When a comment like this is hidden to -1 and thus both censored from view and censored from archival, the Slashdot forums are officially dead. Disagreement has officially become trolling, and echos of "conventional wisdom" bounce about exponentially, like an array of ping-pong balls on mouse traps.
One thing is for sure, however: Desktop Linux has not gained significant institutional usage. That is a fact. Downmodding that fact will not make it go away.
Desktop Linux sucks. Well, let's be honest, desktop Unix sucks. Gnome and KDE did not meet the goal of providing a quality alternative to commercial desktop systems. That was their intent, but the outcome has been simply dismal. I say this having used desktop UNIX and Linux exclusively since the early 1990s. I haven't run Windows at home since Win 3.1. Currently, I've given up on Linux and run MacOS X - but, frankly, that too is nearly twenty year old desktop technology.
Where I work we're currently slowly transitioning from desktop Linux to MacOS X. Linux and FreeBSD will remain in the server room and for computational clustering. Which is where the free OS's truly shine right now.
The next time you want to release a product in a market already saturated by a single large a and very popular competitor, try competing not on the coolness factor but on price/performance. You know, make the product "cheaper" with the same or better "features". If you can't do that, perhaps you don't have a value proposition to offer your potential customers. And if so, you shouldn't be surprised when they buy your competitor's product.
I know, sucks when you have to compete in a fair and free market - don't it?
I now just make do with my iPhone and a fat connection at work. I first canceled Comcast because their prices are simply too high. They were charging me $180/mo for HD television and Internet. To cut out the television would have still been almost $70/mo.
RCN, a competitor in my town, offered Internet service only for $35/mo, so I tried them. They simply made up stuff to charge me with. No television? Well, you have television service now! Pay up. Call them and have it turned off? Sure... only to have it turned back on again, with yet more bills for service I never ordered. I finally canceled, only to be forced to call the MA Department of Public Utilities to force the company to stop sending me bills for a service that was now canceled. Getting service through the phone tree was impossible. I really had to go to my state regulator.
Verizon: DSL service. Great. Except that it would regularly die for days on end. And Verizon could not be bothered to actually FIX the service they were charging me for. After over a week of downtime, I canceled. They're still sending me bills for service I canceled months ago. I'm currently dealing with the state regulator over their bullshit too.
I'm done with giving these assholes my money.
Let's hope the new administration sets a new regulator tone. Because the last administration let those guys fuck their customers over good and hard.
I'd like to hear you say that after your wife and children are killed in front of your face. War has real consequences to real human beings, most of whom have no interest in war whatsoever. They just want to feed themselves and their kids.
Because RUSSIA had just entered the war against Japan. There was absolutely no reason to drop those nuclear bombs, because the last thing the Japanese wanted was Russia occupying the Japanese islands. We can thank General Curtis Lemay for convincing President Truman of the necessity of dropping those bombs. We can also thank him for all that firebombing too.
I don't accept that mass civilian casualties are the norm of warfare. It is WRONG.
It is both true that Microsoft has engaged in numerous anti-competitive business practices, has bought out numerous technologies that they then either killed or rebranded and resold, and they even broke some laws in the process - as proved in US district court. But all that could be true and still your point is irrelevant. Because staff engineers at Microsoft have also written a hell of a lot of source code. Microsoft also has hired many top CS professors and academics. There's a pile of brains in that place, most of which are used inefficiently. That's bureaucracy.
But there's no way in hell that Canonical - with a few random employees and a dinky $30M/yr gross, can compete with a behemoth like Microsoft. They can't. Perhaps the entire Linux community can, but Canonical hasn't hired the "Linux community" and doesn't pay them.
Again: the article and this synopsis offers Slashdot readers a ridiculous and thoroughly useless comparison between the two. As such, it's at best a bad strawman argument. At worst, yet another example of Slashdot swirling down the drain.
This place used to be filled with smart folks. Now it just makes smart folks yet more stupid. This place has become a brain sink.
I had personal friends who were fucked over by the Stacker imbroglio. I'm well aware of Microsoft's anticompetitive and criminal business tactics. But leftovers from that era at MS are still a very small part of the entire source-code tree that is Windows. I don't really like Windows. I don't use it. I don't much care for Microsoft as a business.
But the assertion that Canonical has somehow found a better business model than Microsoft's because they hire fewer developers and have a smaller gross income than Microsoft and - yet - also sell an entire OS like MS does is utterly ridiculous at its face.
