of the scope of the discussion, but one has to wonder what kind of marketing genius would put together a brochure like that. It's almost enough to make a person get conspiracy theories. Why would any retailer of any product advertise two identical products, with one touted as being lower performance? Do they display a great price differential?
This is very weird on Dell's part - they can't expect to make more money on the NT stuff. They can't expect to make friends in the Linux Community by dissing the Linux part of their server line. They can't expect to increase sales by claiming one is better than the other - so what did they hope to accomplish here?
Um, just because China decides to utilize Linux, it doesn't mean that sweatshops in China are responsible for coding Linux - which is what I believe the earlier post was implying, that Dell utilizes Chinese labor to produce equipment.
China doesn't have to get permission to use Linux, and their use of Linux does not in any way imply support of Chinese politics or labor by other Linux users. That argument simply doesn't follow.
While putting a human rights clause on the GPL may sound like a wonderful idea, it really wouldn't be
very effective and would be counterproductive. Some might hope that by exposing people in countries with oppresive political situations to free software that maybe some of the ideology behind free software might rub off and cause change in those countries. (It's my hope that exposure to free software and the ideas behind it might spark some thought in countries like the USA as well....) That's probably wishful thinking, but everyone has to have a dream.
Daniel Quinn makes a good case for why the Earth is quite likely to become unable to support human life in "Ishmael," "The Story of B," and "My Ishmael." He raises some very interesting ideas that are worth consideration - even if you don't agree, they're worth thinking about seriously. (I happen to agree, but I can see why many wouldn't...)
I wonder if this kind of statement by Hawking will get taken seriously by the masses or not. Steven Hawking is dead brilliant, but Mother Culture has taught the majority of the populace to ignore these types of predictions because they conflict with the teachings of society...
The FCC regulating Internet services is the very last thing I would ever want to see. They should not be able to regulate ISPs or anything on the Internet anyway - the whole excuse for the FCC is that radio and televison frequencies are limited commodities and therefore need to be regulated and divvied up by the government - to make sure radio stations don't try to lay claim to a frequency by just squatting there, for instance. However, the FCC has gone far beyond that and has really fubared radio for everyone. Ever wonder why all radio sounds alike? It's probably because most radio stations are owned by conglomerates that just apply cookie-cutter formulas to stations, and corporations are now allowed to own more stations in one area than ever before.
In the early days of radio it was a fairly democratic medium, the barriers to entry were small and many enterprising people started up small stations. However, the trend has been towards creating regulations that raise the barrier of entry, require much more massive equipment and basically bar anyone but the wealthy from starting a radio station. Of course, this has the nasty side effect of limiting your options when it comes to listening to radio. Just try to get a license to run an FM or AM station to broadcast to the area of a small town. More than likely you will be unable to because the FCC only wants you to have a license if you are going to run a large transmitter. Never mind the fact that is not in the best interest of the public - the rules and regs of the FCC are shaped by special interest groups who have the money to lobby them.
If the FCC started regulating the Internet in any way, it wouldn't be long before the heavies started lobbying for rules that would be prohibitive for small businesses or publications on the Net.
Sorry - I used to work in radio and I have an intense hatred for the FCC and what they've done to radio.
Why do people pay "big bucks" to tv and radio, and not for banner ads? Let's see - if you pay $50 for a 30 second radio spot in a large market you can reach tens of thousands of people at any given time. If you're getting drive time hours on a popular station you can count on even more.
Now, a site like Slashdot charges something outrageous like $35 CPM - which means $35 for every 1,000 displays. Yahoo! is even higher at around $70 for some of their properties. Let's see, I can reach 1,000 people for $35 or I can reach 10,000 for $50. And let's not forget that multiple people can be listening to a radio station or watching a TV show - but how often do you get a double-whammy with a banner ad? Hardly ever. Evil as they are, Double-click and other ad networks charge much less because they can run so many ads.
Internet ads also have one of the lowest response rates - 1% is considered good, 2% - 3% is phenomenal.
