IANAL either, but creating a legible image of currency is illegal in Canada. There was a bank which had to pull a series of ads because they contained images of Canadian money...
One could have predicted that the vast majority of Slashdot readers would have responded with, "This guy is an idiot because... misconfiguration... blah blah" without addressing the underlying complaint. The more important issue is that a group of unregulated volunteers (albeit well-meaning volunteers) has the power to block any server from sending mail, by placing it on a blackhole list. Nobody is holding these people accountable for the power that they wield, and their grievance procedures are either obscure or non-existent.
I agree that Word is a POS. However I regret to inform you that many of the packages you mention, and KDE and Sun in particular, are not part of the GNU project. It is you who are mistaken... about a great many things...
Nope, 100% wrong. Nothing could be more friendly than having 100% control of your computer.
I agree if we use "user-friendly" to mean "we are as accommodating to the user as possible, and we trust the user". However the conventional usage is "we make things as easy for the user as possible", which GNU does not do (emacs, as just one example). GNU authors are geeks who write for geeks, and I think they secretly like the feeling that they are part of a secret club that nobody else can understand.
The goal of GNU is to produce the world's best software and that includes ease of use.
From the horse's mouth:
The principal goal of GNU was to be free software. And: The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular.
the easiest installs available anywhere
Newbie software install in Windows: double click on setup.exe, keep clicking OK. Done.
Newbie software install in GNU:
Let's see, it's.tar.gz, so I have to untar it... can't remember how that works... man tar... OK, there it is. Now let's read the README. Configure, fine. GCC not found? What the hell is that?
Is there a single piece of comercial software that you can point to that does not have a free analog that's just as easy to use and more powerful?
Linus certainly seems to think so. Remember the kerfuffle over his use of some proprietary package to maintain the Linux kernel? He said he just wanted to use the best tool, whether it was free or not.
What kind of privilege escalation is there on a userless OS?
As many on this forum have established, although Win 95/98 are userless, WinNT does have privilege checking and administrator accounts.
And with reference to your spelling of MS
with a dollar sign, you might find this
Penny Arcade cartoon helpful.
Correct, but the electrical field propagates through the copper at nearly the speed of light -- and the signal travels at the speed of the electrical field.
Advances in optical-fibre making at the Australian Photonics research centre could bring communications at the speed of light into Australian homes and businesses in the next few years.
Dammit, communicating over copper with electrical pulses is also at the speed of light (roughly). This is a painful but all-too-common misuse of terminology, confusing speed as in data rate with speed as in velocity. Damn marketing types.
If the RIAA release songs which are already in the public domain, but titled incorrectly (e.g., release a repeating loop of "Happy Birthday" with the title of "Coldplay--Yellow.mp3"), then they can add the tag line without fear of losing anything. I'm sure they have enough lawyers to argue that the tag line applies to the content of the mp3 and not its title.
If you were really smart, you would design it to be much longer than 35,000 km, where the orbital velocity is much less than geostationary, and apply a counterweight to shift the center of mass. That way, cutting the elevator would cause the entire assembly to be hurled into a higher orbit.
fifteen years?
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
According to
this BBC article covering the same story, a fifty year timeline is more likely.
Why, back in my day, we were PROUD of how hard our OS was to install. "It took me 83 floppies and three whole days, catching catnaps on the floor," we'd say. 'Course, in those days, we didn't have any fancy damn GUIs. We had to build our own interface to connect through the serial port, using nothing but chewing gum and twine that we found while rummaging through our co-workers' desks. Why, I once installed the OS on a PDP-11 by licking my finger and feeling the shocks through the serial line. I had an onion tied to my belt, as was the style at the time.
My naval experience is more recent. I have a vivid memory of checking out the computers that drove the operations room (the Canadian term fo what the Americans call the CIC). The computers consisted of a half-dozen circuit boards, most with discrete components, and were mounted in big, heavy iron boxes in large racks. On the floor, securely mounted, was an object the size and shape of a standard business safe, which I was told was an 80 megabyte hard drive (at the time the standard in a desktop was around 1 GB). The ship had just come out of refit, so this stuff was allegedly "new". The mil-spec stuff that is intended to survive floods, missile hits, etc. etc. tends to be expensive, heavy, and obsolete.
However, our ship also had any number of PC's and laptops which were used for various non-critical, administrative uses. As far as I could see, these were all standard, off-the-shelf equipment, and they held up pretty well. As long as you buy decent equipment, and don't expect it to survive immersion in salt water, it should be fine.
Whatever happened to the idea that when you buy something it's yours to do as you please?
That right doesn't actually exist. For example, I can buy a gun and ammunition, but that doesn't give me the right to fire in any direction that I please. The question is better approached from a perspective of individual freedom versus collective good.
Check out the top cities for Slashdot Meetup Day. First on the list is Toronto. Vancouver (13) and Montreal (Tied-14) are in the top 20; taken together they outscore the combination of San Francisco and San Jose. Outside of Canada, London (England) is second on the list (the top American city is Washington, at third). The Aussies are putting in a strong showing with three in the top 20: Melbourne (6), Sydney (7), and Brisbane (11); Perth weighs in at 32nd. "Majority" is too strong a word to use, but... are us non-Americans taking over Slashdot?
Sorry, but the concentration of CO2 that is necessary to put out a fire is also insufficient to support human life. The neat thing about Halon is that it doesn't do immediate harm to humans at the concentration that puts out a fire, as long as you leave the area quickly. I knew somebody who was in a room when Halon was accidentally released, and it had no effect on him...
The CBC carried the semi-finals and finals live, and aired a number of games on tape delay. They also used the BBC audio feed, which provided probably the best English language commentary.