Yet more stupid Slashdot crap that offers no insight into the problems of maintaining a large tree, and even less insight on the business and logistics problems of managing a large project and many developers. That's the real underlying discussion here. And nobody is having that discussion because Slashdot is filled with a bunch of fucking kids who want to spend their time finding reasons to hate Microsoft.
One needn't have much reason to dislike Windows. It's a piece of shit. We all know that already. But that doesn't mean that some random Linux distribution based off of a huge free development project with decades of history, is in any way comparable with a private internally developed product. It's not. And to argue that MS doesn't do any internal software development is idiotic at its face.
Just as I knew friends at Stacker at one time, so do I know a few devs at Microsoft. They work their asses off writing code.
How much source code from Q-DOS do you think still remains in the Windows NT tree? The only portion of BSD that I'm aware of that was - at one time - used for NT 3.51 and 4.0 was the IP stack. Which is a pretty dinky part of the kernel, never mind the entire OS tree. SpyGlass wrote a little web browser that could render no more than HTML 1.0 back in the day - how much of that do you think still remains in Internet Explorer 7?
They had a source code tree that's just over fifteen years old, with bits that go back some twenty five years. Microsoft wrote its own source code tree from scratch. There's kind of a difference, don't you think? So comparing Canonical's $30m/yr cash flow and small staffing to Microsoft's multi-billion/yr cash flow and tens of thousands of staff members is invalid because the two aren't comparable. Apples-Oranges, to use a cliche.
Re:I agree. But that's a different problem
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 1
I'm off my academic computer right now due to a blizzard in Boston. But they're there. I chose pubmed because it's the only resource available to the public.
I cited through pubmed because it's public
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 1
Would you prefer citations from journals that require a subscription or academic access?
Look, get to the original point. There are many peer reviewed studies from the late 1980s through to the present that show a positive result beyond placebo. I've never taken or used acupuncture, I don't practice it, I have no interest in the procedure beyond using it to challenge this author's abuse of factual claims not substantiated by his own academic press in order to sell copy.
Skepticism has become a business. As a result, it is not a rational way to set science policy. Nor is it a good way to educate oneself about what are and what are not recent scientific findings. It is - at best - a shorthand for being "right". In the sense that a clock is right at least twice a day. But - like all pseudoscience - over reliance on skepticism as a shorthand never predicts new results nor do those engaging in the practice offer new data for determining new findings.
Thus, I argue that skepticism has become nothing more than a new religious bias.
This article is about a book's claims
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 1
I have provided medical citations that dispute the author's claims that certain popular so-called 'alternative medicine' techniques are worthless bunk. The author is claiming a negative finding which is not supported by the literature. I do not argue that it is your responsibility to refute an unreferenced positive claim. Please see the entire thread in context.
I have never taken acupuncture. That is not the point.
Your cite, however, is welcome. Thank you.
I agree. But that's a different problem
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Now you're arguing that an ancient Chinese model for how acupuncture works is flawed because it doesn't conform to modern medical terminology, nor does it conform to the scientific method of making predictions based on prior results.
I fully agree.
But that doesn't discount findings, it only calls into question an understanding of the underlying mechanisms behind the technique. Which ultimately means, let's do more research and find out that answer. But having a broken model is not confirmation that one's findings are wrong. That's ridiculous. In fact, such a position is as much the exact opposite of the scientific method as are those ancient claims about chi.
IOW: Skepticism as a business has far outstripped anti-science nuttiness from new-age and other so-called 'alternative' medical and science quacks.
Re:The author is wrong about accupuncture
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Conduct a study and discover the answer then. Just making your claim does not prove your point. And a lot of reputable scientists and physicians have now published in peer reviewed journals positive findings beyond placebo in the use of acupuncture (and other so-called 'alternative' treatments).
Pay attention to data, methods, and results. The rest is all bullshit.
The author is wrong about accupuncture
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 5, Informative
And likely many of his other claims as well. Here's what PubMed says:
"Accupuncture may be an efficacious and acceptable nonexposure treatment option for PTSD. Larger trials with additional controls and methods are warranted to replicate and extend these findings."