Also, telling a "local business" to advertise on a Web site is kind of a waste - how do they know who's going to the site? For all they know the bulk of your traffic is coming from Taiwan!
Maybe it's time for some resourceful Open Sourcers to start a non-evil ad network... What's Blockstackers doing these days?
I don't think providing patches for memory managment on big iron really is any cause for concern. This isn't the same as the Unices forking and becoming almost wholly incompatible - this seems to be a patch or line of development for specific hardware that wouldn't really cause any disruption to the rest of kernel development, and no disruption whatsoever to the remainder of the tools that make up Linux distributions.
The danger would be if Red Hat or SuSE or someone like that started doing ugly things to make their distribution incompatible with the others in mainstream use. Since Big Iron servers are such a rarified environment, they're not very important to the average user.
Xi Graphics is doing what they can to keep their outmoded business model afloat. They based their business model on the fact that years ago Linux didn't have a real "desktop" or X servers for a large number of video cards. Now they're finding that their products don't have the features to justify the price over the freely available tools. It's too bad they are taking this tack instead of changing their business model.
I can't say I'll cry over CDE going to the dustbin - I had to use it for a while as part of my old company's "standard" desktop and hated it with a passion. Their X server for my ATI card also proved buggier than the freely available XFree server - I've never had an XFree server bug out on me, but the Accellerated X product crapped out on me at least once a week. (Having a crash is quite shock when you're used to working with Linux and not having them - it's really catastrophic!)
By the way - if you do happen to like the look and feel of CDE (sick bastard) there's always XFce, the GPL'ed CDE clone. Much smaller memory footprint too.
It's really odd to see the amount of hype that is being given to the olympics - especially given the collective yawn that people are giving them. It's a good example of the growing disconnect between media outlets and the public's interests. Of course, the multi-million dollar sponsors are pressing media outlets for more coverage since they're afraid of seeing their (wasted) investment go out the window.
Maybe people have finally woke up and realized that there's no point in watching endless hours of coverage of something that has absolutely no meaningful impact on their life...(notice the ratings for football are also down this year as well...)
I saw a poll on MSNBC, I think, that was about the low ratings and oddly enough none of the options were "no one cares" or "the olympics don't interest me" - they were all about time slots and that sort of thing, which leads me to believe that either they're trying to simply rig results that say "Oh, that's why ratings are low - because we're showing them on tape delay, not because no one really cares..." or they really can't fathom that the average American really doesn't care.
To address the topic at hand, though - it's ridiculous to say that participants can only communicate to the public through approved channels, but it looks like the atheletes are going to have to fight the IOC if they want to do so and still be allowed to play. Of course, by the time the IOC gets done getting rid of the olympians who are using dope and the ones who are doing diaries they won't need to have the games anyway!
I dunno - charging for it when Debian and Mandrake are already doing it for free is pretty damn bold, right? Heh. Never did like Red Hat anyway...I own five Linux boxen - Slack, Debian, Suse and Mandrake - not a Red Hat amongst them.
If you have a techie job you shouldn't have to look to far past your co-workers to find someone looking to split rent. Once you put more than one geek in a habitat the whole geek house thing just kind of happens...
Just make sure it's someone you can get along with and have similar tastes in entertainment with. There are two geeks in my house and about 9 computers and a cable modem and DSL, but only 1 kitchen and 1 TV.
You probably would - and would probably be (quite rightly) annoyed by those responses. Unfortunately, there's a high signal to noise ratio here...
The main reason I chose to respond to the FreeBSD comment is because I've been to quite a few Linux shows and met several of the BSD bigots and find it unbelievable the amount of hostility that they display towards Linux. I think that the BSD projects are great - but they're not for me. But, I'm glad they're out there, I'm happy that they are moving forward and I might even decide to use them someday. I just don't understand why some of the BSD camp feel the need to flame Linux users - I've never seen any Linux user flame someone for using FreeBSD. Ever.
And what is the deal with the Natalie Portman stuff anyway?
In patent lawsuits having legitimate licensees goes a long way towards making a patent look reasonable. The fact that Apple has done this gives Amazon too much credibility and creates a very scary precedent.
