When I was stationed in San Diego in the early 90s, my roommate had a early-80s Chrysler Fifth Avenue - gold, with tinted windows - sporting a ridiculous amount of audio wattage. We used to cruise through the bad neighborhoods (that is, the ones near the crappy apartment we could afford) blasting George Strait.
People never really knew how to react to two clean-cut white kids in a ghetto cruiser, shaking the ground with country anthems. I guess they figured we were stupid, crazy, or incredibly bad-ass (answer: the first one).
Some people liked it, though. We'd get smiles and shouts of "turn it up, white boy!" fairly often.
Anyone here using KOffice in a "real world" environment?
Sort of - I use it to print dictation that our transcriptionist sends to us. I have exactly two problems that keep me from switching permanently:
I want a way to set the default font on imported documents. I don't know what font our transcriptionist uses, but it's not Times New Roman or anything else KWord can identify. I wish there was an "open all documents like this with this font" setting.
The horrible, horrible printed kerning. Honestly, printed documents look awful. The inter-character spacing is completely hosed. It's good enough to print legal documents that don't have to look pretty, but I'd never use it for an article or resume.
If those two shortcomings were addressed, I'd switch today. I can understand the first one not being critical (although it's vitally interesting to everyone who's used to manually selecting all and setting the font every time they import a Word doc), but the second is kind of a dealbreaker. A word processor that can't print nicely isn't widely useful.
I don't think the warning labels would ever be useful, though. The idiots who buy GTA for their pre-teens would never bother to read any additional information:
Box: Warning: this game cause epilepsy in all children within 15 minutes.
Idiot parent: Ooh, shiny! Jimmy will love this!
Jack Thompson: All your bad PR are belong to me.
How is that different from what Jack Thompson is saying?
The difference is that the SBC is stating that it is the opinion of several of their organizers that certain video games are bad for kids [0]. Jack Thompson is suing to make it all-but-impossible for you and I - presumably both adults - to make decision about our own entertainment.
[0] Some (most? I have no idea) research probably shows that they're not bad for children. Just sayin' that there probably is some report, somewhere, that says violent games are bad.
Membership is by definition subscribing to a particular set of beliefs and values; different beliefs and you become part of another group.
The core Southern Baptist belief is that asking praying to God in the name of Jesus Christ and asking him to forgive you for the bad things you've done means that you get to spend eternity in his presence after you die. That is one of the main, unarguable tenets - if you don't believe that, then you can't be a member of a Southern Baptist church.
The Southern Baptist Convention publishes lists of position statements and their basic beliefs. Although they explicitly declare positions in other areas of theological debate, they conspicuously offer no opinion on creation versus evolution.
Many churchmembers share my opinion: God created the Universe and all life in it, with scientific evidence currently supporting the theories (in the scientific sense) of the Big Bang and evolution, respectively. He made a complex and beautiful world for us, and gave us the intelligence and curiosity to learn how he did it.
Although certain individual churches or leaders may have expressed opinions on these subjects, it's important to know that the Southern Baptist Convention is more of a coalition than a hierarchy (as opposed to, say, the Roman Catholic Church). To the best of my knowledge, no broadly recognized authority requires adhering to belief in a 6000-year-old planet or "intelligent design".
I really didn't mean to be so long-winded. In summary, you can be a Southern Baptist in good standing without agreeing with every other Southern Baptist on every single issue. Some shared beliefs are very important to us, but I don't believe that this is one of them.
As far as violent video games, my personal belief is that they're probably not "solid nourishment" for your mind. A mental diet of GTA:SA is probably no better for your inner self than a physical diet of Pixie Stix would be good for your body. On the other hand, the occasional Pixie Stix is yummy and not likely to hurt you, unless you're genetically predisposed to react poorly to that trigger.
Who are "my people"? Interestingly, I'd never heard of Agape Press until you mentioned them.
Again, you have the unwarranted presumption that the words of one group speak for another group only tangentially related. Marilyn Manson is a professed atheist. He's said a lot of goofy things over the years, but I don't feel the need to use his song lyrics to "prove" that all atheists are drug-obsessed nihilists.
he uses that as evidence that Blank Rome (the opposing law firm), the judge, and the Republican Party are all out to get him some wifely lovin' so he'd shut up and go back to his day job?
Combine that with the fact that the man is a political conservative and a Christian
<baptist class="southern" politics="conservative">
Just so we're all clear on this, please do not infer that his chosen affiliation with various political or religious groups means those groups want anything to do with him.
