I dunno. Something needs to be done. The authors are becoming really lazy when it comes to checking up on stories, and at some point it's going to bite them in the ass even worse than this.
Rob, shit like this is what gives your critics ammunition. "We're checking up on this information," well shit, you didn't check up on this while it was in the submission queue? Isn't that what it's there for, to give the authors time to check stories before posting them?
What the hell happened? Did you get lazy this time? There's been a lot of evidence lately that links never, ever get checked before a story is posted. Every other story is either a broken link, or the synopsis is completely different from the actual story content. It's becoming a fucking joke.
Please, Rob. You, Jeff, timothy, jamie, michael, everyone take a month off and let someone else handle the site. Come back when you're ready to do your job correctly. It's becoming pretty clear you're burning out, it's doing great harm to the quality of the site, and something needs to be done about it.
Since the Internet is more or less a written medium, Taco could be sued for libel by Apple. This might be a somewhat appropriate action for Apple to take, since it seems pretty clear they aren't suing anyone at this point over TrueType rendering systems, much less the Freetype crew.
If nothing else, a suit might just encourage the editors to check the damn story before posting and commenting on it.
If it were just a reply to a story, I'd let it slide; we all know lots of B.S. is dropped in comment sections. When it's the people who run the site failing to check facts and unfairly tarnishing an individual or company's image, those people have no reason to be surprised when the victim takes action.
Why, yes, I am rather miffed at Taco for letting this get by. Worst. Story. Ever.
Have you ever read HTML e-mail in a text-mode-only mail reader? You're destined for minutes of fun fun fun trying to extract the text you want from the crap Hotmail/etc. wants to put in. What a blast.
What I like about Linux configuration is that I can do it at the console, from my parents' machine several cities away, and not have to worry about blowing a config option or wasting time trying to reproduce XML tags. I type, save, it's done, any mistakes are clearly my fault.
There are already 50 000 different formats for text-based config files in Linux/*NIX. Since XML won't automatically take over every single program and tool, that will give admins and users 50 001 different formats, and that one will be much less readable in the event of a necessary quick fix.
XML's great for some things. It's great if the user/admin will never actually edit the config file, but use a tool instead. Unfortunately, I like to get down and dirty with my config files, and I don't feel like digging through tags 'n crap to dig out the option I want to edit. Not to mention the bloat XML can cause...I can forsee situations where XML tags could bloat a config file by as much as 2x. Again, as long as the user/admin doesn't need to ever touch the actual config file, XML can work. Beyond that, kill it.
For comparison, I also hate Netscape/Mozilla's "prefs.js" file - ugh.
Vaporware used to imply software that only existed in press releases and screenshots. No one outside of the company had seen actual running copies of the software in question.
By that standard, Linux 2.4.x and Mac OS X are certainly not vaporware. Even.NET could be considered non-vapor, if you consider Visual Studio.NET and the Whistler betas to be released products.
I mean, it's not like the 2.4 test kernels are hidden from the world, only mentioned in glowy press releases and described as the Second Coming of MS.
So far, i haven't heard one compelling moral reason to use Napster to get music you haven't bought.
How about using it to get music you can't buy - live bootlegs, unreleased stuff, stuff the label won't release (Smashing Pumpkins), indie stuff released by the band, etc...
Well, if my boss or anyone else, tells me to jump off the 10th floor window and I took the dive without "looking into it" than it is my own doing and no one but "I" to be held responsible for the consequence.
Taking a flying leap off the 10th floor has no discernable benefit besides being a Darwin Awards footnote. The teacher, on the other hand, is acknowledged to have said the software company was offering a reward. Not only that, but Lutes wasn't the only student to take him seriously, according to the superintendent. Completely different situation here; looks like the teacher didn't realize how much power his words carry among his students, and one of them got burned as a result. I'm rather disappointed the teacher (as far as I know) hasn't come out and stood up, publicly, for his student.
He also was hauled off to the Elma police station and held briefly for investigation of unauthorized use of a computer to access government information.
Wait? Wasn't the charge based on using a computer to acccess "government information"? Which would mean, you know, accessing a file? Something ain't matching up here kids, and it doesn't look like Aaron's the bad guy here...