Isn't there a site that can demonstrate prior use of the one-click technology to get this lousy patent killed?
Y'know - I'm not even that big a fan of the band, but I may just go buy the latest album to support the fact they're being inventive and not abusing the court system. It's amazing that there aren't already billions of MP3 ads for porno sites and spam anyway...If only the record companies had a clue they could have made Napster go away whimpering by displaying a little adaptability rather than clogging up the court system with their temper-tantrums.
Hey Lars - put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Oh - I have some used Metallica CDs for sale cheap...
Amen - how about an "Ask Slashdot" about the apparent conspiracy to keep RAM prices up? I mean, the Taiwan earthquake excuse is a bit ragged by now. RAM is only expensive because there doesn't seem to be too much competition between RAM dealers. Does anyone have an inside scoop on the real price of RAM to manufacture and the actual available supply?
You know, I have nothing against any of the *BSDs, but some of you BSD-bigots really get annoying. A guy posted a question about doing something with Linux, he didn't ask if other OSes could do "x" he asked how to do "x" under a particular OS. Leave it alone. It's all free UNIX, it's all good, get over it.
Sure, FreeBSD does some things better than Linux - so use FreeBSD and let those of us who prefer Linux use Linux. I personally think Linux does nearly everything better than Windows or the MacOS, but I don't feel the need to insult and annoy Windows or Mac users with "why try to do it on those OSes - use Linux instead!" (Of course, if a Windows or Mac user asks about Linux I'm more than happy to share what I know...)
I would have hoped that this story would highlight the obvious - national borders are becoming more and more ridiculous. You can fly anywhere in the world in under a day - you can communicate with someone around the world easily by picking up a phone or sending an e-mail in under a minute. So why is it that moving from one country to another is such a punishing ordeal?
Instead of arguing about how we can keep people from countries that have lower standards of living out of our country - perhaps we should be talking about raising their standards of living so that living in their country is as attractive as living here. I'm not talking about spending billions of dollars on aid programs that get sucked up by the power structures that exist in those countries - I'm talking about ending predatory labor practices that companies from the U.S. employ in other countries.
There is a shortage of tech workers in this country because we have created a very imbalanced economy here - we have a disproportionate number of information technology jobs here and a severe lack of unskilled labor jobs here. We've exported so much of our production to countries that have no labor regulations and concentrated all of the IT here. There is a widening gap in available jobs in this country - high-paying professional jobs or severely low-paying service jobs. Think about it.
I say require companies to pay federally required minimum wages wherever they do business - then you'll see plenty of IT jobs moving to India or wherever and labor moving back here. The techies in India (just an example, I hope no one is offended...) will be happy to work for a wage that would offend techies here, and companies faced with paying the same wage here or overseas for production-type labor would choose to do business here because the taxes and shipping would make it more attractive to do production here.
We have to import workers because there's a limited percentage of people in this country who are inclined to technical careers. It's not just a matter of going to school to learn to code - you have to have a desire to do that type of work. Money is not a sufficient motivator to induce everyone to pursue a career they're not suited to. Plus, do we really want people who are just in it for the money? For the most part they're likely to be mediocre techies at best.
I agree that whenever Congress gets involved it usually makes a mess, but that doesn't mean that people who want to live in the US should suffer because of it. It's really disturbing to see so many people espousing a "us" and "them" mentality.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by polar_bear:
Heh... Good point. I bet we only try to save cute and furry species. No one is going to try to save any extinct variety of mosquito or jellyfish.
Posted by polar_bear:
Oh, please, save us from precautionary thinking!
Granted, you're right - "you cannot conclusively prove that any new thing will do no harm" and often you can't prove that it will, either.
However, our technology has so far outstripped our culture that it's not funny. We're still arguing about whether or not it's okay to have abortion (and some about birth control) while we're freezing embryos and working on same-sex parenting and genetic manipulation and cloning and...well, quite a few technologies that we've barely paused to examine the ethical and practical complications of. Frankly, we haven't even dealt with the invention of the car from a cultural perspective. Think about it - how fragile the nuclear family is now that you can be in another state by nightfall and across the country in a day or two.