"A brief characterisation is maccccde of the working principles underlying neural therapy under local anaesthesia or accupuncture. Common approaches to therapy are offered by disorders of autonomous regulation, including inflammatory processes, and by purely functional disorders.--There are many applications in gynaecology and obstetrics. A brief statistical information on lumbosacral pain is quoted as an example. Optimum performance can be expected from them, when used in combination with proven therapeutic methods. They provide a low-cost approach to reducing both the consumption of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals as well as time of morbidity."
There are many others outside of PubMed. And that is but one of the author's claims that actual published studies in the medical literature refute. This side-swipe skepticism is not science, it is marketing in order to sell a bullshit book. Ignore idiots like him and read peer reviewed journals and abstracts before basing your own judgment.
I'm forty years old and taking first semester Chinese (Mandarin) at Harvard Extension. I'm doing well. But to get character recognition down I've had to resort to flashcards. And many repetitions of writing the characters (in proper stroke order) in order to memorize. I've only got about 250 - 300 characters down, but that's real progress. I'm actually reading my textbook in Chinese now, which - I admit - is a very limited set of characters. But still, pretty damn cool.
So, folks call them "flashcards". A more formal name for it is: Spaced Repetition. Also, if you dig flashcards try ANKI, a free GPL'd flashcard program for Win, Mac, and various 'NIXen (including Linux).
Can't speak to other Asian languages, but its Mandarin support is really helpful to me. It's particularly good for practicing character recognition with the various flashcard apps available for the thing. I like it.
Blueboxing was never a payphone hack. So-called red boxes would mimic the one, two, or three chirp tones used to denote nickel, dime, quarter to the phone company. Blue boxes were used to take control of a short-haul or long-haul trunk by presenting a "supervisor tone" to disconnect the remote portion of the call while leaving the local CO's trunk out active. From there one could enter an arbitrary number sequence using a second set of MF tones specific to inter-trunk communications.
Since it's long past the statute of limitations, I'll admit that at one time during my childhood I build and used many blue-boxes. Most of them were done with 555 timers and pots. But a popular hack back then was the AppleCat modem, that used programmable tone generators to generate its DTMF sequence for auto-dialing.
And they can record license plates. I think this hack has little criminal viability. Anyone who used it extensively would be caught in short order. Though authorities might be willing to let the criminal conduct continue on until the criminal passed the felony threshold.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the "wisdom" of crowds.
When a comment like this is hidden to -1 and thus both censored from view and censored from archival, the Slashdot forums are officially dead. Disagreement has officially become trolling, and echos of "conventional wisdom" bounce about exponentially, like an array of ping-pong balls on mouse traps.
One thing is for sure, however: Desktop Linux has not gained significant institutional usage. That is a fact. Downmodding that fact will not make it go away.
Desktop Linux sucks. Well, let's be honest, desktop Unix sucks. Gnome and KDE did not meet the goal of providing a quality alternative to commercial desktop systems. That was their intent, but the outcome has been simply dismal. I say this having used desktop UNIX and Linux exclusively since the early 1990s. I haven't run Windows at home since Win 3.1. Currently, I've given up on Linux and run MacOS X - but, frankly, that too is nearly twenty year old desktop technology.
Where I work we're currently slowly transitioning from desktop Linux to MacOS X. Linux and FreeBSD will remain in the server room and for computational clustering. Which is where the free OS's truly shine right now.
Hey, MS - try this out for size!
The next time you want to release a product in a market already saturated by a single large a and very popular competitor, try competing not on the coolness factor but on price/performance. You know, make the product "cheaper" with the same or better "features". If you can't do that, perhaps you don't have a value proposition to offer your potential customers. And if so, you shouldn't be surprised when they buy your competitor's product.
I know, sucks when you have to compete in a fair and free market - don't it?
I now just make do with my iPhone and a fat connection at work. I first canceled Comcast because their prices are simply too high. They were charging me $180/mo for HD television and Internet. To cut out the television would have still been almost $70/mo.
RCN, a competitor in my town, offered Internet service only for $35/mo, so I tried them. They simply made up stuff to charge me with. No television? Well, you have television service now! Pay up. Call them and have it turned off? Sure ... only to have it turned back on again, with yet more bills for service I never ordered. I finally canceled, only to be forced to call the MA Department of Public Utilities to force the company to stop sending me bills for a service that was now canceled. Getting service through the phone tree was impossible. I really had to go to my state regulator.
Verizon: DSL service. Great. Except that it would regularly die for days on end. And Verizon could not be bothered to actually FIX the service they were charging me for. After over a week of downtime, I canceled. They're still sending me bills for service I canceled months ago. I'm currently dealing with the state regulator over their bullshit too.