The Lutes family and the district also acknowledge that Lutes' computer-science teacher, Giovanni Colombo, told students they'd get a reward from the software company if they cracked the security system and that Colombo wanted a 10 percent cut of that reward.
So it's agreed; the teacher went out and said the software company was offering a reward for cracking the software. The teacher lied to his students for yuks. Great teacher.
"But the teacher was only joking!"
About what part? The phony "reward" or the "10% cut"? I joke about getting a cut of others' work all the time.
Elma School Supt. Bill Myhr, duly noting that the issue was confidential, did say that while some students took the challenge seriously, it wasn't intended that way.
So Aaron wasn't the only kid who thought the teacher was serious? So one can't argue that Aaron claiming his teacher was serious is just an excuse; he wasn't the only one confused by the teacher's statements.
So far, it looks like Aaron's only crime was being too good with computers for the adults' liking.
He did acknowledge that Aaron Lutes was disciplined last year for using a school computer to call up inappropriate Web sites.
Probably 2600, attrition.org, Peacefire and the like. Nice use of ambiguous terminology to besmirch Aaron's character. In large legal cases, this is called "leaking selected information to the media," and is considered a rather sleazy P.R. tactic.
Really, it looks like Aaron's being persecuted for making the teacher, the school, and the district look like fools for using such an easily-circumvented "security system." The kid does what the teacher is known to have said to the students, expects the reward the teacher claimed was being offered, and instead gets punished for being too smart. The ol' bait-and-switch; wasn't this used on Winston in 1984? Root out the undesirables by offering exactly what they want, then turn and stab them in the back?
I think Aaron Lutes has learned more from this experience than any high school could teach in four years.
I use Balsa. I like Balsa. However, the precompiled packages don't always play nice with my system; something about libmutt being goofy or whatever. Solution: grab a source RPM, rpm --rebuild balsa-1.0.1-1.src.rpm, and kaboom! Ten minutes later, I not only have a working version of Balsa tailored to my system, but a binary package stored on my system in case I need to reinstall that version later for some reason!
Another story:
Ghostscript is a nightmare. Compile it from source? Yeah, right. However, there's a GPL driver for my printer that I prefer to use that has to be compiled in. Solution? Grab a source RPM, do the prep stage, perform some magic, edit the spec file, and kabang; not only will Ghostscript compile and work, but I can produce binary and source packages to distribute so that other people who can benefit from the driver don't have to go through hula hoops themselves!
Well, uhh, I can't distribute the particular packages I have at the moment...err...licensing issues...but I plan to do the same thing with GNU Ghostscript today, so I'll make that available for you HP, Epson and Canon users out there looking for a better ghostscript driver:).
Of course, there are times where one will run into dependency problems, and this is where something like Source.debs (or BSD ports? Does that deal with dependencies on its own without bitching at the user?) could shine. Also, sometimes you have to tweak parts of the.spec file (or the tricks I had to pull with Ghostscript); Joe User wouldn't want to do that. Still, "if you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself":).
Someone pointed out in a reply to another post I made in this section that the names of the themes being removed are all Apple trademarks.
Then I realized that OSX2, another Aqua-like theme, wasn't listed in the removed themes.
Go to the global theme search page and look for "Aqua". There are a heck of a lot of Aqua themes for various window/desktop managers.
So was it the names of the themes Apple objected to? Why is Apple being selective with their removal requests? Are they just not aware of the other Aqua-like themes still available, or is it something else? And I ask again; why isn't Apple trying to contact the theme creators?
Go to a Project Gutenberg page with the entire text and read that aloud, being sure to yell "Fuck you Adobe!" at the end of every other sentence.
Perhaps a bunch of pissed-off geeks should hold a "read-in", where books are read aloud. In a very public place. Then they should dare to be arrested for "broadcasting" a copyrighted work.
...the logo is nowhere to be found in any of the Aqua-like GTK themes!
How do I know? I'm using one of them right now, and I have the other installed.