We have an insanely bad habit of doing something just because we can. Is it great that we can clone sheep? Yeah, it's really cool. Is it something we should be practicing...um, I dunno. I really don't, and I doubt that anyone else really does either. But we are. Should we be cloning extinct animals. Maybe. Should we be worrying about why they're extinct in the first place? I'd say so. I bet it has a lot to do with the fact that we didn't stop to think of the consequences of our actions.
It's imperitive that when we as humans invent a new technology that someone ask the question "is this going to help or hurt us? or both?" This should happen before the technology has been spread all over the world and then someone notices - "oh, look, all those exhaust fumes doing massive damage to the ecosystem" "oh, bother, all the lead in discarded computer monitors is polluting the water table." "Hmmm...that's funny, all those women who took thalidomide (sp?) for morning sickness are having babies with birth defects..." Get the picture?
Would it be that terrible if we invented something, and then said "yup, it's neat, but we're not quite ready for it yet. Let's shelve it and come back in five years." By all means, we should do research, but you have to consider the consequences of inventions as well as chugging along and spewing out new technologies.
Posted by polar_bear:
This is great, we'll find a way to bring back animals from extinction...after they've been killed off because we keep expanding to fill all the available habitats on Earth and ruin their ecosystem and...so - what happens when we bring them back? Keep a few choice samples in zoos and preserves so we can pretend that we've done something wonderful by recreating a species just for our own amusement?
Fact is, if we don't get our stuff together, the numbers of animals going extinct is going to rapidly increase until we end up being the one going extinct - and no other species of animal would be willing to bring us back, even if they could. (Except maybe dogs, we've been pretty nice to them overall and they're generally forgiving. But they just don't have the technology, so forget it...)
In any other species, when the population overruns the food supply then some of the population dies off and the cycle continues - generally the species reaches homeostasis. They become part of their environment, and too many or too few create an imbalance. Predators or lack of food (or both) work to make sure that overpopulation doesn't last long. Similarly, if an animal is being preyed on too much, eventually some of the predators die off and then they can repopulate. Before humans start coming on to the scene, extinction is rare. Not unheard of, but rare.
However, we've been breaking the laws of nature by producing more and more food and more and more people. It is a cycle that cannot last - we are not above nature just because we are "smarter" than other animals. Yes, I said "other" animals because we are, like it or not, part of the animal kingdom. We're not exempt just because we have tools and written language and bank accounts and other things...we're still animals. And, if we don't change our ways and learn to become part of nature again, we'll be an extinct animal.
To quote George Carlin "Save the planet? How arrogant! The planet doesn't need saving. The planet is fine. The people are f@#$ed, but the planet is fine. It'll be here long after we're gone."
Want a different perspective? Check out http://www.ishmael.org/ and get hold of Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" or "Story of B" or "My Ishmael" - they should be required reading in second grade.
Posted by polar_bear:
When a statement like this comes from a CEO of a second or third-tier company, it probably means that they're about to merge with one of the big boys...it looks like a save-face move to me. TurboLinux is not one of the distinctive distros - they don't have the name recognition of Red Hat, or the reputation of Slackware and Debian.
Turbo has done well in the Asian market (is that the correct term? I don't want to be non-PC...) but there numbers in the U.S.A. and Europe aren't worth diddly. I'd say that they're about to pull a SCO and their distro is going to be absorbed by another company.
On the topic of an Uber-distro - never happen. It's possible that the field will narrow to two or three commercial market-leaders, but Debian has a fairly solid user base that isn't going anywhere. Slackware has a fairly committed following as well. As long as there is Linux, I imagine you'll see three to five major commercial distros and the smattering of free or minor commercial variants you find now. (For instance, the KRUD distro that is based on Red Hat, but with bug fixes and such isn't going anywhere.)
Posted by polar_bear:
This may be outside of the scope of the discussion, but one has to wonder what kind of marketing genius would put together a brochure like that. It's almost enough to make a person get conspiracy theories. Why would any retailer of any product advertise two identical products, with one touted as being lower performance? Do they display a great price differential?