I look forward to the upcoming religious holiday, visiting the church of my youth, and logging some serious GTA:SA time. And while we're at it, the Kansas School Board can kiss my evolved butt.
</baptist>
As others have pointed out, there are objects that resemble Compact Discs (but that do not meet the standards and therefore aren't really CDs), but since there's really no such one thing as Linux, there will never be a Linux-specific DRM hack.
What do I mean? Simple - even if some Linux systems could be infected with DRM, those systems are only one instance of software running on top of a Linux kernel. A kernel with different a different configuration might not be infectable. The same kernel but with a different userland might not be infectable. Unless Linus embeds a code-executing virtual machine (like a JVM or Parrot) inside the kernel, the same kernel + userland running on a different CPU might not be infectable.
There are just too many variables at play. If Red Hat could be infected with DRM, then switch to Ubuntu. If Ubuntu falls, try Debian on a PowerPC. You get the idea.
I can understand the US coasts being solid red, but who was the guy in Northwest Territory who just had to have Van Zant in the first week? And there was really demand for Celine Dion in upper Bolivia?
How old do you think a kid has to be to have the dexterity and coordination to play this game?
I'd be willing to bet money that my 4-year-old son can wipe the floor with most adults on the GBA version of this one. He uses techniques that simply never occurred to me, like leaping over the inside corners of right-angle turns to get a wider virtual turn radius.
Don't sell little kids short. They can do some pretty amazing things.
Fear of Failure is kryptonite to geniuses
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 1
Look, unless you have some other mental deficiencies, your 151 IQ should be nothing but a boon to you.
I'm not so sure. A lot of smart kids are universally praised at every difficult academic task the accomplish, and often rightfully so. However, many young geniuses turn this into a positive feedback loop and decide that everyone expects them to succeed 100% of the time, and that if they try but fail, then they're failures as people.
That bug bit me, and hard. By the time I got to the end of high school, I would much rather ignore a task (exam, term paper, project, etc.) altogether than try to complete it and not get a perfect score. Then, I could still claim that I could have aced the task, but I just didn't care. I actually cared quite a lot, but I was terrified of finding out that I might not be the best in my class at something.
I've got three young children that I desperately hope to help past this problem, but I don't really know how to go about it. I don't want to set them up to fail at certain things to show them that it's OK to not be the best sometimes, but I don't have any better ideas. Any Slashdotters have any great suggestions in this area?
Some of us dont like supporting the russian mafia.
Is that any worse than supporting the American mafia, aka RIAA?
And remember, just because a forian government says artist dont have rights, does not mean you should agree.
And just because a domestic government says that a cabal of megacorporations does have certain rights does not mean you should agree.
At least apple gives somthing back to the people who write and perform the music.
Really? I thought they paid the music distributors, who then make a game of playing "steal from the artist". Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
Ironically, I'm about as conservative as you can get, but the music companies have so thoroughly demonstrated their complete lack of regard to any part of me but my wallet that I just don't care about them anymore. I personally do not download or upload music (I've got a family and can't afford the legal exposure), but that's purely out of pragmatism and not because I think it's morally wrong in any way.
On the other hand, I've bought quite a few CDs from artists at CDBaby, and I'd never infringe their stuff. Respect is a mutual relationship.
Usenet requires tons of bandwidth and storage, and serving it needs decent server hardware. I'm not sure anyone I know still uses it.
My ISP let the license to their commercial Usenet server expire a few years ago. I worked out a quick trade with them: in exchange for giving me a small static netblock, I'd host their Usenet service out of my house.
That was nearly four years ago, and my little Leafnode2 server and its set of users is still quietly chugging along. I filter all the binary groups by default (but permit exceptions by request) and Cricket tells me that it's not using enough bandwidth to fret about. Granted, the FreeBSD jail it lives inside takes a couple percent of my hard drive, but again, it's not enough to actually care about.
A raw, unfiltered Usenet feed can be very expensive. A small, on-demand feed can be darn near free. Since the cost of providing the service is essentialy nil, why not offer it? Unless, of course, you like having a customer pool with a smaller-than-average number of hardcore geeks that never require human tech support...
Fact: it's trivial for any user with an account on a box to read any other user's files, even in their cgi-bin, since they must necessarily all be visible to the Apache daemon user {www-data on Debian systems}.
Why would you do that? Instead, create a new secondary group for each customer, and put only them and Apache into that group. chgrp all of their web files to that group. Give said files mode 640. Voila: Apache can read (but not write) all of their web data, but nothing in their home directory. No other customers will be in that group, so they don't get access.