Now, it might have been in one of the E or Sawfish themes, but I can confidently say it wasn't in any of the GTK ones. In fact, I don't think anyone would have included the Apple logo after the first Aqua theme was removed for that very reason, and removed again at Apple's request even after the logo was removed.
As for the "They spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars..." argument...please. Aqua is NeXT with curvy, bubble-like widgets, at least on the surface. They certainly don't provide any functionality improvements that Aqua gives (does it give any?)
If the logo isn't in any of these themes, Apple barely has a leg to stand on, unless they want to copyright curvy, shiny widgets. I wonder if they've sent similar letters to the theme authors. Is creating a theme enough to whiff off Apple, or do you actually have to offer it for download before they'll launch attack lawyers?
I was wondering about the disadvantages of open source systems.
The problem is in security bugs (as in Red Hat) with people who are not IT professionals.
News flash: this is a general issue with most (all?) operating systems, not just open source ones. It's not a disadvantage of open source alone, but a general difficulty all admins and end users deal with on a daily basis. The difference is, the sysadmin is expected to keep the doors closed and locked. That's part of his/her job description. An end user just wants to check e-mail, browse the web, maybe play a game or write a letter, in which event, they won't religiously follow security mailing lists.
Helix Code, Red Hat, and MS are probably doing end users a favour with automatic update systems, although I'm sure everyone here can rattle off three potential attacks and security holes involving these autoupdaters without thinking (man-in-the-middle attacks, spoofed routing entries, spoofed DNS entries, leading to trojaned packages being downloaded and installed without the user's input).
In the end, it's just an eternal conflict between the developers of new software and the developers of ways to poke holes in new software. That's life.
As another poster mentioned, and as pointed out in the Mozilla roadmap, Mozilla 0.6 is a build from the Netscape branch, not the Mozilla trunk. It's something for people who want to extend or develop for Netscape 6 with some added fixes and updates from the trunk.
I'm personally going to stick with Mozilla trunk nightlies, considering the mess that was the NS6 release. I imagine Moz0.6 incorporates many fixes, but the trunk nightlies are just beautiful at this point. Speed is nearly (if not already) equal with IE5 in Win9x, and the speed under Linux seems to be increasing slightly. At this point, there seem to be more regressions than new bugs cropping up.
Go to the nightlies directory and grab the latest build for your platform. Scroll down to get the absolute latest build for your platform, and be amazed. I should note that, at least in my experience, using the installer seems to allow some strange bugs to creep in - grab the main tarball/zips if you can and be blown away. It's become a good browser at this point.
Yes, the Aussies did a spectacular job. The people were enthusiastic about all the athletes instead of just their own, the logo and celebrations were tasteful yet modern (blasted difficult to pull off nowadays), and the events were fun to watch (unless you were stuck with NBC).
The organizers, or the IOC, whoever handled marketing and licensing, whored out the Olympic name to anyone who could pony up the cash. Come on, tossing away spectators' own food and drinks after they paid wads of $Aus to see the events just because it didn't have the right label? What a pile of crap. I bet the ancient Greeks are wishing they could come back from Elysium to shove spears through the entire IOC. Quite frankly, I'd like to help them.
They're operating, they're releasing products, despite taking a beating on Wall Street and not making a penny of profit. Since I don't have their financials on hand, and no analysts inside or outside of Red Hat seem to be freaking out yet, I think these type of the-sky-is-falling are mostly from reactionaries, or people who wish to see Red Hat fail.
Note that it can take several years for a company to make a profit after starting up, private or public. Hell, Red Hat might still fail in the end - but you can't fault them for making the attempt to succeed, and the company shows no signs of closing its doors.
Few of the bell-weathers are off by more than 50% of their 52-week high (and Nasdaq itself is off by about as much). LNUX and RHAT are off by more than 95%. They have performed MUCH worse than the market, and other tech stocks.
I guess the concept of an IPO rush escapes you? The companies continue to putt along just fine, whatever else the market thinks.
The stock market never has been, and never will be, the be-all and end-all of Linux or other Free/OSS software.
Umm... clients pay for local call to ISP, same as any other local call. ISP pays for bandwidth from phone company or other owner of infrastructure. In turn, this provider often pays a chain of upstream providers that are generally phone companies or similar.