This is very weird on Dell's part - they can't expect to make more money on the NT stuff. They can't expect to make friends in the Linux Community by dissing the Linux part of their server line. They can't expect to increase sales by claiming one is better than the other - so what did they hope to accomplish here?
Posted by polar_bear:
Um, just because China decides to utilize Linux, it doesn't mean that sweatshops in China are responsible for coding Linux - which is what I believe the earlier post was implying, that Dell utilizes Chinese labor to produce equipment.
China doesn't have to get permission to use Linux, and their use of Linux does not in any way imply support of Chinese politics or labor by other Linux users. That argument simply doesn't follow.
While putting a human rights clause on the GPL may sound like a wonderful idea, it really wouldn't be
very effective and would be counterproductive. Some might hope that by exposing people in countries with oppresive political situations to free software that maybe some of the ideology behind free software might rub off and cause change in those countries. (It's my hope that exposure to free software and the ideas behind it might spark some thought in countries like the USA as well....) That's probably wishful thinking, but everyone has to have a dream.
Posted by polar_bear:
Daniel Quinn makes a good case for why the Earth is quite likely to become unable to support human life in "Ishmael," "The Story of B," and "My Ishmael." He raises some very interesting ideas that are worth consideration - even if you don't agree, they're worth thinking about seriously. (I happen to agree, but I can see why many wouldn't...)
I wonder if this kind of statement by Hawking will get taken seriously by the masses or not. Steven Hawking is dead brilliant, but Mother Culture has taught the majority of the populace to ignore these types of predictions because they conflict with the teachings of society...
Posted by polar_bear:
The FCC regulating Internet services is the very last thing I would ever want to see. They should not be able to regulate ISPs or anything on the Internet anyway - the whole excuse for the FCC is that radio and televison frequencies are limited commodities and therefore need to be regulated and divvied up by the government - to make sure radio stations don't try to lay claim to a frequency by just squatting there, for instance. However, the FCC has gone far beyond that and has really fubared radio for everyone. Ever wonder why all radio sounds alike? It's probably because most radio stations are owned by conglomerates that just apply cookie-cutter formulas to stations, and corporations are now allowed to own more stations in one area than ever before.
In the early days of radio it was a fairly democratic medium, the barriers to entry were small and many enterprising people started up small stations. However, the trend has been towards creating regulations that raise the barrier of entry, require much more massive equipment and basically bar anyone but the wealthy from starting a radio station. Of course, this has the nasty side effect of limiting your options when it comes to listening to radio. Just try to get a license to run an FM or AM station to broadcast to the area of a small town. More than likely you will be unable to because the FCC only wants you to have a license if you are going to run a large transmitter. Never mind the fact that is not in the best interest of the public - the rules and regs of the FCC are shaped by special interest groups who have the money to lobby them.
If the FCC started regulating the Internet in any way, it wouldn't be long before the heavies started lobbying for rules that would be prohibitive for small businesses or publications on the Net.
Sorry - I used to work in radio and I have an intense hatred for the FCC and what they've done to radio.
Posted by polar_bear:
Why do people pay "big bucks" to tv and radio, and not for banner ads? Let's see - if you pay $50 for a 30 second radio spot in a large market you can reach tens of thousands of people at any given time. If you're getting drive time hours on a popular station you can count on even more.
Now, a site like Slashdot charges something outrageous like $35 CPM - which means $35 for every 1,000 displays. Yahoo! is even higher at around $70 for some of their properties. Let's see, I can reach 1,000 people for $35 or I can reach 10,000 for $50. And let's not forget that multiple people can be listening to a radio station or watching a TV show - but how often do you get a double-whammy with a banner ad? Hardly ever. Evil as they are, Double-click and other ad networks charge much less because they can run so many ads.
Internet ads also have one of the lowest response rates - 1% is considered good, 2% - 3% is phenomenal.
Also, telling a "local business" to advertise on a Web site is kind of a waste - how do they know who's going to the site? For all they know the bulk of your traffic is coming from Taiwan!