The scenario you described would be trivially crackable, but who in their right mind would run a setup like that?
don't know much about the origins of the JPEG algorythem, although I am very familiar with how it works.
I spent about an a hour reading though that patent filed in 1987. It really explains a lot of things in detail that are almost identical to how JPEG does it.
I am skeptical that anyone capable of reading and understanding both the JPEG standard and this patent would be unable to spell algorithm.
Anyway, here's the deal: physical patents are generally OK. Algorithm patents are almost categorically not OK. The odds of creating an entirely new system that isn't based on something Knuth wrote 40 years ago approaches zero as the complexity of the system increases.
Even if the US slips behind and loses its position as the worlds biggest economy and/or science nation, Americans will still not reform their education system. This is because in the end, beneath all the rhetoric, all the patriotism, all the pride, all the manifest destinies, there has been only one true constant in America. The Buck.
Interesting observation, even if completely and utterly wrong. It's not that I mind paying for good schools. I do, however, mind paying more money without any perceived benefit whatsoever. We've ponied up thousands of dollars to put computers in every classroom, but they use them to teach word processing (or don't use them at all). One group came up with the radical idea of suggesting that we require a 65% of education money go to classrooms instead of administration, but the NEA and state teachers' unions are fighting it tooth and nail. Just try to suggest that parents should be allowed to send their kids to the school of their choice and watch how quickly you get shouted down as racist and oppressive.
As a taxpayer, I want to know how my money's going to be spent. Give me a solid plan that actually works to advance educational goals and not the hot new theory du jour, and I'll open my wallet. Don't expect me to keep throwing good money after bad, though, as I watch my past contributions get washed down the bureaucratic sinkhole.
Keep it up, and if it's serving web pages to the public, then you'll beat the
highest-ranked Windows server in just another 1250 days or so. Of course, you'll still be six months "younger" than the top 10 (all Unix), but boy-oh-boy, won't you have something to brag about!
When I was a novice, I could roll out a new production system with all the bells and whistles in a few days. Now that I'm more experienced, it often takes weeks or months.
Of course, the new systems are actually usable, as secure as I can make them, better integrated with the rest of the business environment, and much easier to maintain and expand.
It's easy to do things quickly when you get to skip the planning stage. Ask your stereotypical long-bearded Unix guy to implement web services and you'll be lucky to see the first draft during the same fiscal year - and no amount of pressure will make it happen any faster. Of course, it'll work correctly from the first day and will exceed the total workload of the quick-hack system within the first month, but that doesn't look pretty on this year's financials so a lot of managers aren't interested.
A good troupe of actors with a good director can take even the archaic language of four centuries ago and perform it in a way that's easy to follow and, believe it or not, entertaining.
A few years ago, my then-girlfriend dragged me to see Romeo + Juliet (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes). As much as I hate to admit it, it was a fun movie. They used the dialog from the original - unedited - but it was exceedingly easy to follow.
A little bit of acting can go a long way. That movie would never be confused with a Royal Shakespeare Company production, but it still worked.
Slashdot Mirror
People never really knew how to react to two clean-cut white kids in a ghetto cruiser, shaking the ground with country anthems. I guess they figured we were stupid, crazy, or incredibly bad-ass (answer: the first one).
Some people liked it, though. We'd get smiles and shouts of "turn it up, white boy!" fairly often.
Sort of - I use it to print dictation that our transcriptionist sends to us. I have exactly two problems that keep me from switching permanently:
If those two shortcomings were addressed, I'd switch today. I can understand the first one not being critical (although it's vitally interesting to everyone who's used to manually selecting all and setting the font every time they import a Word doc), but the second is kind of a dealbreaker. A word processor that can't print nicely isn't widely useful.
I don't think the warning labels would ever be useful, though. The idiots who buy GTA for their pre-teens would never bother to read any additional information:
Box: Warning: this game cause epilepsy in all children within 15 minutes.
Idiot parent: Ooh, shiny! Jimmy will love this!
Jack Thompson: All your bad PR are belong to me.
The difference is that the SBC is stating that it is the opinion of several of their organizers that certain video games are bad for kids [0]. Jack Thompson is suing to make it all-but-impossible for you and I - presumably both adults - to make decision about our own entertainment.
[0] Some (most? I have no idea) research probably shows that they're not bad for children. Just sayin' that there probably is some report, somewhere, that says violent games are bad.