Nice, except my ISP isn't a dial-up, and they don't get their bandwidth from a telco. It's not just telcos handling the cables anymore.
Of course, depending on what you're looking for, the necessary apps might already be there. StarOffice is adequate as an office suite, if a bit bloated (but then, find me a slim office suite). Mozilla nightlies (pick a recent one) are good-to-great. Evolution is developing, but you can slap together a solution using Balsa or Pine and ical, or the KOffice package. I think StarOffice itself also supports e-mail (POP and IMAP), though the web browser stinks.
Now, if you need functions that only MS Office has, you're kinda screwed. Still, all some shops need is a migration path for their applications in order to send Windows and its myriad licensing issues packing.
People need to stop glibly saying that you should just use Linux - Windows is the best quality software available, and people should pay for it accordingly.
Incorrect - the software that runs on top of Windows is the best-quality software available. Windows itself, however, is of debatable quality. I know if Windows had worked as well as I thought it should have, I would never have bothered to learn how to use Linux. Windows has probably been the best marketing tool Linux could ever ask for, and it's usually software other than Windows itself that keeps people tied to the platform.
I didn't think nerves could self-repair, but then, IANAD by any stretch of the imagination. However, this would suggest real hope for paralysis victims (as the result of certain kinds of accidents/nerve damage). Or am I misunderstanding the doctor's statement?
No, you've about got it dead on. I first learned of this technique several years ago. Tests were performed on mice, where nerves were strung between two ends of a damaged nerve bundle, providing a pathway for the nerves to regenerate.
The nerve bundle being regenerated was the spinal cord.
The operation worked; the mice regained some movement in their hind legs.
Hope springs eternal, for good reason. -------------
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. Something needs to be done. The authors are becoming really lazy when it comes to checking up on stories, and at some point it's going to bite them in the ass even worse than this.
Rob, shit like this is what gives your critics ammunition. "We're checking up on this information," well shit, you didn't check up on this while it was in the submission queue? Isn't that what it's there for, to give the authors time to check stories before posting them?
What the hell happened? Did you get lazy this time? There's been a lot of evidence lately that links never, ever get checked before a story is posted. Every other story is either a broken link, or the synopsis is completely different from the actual story content. It's becoming a fucking joke.
Please, Rob. You, Jeff, timothy, jamie, michael, everyone take a month off and let someone else handle the site. Come back when you're ready to do your job correctly. It's becoming pretty clear you're burning out, it's doing great harm to the quality of the site, and something needs to be done about it.
Since the Internet is more or less a written medium, Taco could be sued for libel by Apple. This might be a somewhat appropriate action for Apple to take, since it seems pretty clear they aren't suing anyone at this point over TrueType rendering systems, much less the Freetype crew.
If nothing else, a suit might just encourage the editors to check the damn story before posting and commenting on it.
If it were just a reply to a story, I'd let it slide; we all know lots of B.S. is dropped in comment sections. When it's the people who run the site failing to check facts and unfairly tarnishing an individual or company's image, those people have no reason to be surprised when the victim takes action.
Why, yes, I am rather miffed at Taco for letting this get by. Worst. Story. Ever.
There's no mention of this on the Freetype page or LinuxToday.
CmdrTaco appeas to have fallen for a troll submission. Note to Taco: check the link, like you encourage submitters to do.
For example, all config files should be XML
ICK.
NO.
Have you ever read HTML e-mail in a text-mode-only mail reader? You're destined for minutes of fun fun fun trying to extract the text you want from the crap Hotmail/etc. wants to put in. What a blast.
What I like about Linux configuration is that I can do it at the console, from my parents' machine several cities away, and not have to worry about blowing a config option or wasting time trying to reproduce XML tags. I type, save, it's done, any mistakes are clearly my fault.
There are already 50 000 different formats for text-based config files in Linux/*NIX. Since XML won't automatically take over every single program and tool, that will give admins and users 50 001 different formats, and that one will be much less readable in the event of a necessary quick fix.