Maybe it's time for some resourceful Open Sourcers to start a non-evil ad network... What's Blockstackers doing these days?
Posted by polar_bear:
I don't think providing patches for memory managment on big iron really is any cause for concern. This isn't the same as the Unices forking and becoming almost wholly incompatible - this seems to be a patch or line of development for specific hardware that wouldn't really cause any disruption to the rest of kernel development, and no disruption whatsoever to the remainder of the tools that make up Linux distributions.
The danger would be if Red Hat or SuSE or someone like that started doing ugly things to make their distribution incompatible with the others in mainstream use. Since Big Iron servers are such a rarified environment, they're not very important to the average user.
Posted by polar_bear:
Um, in regards to "0" - I really think sex should qualify as a stress reliever in its own right...
Posted by polar_bear:
Xi Graphics is doing what they can to keep their outmoded business model afloat. They based their business model on the fact that years ago Linux didn't have a real "desktop" or X servers for a large number of video cards. Now they're finding that their products don't have the features to justify the price over the freely available tools. It's too bad they are taking this tack instead of changing their business model.
I can't say I'll cry over CDE going to the dustbin - I had to use it for a while as part of my old company's "standard" desktop and hated it with a passion. Their X server for my ATI card also proved buggier than the freely available XFree server - I've never had an XFree server bug out on me, but the Accellerated X product crapped out on me at least once a week. (Having a crash is quite shock when you're used to working with Linux and not having them - it's really catastrophic!)
By the way - if you do happen to like the look and feel of CDE (sick bastard) there's always XFce, the GPL'ed CDE clone. Much smaller memory footprint too.
Posted by polar_bear:
It's really odd to see the amount of hype that is being given to the olympics - especially given the collective yawn that people are giving them. It's a good example of the growing disconnect between media outlets and the public's interests. Of course, the multi-million dollar sponsors are pressing media outlets for more coverage since they're afraid of seeing their (wasted) investment go out the window.
Maybe people have finally woke up and realized that there's no point in watching endless hours of coverage of something that has absolutely no meaningful impact on their life...(notice the ratings for football are also down this year as well...)
I saw a poll on MSNBC, I think, that was about the low ratings and oddly enough none of the options were "no one cares" or "the olympics don't interest me" - they were all about time slots and that sort of thing, which leads me to believe that either they're trying to simply rig results that say "Oh, that's why ratings are low - because we're showing them on tape delay, not because no one really cares..." or they really can't fathom that the average American really doesn't care.
To address the topic at hand, though - it's ridiculous to say that participants can only communicate to the public through approved channels, but it looks like the atheletes are going to have to fight the IOC if they want to do so and still be allowed to play. Of course, by the time the IOC gets done getting rid of the olympians who are using dope and the ones who are doing diaries they won't need to have the games anyway!
Posted by polar_bear:
I dunno - charging for it when Debian and Mandrake are already doing it for free is pretty damn bold, right? Heh. Never did like Red Hat anyway...I own five Linux boxen - Slack, Debian, Suse and Mandrake - not a Red Hat amongst them.
Posted by polar_bear:
The first Linux book that I bought was Yggdrasil's Linux Bible - I'm glad to see Yggdrasil back on the map.
Posted by polar_bear:
If you have a techie job you shouldn't have to look to far past your co-workers to find someone looking to split rent. Once you put more than one geek in a habitat the whole geek house thing just kind of happens...
Just make sure it's someone you can get along with and have similar tastes in entertainment with. There are two geeks in my house and about 9 computers and a cable modem and DSL, but only 1 kitchen and 1 TV.
Posted by polar_bear:
You probably would - and would probably be (quite rightly) annoyed by those responses. Unfortunately, there's a high signal to noise ratio here...
The main reason I chose to respond to the FreeBSD comment is because I've been to quite a few Linux shows and met several of the BSD bigots and find it unbelievable the amount of hostility that they display towards Linux. I think that the BSD projects are great - but they're not for me. But, I'm glad they're out there, I'm happy that they are moving forward and I might even decide to use them someday. I just don't understand why some of the BSD camp feel the need to flame Linux users - I've never seen any Linux user flame someone for using FreeBSD. Ever.