Thank you. That's pretty much exactly the way I feel about it.
The core Southern Baptist belief is that asking praying to God in the name of Jesus Christ and asking him to forgive you for the bad things you've done means that you get to spend eternity in his presence after you die. That is one of the main, unarguable tenets - if you don't believe that, then you can't be a member of a Southern Baptist church.
The Southern Baptist Convention publishes lists of position statements and their basic beliefs. Although they explicitly declare positions in other areas of theological debate, they conspicuously offer no opinion on creation versus evolution.
Many churchmembers share my opinion: God created the Universe and all life in it, with scientific evidence currently supporting the theories (in the scientific sense) of the Big Bang and evolution, respectively. He made a complex and beautiful world for us, and gave us the intelligence and curiosity to learn how he did it.
Although certain individual churches or leaders may have expressed opinions on these subjects, it's important to know that the Southern Baptist Convention is more of a coalition than a hierarchy (as opposed to, say, the Roman Catholic Church). To the best of my knowledge, no broadly recognized authority requires adhering to belief in a 6000-year-old planet or "intelligent design".
I really didn't mean to be so long-winded. In summary, you can be a Southern Baptist in good standing without agreeing with every other Southern Baptist on every single issue. Some shared beliefs are very important to us, but I don't believe that this is one of them.
As far as violent video games, my personal belief is that they're probably not "solid nourishment" for your mind. A mental diet of GTA:SA is probably no better for your inner self than a physical diet of Pixie Stix would be good for your body. On the other hand, the occasional Pixie Stix is yummy and not likely to hurt you, unless you're genetically predisposed to react poorly to that trigger.
Who are "my people"? Interestingly, I'd never heard of Agape Press until you mentioned them.
Again, you have the unwarranted presumption that the words of one group speak for another group only tangentially related. Marilyn Manson is a professed atheist. He's said a lot of goofy things over the years, but I don't feel the need to use his song lyrics to "prove" that all atheists are drug-obsessed nihilists.
You were almost right:
he uses that as evidence that Blank Rome (the opposing law firm), the judge, and the Republican Party are all out to get him some wifely lovin' so he'd shut up and go back to his day job?
<baptist class="southern" politics="conservative">
Just so we're all clear on this, please do not infer that his chosen affiliation with various political or religious groups means those groups want anything to do with him.
I look forward to the upcoming religious holiday, visiting the church of my youth, and logging some serious GTA:SA time. And while we're at it, the Kansas School Board can kiss my evolved butt.
</baptist>
What do I mean? Simple - even if some Linux systems could be infected with DRM, those systems are only one instance of software running on top of a Linux kernel. A kernel with different a different configuration might not be infectable. The same kernel but with a different userland might not be infectable. Unless Linus embeds a code-executing virtual machine (like a JVM or Parrot) inside the kernel, the same kernel + userland running on a different CPU might not be infectable.
There are just too many variables at play. If Red Hat could be infected with DRM, then switch to Ubuntu. If Ubuntu falls, try Debian on a PowerPC. You get the idea.
I can understand the US coasts being solid red, but who was the guy in Northwest Territory who just had to have Van Zant in the first week? And there was really demand for Celine Dion in upper Bolivia?
I'd be willing to bet money that my 4-year-old son can wipe the floor with most adults on the GBA version of this one. He uses techniques that simply never occurred to me, like leaping over the inside corners of right-angle turns to get a wider virtual turn radius.
Don't sell little kids short. They can do some pretty amazing things.
I'm not so sure. A lot of smart kids are universally praised at every difficult academic task the accomplish, and often rightfully so. However, many young geniuses turn this into a positive feedback loop and decide that everyone expects them to succeed 100% of the time, and that if they try but fail, then they're failures as people.
That bug bit me, and hard. By the time I got to the end of high school, I would much rather ignore a task (exam, term paper, project, etc.) altogether than try to complete it and not get a perfect score. Then, I could still claim that I could have aced the task, but I just didn't care. I actually cared quite a lot, but I was terrified of finding out that I might not be the best in my class at something.
I've got three young children that I desperately hope to help past this problem, but I don't really know how to go about it. I don't want to set them up to fail at certain things to show them that it's OK to not be the best sometimes, but I don't have any better ideas. Any Slashdotters have any great suggestions in this area?
IBM dual 2.0GHz Xeon workstation w/ HW SCSI RAID 0/1/5 for sale
Is that a link to an example, or just an unfortunate coincidence?