I'm done with giving these assholes my money.
Let's hope the new administration sets a new regulator tone. Because the last administration let those guys fuck their customers over good and hard.
I'd like to hear you say that after your wife and children are killed in front of your face. War has real consequences to real human beings, most of whom have no interest in war whatsoever. They just want to feed themselves and their kids.
Because RUSSIA had just entered the war against Japan. There was absolutely no reason to drop those nuclear bombs, because the last thing the Japanese wanted was Russia occupying the Japanese islands. We can thank General Curtis Lemay for convincing President Truman of the necessity of dropping those bombs. We can also thank him for all that firebombing too.
I don't accept that mass civilian casualties are the norm of warfare. It is WRONG.
It is both true that Microsoft has engaged in numerous anti-competitive business practices, has bought out numerous technologies that they then either killed or rebranded and resold, and they even broke some laws in the process - as proved in US district court. But all that could be true and still your point is irrelevant. Because staff engineers at Microsoft have also written a hell of a lot of source code. Microsoft also has hired many top CS professors and academics. There's a pile of brains in that place, most of which are used inefficiently. That's bureaucracy.
But there's no way in hell that Canonical - with a few random employees and a dinky $30M/yr gross, can compete with a behemoth like Microsoft. They can't. Perhaps the entire Linux community can, but Canonical hasn't hired the "Linux community" and doesn't pay them.
Again: the article and this synopsis offers Slashdot readers a ridiculous and thoroughly useless comparison between the two. As such, it's at best a bad strawman argument. At worst, yet another example of Slashdot swirling down the drain.
This place used to be filled with smart folks. Now it just makes smart folks yet more stupid. This place has become a brain sink.
I had personal friends who were fucked over by the Stacker imbroglio. I'm well aware of Microsoft's anticompetitive and criminal business tactics. But leftovers from that era at MS are still a very small part of the entire source-code tree that is Windows. I don't really like Windows. I don't use it. I don't much care for Microsoft as a business.
But the assertion that Canonical has somehow found a better business model than Microsoft's because they hire fewer developers and have a smaller gross income than Microsoft and - yet - also sell an entire OS like MS does is utterly ridiculous at its face.
Yet more stupid Slashdot crap that offers no insight into the problems of maintaining a large tree, and even less insight on the business and logistics problems of managing a large project and many developers. That's the real underlying discussion here. And nobody is having that discussion because Slashdot is filled with a bunch of fucking kids who want to spend their time finding reasons to hate Microsoft.
One needn't have much reason to dislike Windows. It's a piece of shit. We all know that already. But that doesn't mean that some random Linux distribution based off of a huge free development project with decades of history, is in any way comparable with a private internally developed product. It's not. And to argue that MS doesn't do any internal software development is idiotic at its face.
Just as I knew friends at Stacker at one time, so do I know a few devs at Microsoft. They work their asses off writing code.
You have to be kidding me.
How much source code from Q-DOS do you think still remains in the Windows NT tree? The only portion of BSD that I'm aware of that was - at one time - used for NT 3.51 and 4.0 was the IP stack. Which is a pretty dinky part of the kernel, never mind the entire OS tree. SpyGlass wrote a little web browser that could render no more than HTML 1.0 back in the day - how much of that do you think still remains in Internet Explorer 7?
Get a grip.
They had a source code tree that's just over fifteen years old, with bits that go back some twenty five years. Microsoft wrote its own source code tree from scratch. There's kind of a difference, don't you think? So comparing Canonical's $30m/yr cash flow and small staffing to Microsoft's multi-billion/yr cash flow and tens of thousands of staff members is invalid because the two aren't comparable. Apples-Oranges, to use a cliche.
I'm off my academic computer right now due to a blizzard in Boston. But they're there. I chose pubmed because it's the only resource available to the public.
Would you prefer citations from journals that require a subscription or academic access?
Look, get to the original point. There are many peer reviewed studies from the late 1980s through to the present that show a positive result beyond placebo. I've never taken or used acupuncture, I don't practice it, I have no interest in the procedure beyond using it to challenge this author's abuse of factual claims not substantiated by his own academic press in order to sell copy.