And what is the deal with the Natalie Portman stuff anyway?
Posted by polar_bear:
In patent lawsuits having legitimate licensees goes a long way towards making a patent look reasonable. The fact that Apple has done this gives Amazon too much credibility and creates a very scary precedent.
Isn't there a site that can demonstrate prior use of the one-click technology to get this lousy patent killed?
Posted by polar_bear:
Y'know - I'm not even that big a fan of the band, but I may just go buy the latest album to support the fact they're being inventive and not abusing the court system. It's amazing that there aren't already billions of MP3 ads for porno sites and spam anyway...If only the record companies had a clue they could have made Napster go away whimpering by displaying a little adaptability rather than clogging up the court system with their temper-tantrums.
Hey Lars - put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Oh - I have some used Metallica CDs for sale cheap...
Posted by polar_bear:
Amen - how about an "Ask Slashdot" about the apparent conspiracy to keep RAM prices up? I mean, the Taiwan earthquake excuse is a bit ragged by now. RAM is only expensive because there doesn't seem to be too much competition between RAM dealers. Does anyone have an inside scoop on the real price of RAM to manufacture and the actual available supply?
Posted by polar_bear:
You know, I have nothing against any of the *BSDs, but some of you BSD-bigots really get annoying. A guy posted a question about doing something with Linux, he didn't ask if other OSes could do "x" he asked how to do "x" under a particular OS. Leave it alone. It's all free UNIX, it's all good, get over it.
Sure, FreeBSD does some things better than Linux - so use FreeBSD and let those of us who prefer Linux use Linux. I personally think Linux does nearly everything better than Windows or the MacOS, but I don't feel the need to insult and annoy Windows or Mac users with "why try to do it on those OSes - use Linux instead!" (Of course, if a Windows or Mac user asks about Linux I'm more than happy to share what I know...)
Posted by polar_bear:
What a happy life you must lead believing that.
Posted by polar_bear:
I would have hoped that this story would highlight the obvious - national borders are becoming more and more ridiculous. You can fly anywhere in the world in under a day - you can communicate with someone around the world easily by picking up a phone or sending an e-mail in under a minute. So why is it that moving from one country to another is such a punishing ordeal?
Instead of arguing about how we can keep people from countries that have lower standards of living out of our country - perhaps we should be talking about raising their standards of living so that living in their country is as attractive as living here. I'm not talking about spending billions of dollars on aid programs that get sucked up by the power structures that exist in those countries - I'm talking about ending predatory labor practices that companies from the U.S. employ in other countries.
There is a shortage of tech workers in this country because we have created a very imbalanced economy here - we have a disproportionate number of information technology jobs here and a severe lack of unskilled labor jobs here. We've exported so much of our production to countries that have no labor regulations and concentrated all of the IT here. There is a widening gap in available jobs in this country - high-paying professional jobs or severely low-paying service jobs. Think about it.
I say require companies to pay federally required minimum wages wherever they do business - then you'll see plenty of IT jobs moving to India or wherever and labor moving back here. The techies in India (just an example, I hope no one is offended...) will be happy to work for a wage that would offend techies here, and companies faced with paying the same wage here or overseas for production-type labor would choose to do business here because the taxes and shipping would make it more attractive to do production here.
Think about it...
Posted by polar_bear:
I agree - indentured servitude is bad enough - no need to resort to calling it slavery.
Posted by polar_bear:
We have to import workers because there's a limited percentage of people in this country who are inclined to technical careers. It's not just a matter of going to school to learn to code - you have to have a desire to do that type of work. Money is not a sufficient motivator to induce everyone to pursue a career they're not suited to. Plus, do we really want people who are just in it for the money? For the most part they're likely to be mediocre techies at best.
I agree that whenever Congress gets involved it usually makes a mess, but that doesn't mean that people who want to live in the US should suffer because of it. It's really disturbing to see so many people espousing a "us" and "them" mentality.