XML's great for some things. It's great if the user/admin will never actually edit the config file, but use a tool instead. Unfortunately, I like to get down and dirty with my config files, and I don't feel like digging through tags 'n crap to dig out the option I want to edit. Not to mention the bloat XML can cause...I can forsee situations where XML tags could bloat a config file by as much as 2x. Again, as long as the user/admin doesn't need to ever touch the actual config file, XML can work. Beyond that, kill it.
For comparison, I also hate Netscape/Mozilla's "prefs.js" file - ugh.
Vaporware used to imply software that only existed in press releases and screenshots. No one outside of the company had seen actual running copies of the software in question.
.NET could be considered non-vapor, if you consider Visual Studio.NET and the Whistler betas to be released products.
By that standard, Linux 2.4.x and Mac OS X are certainly not vaporware. Even
I mean, it's not like the 2.4 test kernels are hidden from the world, only mentioned in glowy press releases and described as the Second Coming of MS.
Wired: Will Troll For Hits
So far, i haven't heard one compelling moral reason to use Napster to get music you haven't bought.
How about using it to get music you can't buy - live bootlegs, unreleased stuff, stuff the label won't release (Smashing Pumpkins), indie stuff released by the band, etc...
Well, if my boss or anyone else, tells me to jump off the 10th floor window and I took the dive without "looking into it" than it is my own doing and no one but "I" to be held responsible for the consequence.
Taking a flying leap off the 10th floor has no discernable benefit besides being a Darwin Awards footnote. The teacher, on the other hand, is acknowledged to have said the software company was offering a reward. Not only that, but Lutes wasn't the only student to take him seriously, according to the superintendent. Completely different situation here; looks like the teacher didn't realize how much power his words carry among his students, and one of them got burned as a result. I'm rather disappointed the teacher (as far as I know) hasn't come out and stood up, publicly, for his student.
He also was hauled off to the Elma police station and held briefly for investigation of unauthorized use of a computer to access government information.
Wait? Wasn't the charge based on using a computer to acccess "government information"? Which would mean, you know, accessing a file? Something ain't matching up here kids, and it doesn't look like Aaron's the bad guy here...
The Lutes family and the district also acknowledge that Lutes' computer-science teacher, Giovanni Colombo, told students they'd get a reward from the software company if they cracked the security system and that Colombo wanted a 10 percent cut of that reward.
So it's agreed; the teacher went out and said the software company was offering a reward for cracking the software. The teacher lied to his students for yuks. Great teacher.
"But the teacher was only joking!"
About what part? The phony "reward" or the "10% cut"? I joke about getting a cut of others' work all the time.
Elma School Supt. Bill Myhr, duly noting that the issue was confidential, did say that while some students took the challenge seriously, it wasn't intended that way.
So Aaron wasn't the only kid who thought the teacher was serious? So one can't argue that Aaron claiming his teacher was serious is just an excuse; he wasn't the only one confused by the teacher's statements.
So far, it looks like Aaron's only crime was being too good with computers for the adults' liking.
He did acknowledge that Aaron Lutes was disciplined last year for using a school computer to call up inappropriate Web sites.
Probably 2600, attrition.org, Peacefire and the like. Nice use of ambiguous terminology to besmirch Aaron's character. In large legal cases, this is called "leaking selected information to the media," and is considered a rather sleazy P.R. tactic.
Really, it looks like Aaron's being persecuted for making the teacher, the school, and the district look like fools for using such an easily-circumvented "security system." The kid does what the teacher is known to have said to the students, expects the reward the teacher claimed was being offered, and instead gets punished for being too smart. The ol' bait-and-switch; wasn't this used on Winston in 1984? Root out the undesirables by offering exactly what they want, then turn and stab them in the back?
I think Aaron Lutes has learned more from this experience than any high school could teach in four years.
Anecdote alert:
.debs (or BSD ports? Does that deal with dependencies on its own without bitching at the user?) could shine. Also, sometimes you have to tweak parts of the .spec file (or the tricks I had to pull with Ghostscript); Joe User wouldn't want to do that. Still, "if you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself":).