Skepticism has become a business. As a result, it is not a rational way to set science policy. Nor is it a good way to educate oneself about what are and what are not recent scientific findings. It is - at best - a shorthand for being "right". In the sense that a clock is right at least twice a day. But - like all pseudoscience - over reliance on skepticism as a shorthand never predicts new results nor do those engaging in the practice offer new data for determining new findings.
Thus, I argue that skepticism has become nothing more than a new religious bias.
I have provided medical citations that dispute the author's claims that certain popular so-called 'alternative medicine' techniques are worthless bunk. The author is claiming a negative finding which is not supported by the literature. I do not argue that it is your responsibility to refute an unreferenced positive claim. Please see the entire thread in context.
I have never taken acupuncture. That is not the point.
Your cite, however, is welcome. Thank you.
Now you're arguing that an ancient Chinese model for how acupuncture works is flawed because it doesn't conform to modern medical terminology, nor does it conform to the scientific method of making predictions based on prior results.
I fully agree.
But that doesn't discount findings, it only calls into question an understanding of the underlying mechanisms behind the technique. Which ultimately means, let's do more research and find out that answer. But having a broken model is not confirmation that one's findings are wrong. That's ridiculous. In fact, such a position is as much the exact opposite of the scientific method as are those ancient claims about chi.
IOW: Skepticism as a business has far outstripped anti-science nuttiness from new-age and other so-called 'alternative' medical and science quacks.
Conduct a study and discover the answer then. Just making your claim does not prove your point. And a lot of reputable scientists and physicians have now published in peer reviewed journals positive findings beyond placebo in the use of acupuncture (and other so-called 'alternative' treatments).
Pay attention to data, methods, and results. The rest is all bullshit.
And likely many of his other claims as well. Here's what PubMed says:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17568299?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
"Accupuncture may be an efficacious and acceptable nonexposure treatment option for PTSD. Larger trials with additional controls and methods are warranted to replicate and extend these findings."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6289567?ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
"A brief characterisation is maccccde of the working principles underlying neural therapy under local anaesthesia or accupuncture. Common approaches to therapy are offered by disorders of autonomous regulation, including inflammatory processes, and by purely functional disorders.--There are many applications in gynaecology and obstetrics. A brief statistical information on lumbosacral pain is quoted as an example. Optimum performance can be expected from them, when used in combination with proven therapeutic methods. They provide a low-cost approach to reducing both the consumption of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals as well as time of morbidity."
There are many others outside of PubMed. And that is but one of the author's claims that actual published studies in the medical literature refute. This side-swipe skepticism is not science, it is marketing in order to sell a bullshit book. Ignore idiots like him and read peer reviewed journals and abstracts before basing your own judgment.
just asking
I'm forty years old and taking first semester Chinese (Mandarin) at Harvard Extension. I'm doing well. But to get character recognition down I've had to resort to flashcards. And many repetitions of writing the characters (in proper stroke order) in order to memorize. I've only got about 250 - 300 characters down, but that's real progress. I'm actually reading my textbook in Chinese now, which - I admit - is a very limited set of characters. But still, pretty damn cool.
So, folks call them "flashcards". A more formal name for it is: Spaced Repetition. Also, if you dig flashcards try ANKI, a free GPL'd flashcard program for Win, Mac, and various 'NIXen (including Linux).
Can't speak to other Asian languages, but its Mandarin support is really helpful to me. It's particularly good for practicing character recognition with the various flashcard apps available for the thing. I like it.
Those articles read like market-speak on toilet paper. At least if it had been printed on a roll, it might have been of use.
bang! bang! bang! bang!
Oh, oh - I think Pystar just nicked out a gouge out on the side of that windmill.
Blueboxing was never a payphone hack. So-called red boxes would mimic the one, two, or three chirp tones used to denote nickel, dime, quarter to the phone company. Blue boxes were used to take control of a short-haul or long-haul trunk by presenting a "supervisor tone" to disconnect the remote portion of the call while leaving the local CO's trunk out active. From there one could enter an arbitrary number sequence using a second set of MF tones specific to inter-trunk communications.
Since it's long past the statute of limitations, I'll admit that at one time during my childhood I build and used many blue-boxes. Most of them were done with 555 timers and pots. But a popular hack back then was the AppleCat modem, that used programmable tone generators to generate its DTMF sequence for auto-dialing.
Boy, that was a long time ago.
And they can record license plates. I think this hack has little criminal viability. Anyone who used it extensively would be caught in short order. Though authorities might be willing to let the criminal conduct continue on until the criminal passed the felony threshold.