So all these Xeons around the farm are laptop CPUs or something?
Is that any worse than supporting the American mafia, aka RIAA?
And remember, just because a forian government says artist dont have rights, does not mean you should agree.
And just because a domestic government says that a cabal of megacorporations does have certain rights does not mean you should agree.
At least apple gives somthing back to the people who write and perform the music.
Really? I thought they paid the music distributors, who then make a game of playing "steal from the artist". Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
Ironically, I'm about as conservative as you can get, but the music companies have so thoroughly demonstrated their complete lack of regard to any part of me but my wallet that I just don't care about them anymore. I personally do not download or upload music (I've got a family and can't afford the legal exposure), but that's purely out of pragmatism and not because I think it's morally wrong in any way.
On the other hand, I've bought quite a few CDs from artists at CDBaby, and I'd never infringe their stuff. Respect is a mutual relationship.
My ISP let the license to their commercial Usenet server expire a few years ago. I worked out a quick trade with them: in exchange for giving me a small static netblock, I'd host their Usenet service out of my house.
That was nearly four years ago, and my little Leafnode2 server and its set of users is still quietly chugging along. I filter all the binary groups by default (but permit exceptions by request) and Cricket tells me that it's not using enough bandwidth to fret about. Granted, the FreeBSD jail it lives inside takes a couple percent of my hard drive, but again, it's not enough to actually care about.
A raw, unfiltered Usenet feed can be very expensive. A small, on-demand feed can be darn near free. Since the cost of providing the service is essentialy nil, why not offer it? Unless, of course, you like having a customer pool with a smaller-than-average number of hardcore geeks that never require human tech support...
Why would you do that? Instead, create a new secondary group for each customer, and put only them and Apache into that group. chgrp all of their web files to that group. Give said files mode 640. Voila: Apache can read (but not write) all of their web data, but nothing in their home directory. No other customers will be in that group, so they don't get access.
The scenario you described would be trivially crackable, but who in their right mind would run a setup like that?
I spent about an a hour reading though that patent filed in 1987. It really explains a lot of things in detail that are almost identical to how JPEG does it.
I am skeptical that anyone capable of reading and understanding both the JPEG standard and this patent would be unable to spell algorithm.
Anyway, here's the deal: physical patents are generally OK. Algorithm patents are almost categorically not OK. The odds of creating an entirely new system that isn't based on something Knuth wrote 40 years ago approaches zero as the complexity of the system increases.
--
Need IT incident tracking?
What kind of "IT incidents" do you track?
Interesting observation, even if completely and utterly wrong. It's not that I mind paying for good schools. I do, however, mind paying more money without any perceived benefit whatsoever. We've ponied up thousands of dollars to put computers in every classroom, but they use them to teach word processing (or don't use them at all). One group came up with the radical idea of suggesting that we require a 65% of education money go to classrooms instead of administration, but the NEA and state teachers' unions are fighting it tooth and nail. Just try to suggest that parents should be allowed to send their kids to the school of their choice and watch how quickly you get shouted down as racist and oppressive.
As a taxpayer, I want to know how my money's going to be spent. Give me a solid plan that actually works to advance educational goals and not the hot new theory du jour, and I'll open my wallet. Don't expect me to keep throwing good money after bad, though, as I watch my past contributions get washed down the bureaucratic sinkhole.
Keep it up, and if it's serving web pages to the public, then you'll beat the highest-ranked Windows server in just another 1250 days or so. Of course, you'll still be six months "younger" than the top 10 (all Unix), but boy-oh-boy, won't you have something to brag about!
Of course, the new systems are actually usable, as secure as I can make them, better integrated with the rest of the business environment, and much easier to maintain and expand.
It's easy to do things quickly when you get to skip the planning stage. Ask your stereotypical long-bearded Unix guy to implement web services and you'll be lucky to see the first draft during the same fiscal year - and no amount of pressure will make it happen any faster. Of course, it'll work correctly from the first day and will exceed the total workload of the quick-hack system within the first month, but that doesn't look pretty on this year's financials so a lot of managers aren't interested.
A few years ago, my then-girlfriend dragged me to see Romeo + Juliet (starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes). As much as I hate to admit it, it was a fun movie. They used the dialog from the original - unedited - but it was exceedingly easy to follow.
A little bit of acting can go a long way. That movie would never be confused with a Royal Shakespeare Company production, but it still worked.
And yet you keep using their free service, even as you whine about how they run it. Seems like they're actually quite welcome on your computer.