I use Balsa. I like Balsa. However, the precompiled packages don't always play nice with my system; something about libmutt being goofy or whatever. Solution: grab a source RPM, rpm --rebuild balsa-1.0.1-1.src.rpm, and kaboom! Ten minutes later, I not only have a working version of Balsa tailored to my system, but a binary package stored on my system in case I need to reinstall that version later for some reason!
Another story:
Ghostscript is a nightmare. Compile it from source? Yeah, right. However, there's a GPL driver for my printer that I prefer to use that has to be compiled in. Solution? Grab a source RPM, do the prep stage, perform some magic, edit the spec file, and kabang; not only will Ghostscript compile and work, but I can produce binary and source packages to distribute so that other people who can benefit from the driver don't have to go through hula hoops themselves!
Well, uhh, I can't distribute the particular packages I have at the moment...err...licensing issues...but I plan to do the same thing with GNU Ghostscript today, so I'll make that available for you HP, Epson and Canon users out there looking for a better ghostscript driver:).
Of course, there are times where one will run into dependency problems, and this is where something like Source
Someone pointed out in a reply to another post I made in this section that the names of the themes being removed are all Apple trademarks.
Then I realized that OSX2, another Aqua-like theme, wasn't listed in the removed themes.
Go to the global theme search page and look for "Aqua". There are a heck of a lot of Aqua themes for various window/desktop managers.
So was it the names of the themes Apple objected to? Why is Apple being selective with their removal requests? Are they just not aware of the other Aqua-like themes still available, or is it something else? And I ask again; why isn't Apple trying to contact the theme creators?
Go to a Project Gutenberg page with the entire text and read that aloud, being sure to yell "Fuck you Adobe!" at the end of every other sentence.
Perhaps a bunch of pissed-off geeks should hold a "read-in", where books are read aloud. In a very public place. Then they should dare to be arrested for "broadcasting" a copyrighted work.
The stupidity, I tell ya....
...the logo is nowhere to be found in any of the Aqua-like GTK themes!
How do I know? I'm using one of them right now, and I have the other installed.
Now, it might have been in one of the E or Sawfish themes, but I can confidently say it wasn't in any of the GTK ones. In fact, I don't think anyone would have included the Apple logo after the first Aqua theme was removed for that very reason, and removed again at Apple's request even after the logo was removed.
As for the "They spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars..." argument...please. Aqua is NeXT with curvy, bubble-like widgets, at least on the surface. They certainly don't provide any functionality improvements that Aqua gives (does it give any?)
If the logo isn't in any of these themes, Apple barely has a leg to stand on, unless they want to copyright curvy, shiny widgets. I wonder if they've sent similar letters to the theme authors. Is creating a theme enough to whiff off Apple, or do you actually have to offer it for download before they'll launch attack lawyers?
I was wondering about the disadvantages of open source systems.
The problem is in security bugs (as in Red Hat) with people who are not IT professionals.
News flash: this is a general issue with most (all?) operating systems, not just open source ones. It's not a disadvantage of open source alone, but a general difficulty all admins and end users deal with on a daily basis. The difference is, the sysadmin is expected to keep the doors closed and locked. That's part of his/her job description. An end user just wants to check e-mail, browse the web, maybe play a game or write a letter, in which event, they won't religiously follow security mailing lists.
Helix Code, Red Hat, and MS are probably doing end users a favour with automatic update systems, although I'm sure everyone here can rattle off three potential attacks and security holes involving these autoupdaters without thinking (man-in-the-middle attacks, spoofed routing entries, spoofed DNS entries, leading to trojaned packages being downloaded and installed without the user's input).
In the end, it's just an eternal conflict between the developers of new software and the developers of ways to poke holes in new software. That's life.
As another poster mentioned, and as pointed out in the Mozilla roadmap, Mozilla 0.6 is a build from the Netscape branch, not the Mozilla trunk. It's something for people who want to extend or develop for Netscape 6 with some added fixes and updates from the trunk.
I'm personally going to stick with Mozilla trunk nightlies, considering the mess that was the NS6 release. I imagine Moz0.6 incorporates many fixes, but the trunk nightlies are just beautiful at this point. Speed is nearly (if not already) equal with IE5 in Win9x, and the speed under Linux seems to be increasing slightly. At this point, there seem to be more regressions than new bugs cropping up.
Go to the nightlies directory and grab the latest build for your platform. Scroll down to get the absolute latest build for your platform, and be amazed. I should note that, at least in my experience, using the installer seems to allow some strange bugs to creep in - grab the main tarball/zips if you can and be blown away. It's become a good browser at this point.
Yes, the Aussies did a spectacular job. The people were enthusiastic about all the athletes instead of just their own, the logo and celebrations were tasteful yet modern (blasted difficult to pull off nowadays), and the events were fun to watch (unless you were stuck with NBC).
The organizers, or the IOC, whoever handled marketing and licensing, whored out the Olympic name to anyone who could pony up the cash. Come on, tossing away spectators' own food and drinks after they paid wads of $Aus to see the events just because it didn't have the right label? What a pile of crap. I bet the ancient Greeks are wishing they could come back from Elysium to shove spears through the entire IOC. Quite frankly, I'd like to help them.
They're operating, they're releasing products, despite taking a beating on Wall Street and not making a penny of profit. Since I don't have their financials on hand, and no analysts inside or outside of Red Hat seem to be freaking out yet, I think these type of the-sky-is-falling are mostly from reactionaries, or people who wish to see Red Hat fail.
Note that it can take several years for a company to make a profit after starting up, private or public. Hell, Red Hat might still fail in the end - but you can't fault them for making the attempt to succeed, and the company shows no signs of closing its doors.
They're not dead yet, not by a long shot.
Few of the bell-weathers are off by more than 50% of their 52-week high (and Nasdaq itself is off by about as much). LNUX and RHAT are off by more than 95%. They have performed MUCH worse than the market, and other tech stocks.
I guess the concept of an IPO rush escapes you? The companies continue to putt along just fine, whatever else the market thinks.
The stock market never has been, and never will be, the be-all and end-all of Linux or other Free/OSS software.
(3) determine the nature and origin of the dark material on Iapetus' leading hemisphere;
Personally, I want to know the nature and origin of that large black monolith on the other hemisphere...
All I can say to this is "Thank Bob for the CBC!":)
Umm ... clients pay for local call to ISP, same as any other local call. ISP pays for bandwidth from phone company or other owner of infrastructure. In turn, this provider often pays a chain of upstream providers that are generally phone companies or similar.
Nice, except my ISP isn't a dial-up, and they don't get their bandwidth from a telco. It's not just telcos handling the cables anymore.
Well, Steve Wozniak is a teacher...
Of course, depending on what you're looking for, the necessary apps might already be there. StarOffice is adequate as an office suite, if a bit bloated (but then, find me a slim office suite). Mozilla nightlies (pick a recent one) are good-to-great. Evolution is developing, but you can slap together a solution using Balsa or Pine and ical, or the KOffice package. I think StarOffice itself also supports e-mail (POP and IMAP), though the web browser stinks.
Now, if you need functions that only MS Office has, you're kinda screwed. Still, all some shops need is a migration path for their applications in order to send Windows and its myriad licensing issues packing.
People need to stop glibly saying that you should just use Linux - Windows is the best quality software available, and people should pay for it accordingly.
Incorrect - the software that runs on top of Windows is the best-quality software available. Windows itself, however, is of debatable quality. I know if Windows had worked as well as I thought it should have, I would never have bothered to learn how to use Linux. Windows has probably been the best marketing tool Linux could ever ask for, and it's usually software other than Windows itself that keeps people tied to the platform.
I didn't think nerves could self-repair, but then, IANAD by any stretch of the imagination. However, this would suggest real hope for paralysis victims (as the result of certain kinds of accidents/nerve damage). Or am I misunderstanding the doctor's statement?
No, you've about got it dead on. I first learned of this technique several years ago. Tests were performed on mice, where nerves were strung between two ends of a damaged nerve bundle, providing a pathway for the nerves to regenerate.
The nerve bundle being regenerated was the spinal cord.
The operation worked; the mice regained some movement in their hind legs.
Hope springs eternal, for good reason.
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