However, I'm told that FIFA was asking for an enormous amount of money for the rights to broadcast games... CBC nearly didn't carry it, but they worked out some sort of deal. Maybe ABC thought it was too much to pay for a 6 AM broadcast...
How can it be that they can change the EULA in order to disseminate a security patch? Isn't this essentially extortion? If I disagree with the EULA, and someone exploits the security hole the patch was designed to fix, can Microsoft be held liable?
It's difficult to imagine anybody flying in this thing. For one thing, the passengers are intended to be kept in compartments close to the center of the aircraft, so no window seats. The very wide body means much greater displacement when the aircraft banks so even a slight bank would feel like a roller coaster ride for those on the extremities. One of the most important design challenges is emergency evacuation. And -- would the average person fly in a radically new, untested airframe?
Also, the actual games themselves don't cost more than a couple dollars each to manufacture
(even on DVD), and that's including the box, instructions, etc.
Aren't you forgetting those pasty-faced, caffeine-consuming individuals that produce the funny patterns of 1's and 0's on the DVD? What do you call them now... programmers? Most of the programmers I've talked to need to eat occasionally, and live somewhere with a roof.
Why buy a $1500 gaming computer, with all the worries about compatible hardware, flaky software, etc. etc., when you can buy a $300 console, plug it into your TV, and be on your way? I have a console because I use linux on my main box, and if I'm working and want to take a break, I don't want to have to save everything, shut down, reboot into Windows, play the game, shut down, reboot into Linux, and re-open my work. There are also all kinds of games (like Gran Turismo) that are unavailable on the PC.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL either, but creating a legible image of currency is illegal in Canada. There was a bank which had to pull a series of ads because they contained images of Canadian money ...
One could have predicted that the vast majority of Slashdot readers would have responded with, "This guy is an idiot because ... misconfiguration ... blah blah" without addressing the underlying complaint. The more important issue is that a group of unregulated volunteers (albeit well-meaning volunteers) has the power to block any server from sending mail, by placing it on a blackhole list. Nobody is holding these people accountable for the power that they wield, and their grievance procedures are either obscure or non-existent.
I agree that Word is a POS. However I regret to inform you that many of the packages you mention, and KDE and Sun in particular, are not part of the GNU project. It is you who are mistaken ... about a great many things ...
Nope, 100% wrong. Nothing could be more friendly than having 100% control of your computer.
I agree if we use "user-friendly" to mean "we are as accommodating to the user as possible, and we trust the user". However the conventional usage is "we make things as easy for the user as possible", which GNU does not do (emacs, as just one example). GNU authors are geeks who write for geeks, and I think they secretly like the feeling that they are part of a secret club that nobody else can understand.
The goal of GNU is to produce the world's best software and that includes ease of use.
From the horse's mouth: The principal goal of GNU was to be free software. And: The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular.
the easiest installs available anywhere
Newbie software install in Windows: double click on setup.exe, keep clicking OK. Done.
Newbie software install in GNU: Let's see, it's .tar.gz, so I have to untar it ... can't remember how that works ... man tar ... OK, there it is. Now let's read the README. Configure, fine. GCC not found? What the hell is that?
Is there a single piece of comercial software that you can point to that does not have a free analog that's just as easy to use and more powerful?
Linus certainly seems to think so. Remember the kerfuffle over his use of some proprietary package to maintain the Linux kernel? He said he just wanted to use the best tool, whether it was free or not.
What kind of privilege escalation is there on a userless OS?
As many on this forum have established, although Win 95/98 are userless, WinNT does have privilege checking and administrator accounts.
And with reference to your spelling of MS with a dollar sign, you might find this Penny Arcade cartoon helpful.
Correct, but the electrical field propagates through the copper at nearly the speed of light -- and the signal travels at the speed of the electrical field.
Advances in optical-fibre making at the Australian Photonics research centre could bring communications at the speed of light into Australian homes and businesses in the next few years.
Dammit, communicating over copper with electrical pulses is also at the speed of light (roughly). This is a painful but all-too-common misuse of terminology, confusing speed as in data rate with speed as in velocity. Damn marketing types.
If the RIAA release songs which are already in the public domain, but titled incorrectly (e.g., release a repeating loop of "Happy Birthday" with the title of "Coldplay--Yellow.mp3"), then they can add the tag line without fear of losing anything. I'm sure they have enough lawyers to argue that the tag line applies to the content of the mp3 and not its title.
If you were really smart, you would design it to be much longer than 35,000 km, where the orbital velocity is much less than geostationary, and apply a counterweight to shift the center of mass. That way, cutting the elevator would cause the entire assembly to be hurled into a higher orbit.
According to this BBC article covering the same story, a fifty year timeline is more likely.
I think it was the one where Homer organizes a strike at the nuclear plant. Not 100% sure though.
Why, back in my day, we were PROUD of how hard our OS was to install. "It took me 83 floppies and three whole days, catching catnaps on the floor," we'd say. 'Course, in those days, we didn't have any fancy damn GUIs. We had to build our own interface to connect through the serial port, using nothing but chewing gum and twine that we found while rummaging through our co-workers' desks. Why, I once installed the OS on a PDP-11 by licking my finger and feeling the shocks through the serial line. I had an onion tied to my belt, as was the style at the time.
Is that 10^6 geeks, or 2^20 geeks? Or some hybrid, like (10^3)*(2^10)?
My naval experience is more recent. I have a vivid memory of checking out the computers that drove the operations room (the Canadian term fo what the Americans call the CIC). The computers consisted of a half-dozen circuit boards, most with discrete components, and were mounted in big, heavy iron boxes in large racks. On the floor, securely mounted, was an object the size and shape of a standard business safe, which I was told was an 80 megabyte hard drive (at the time the standard in a desktop was around 1 GB). The ship had just come out of refit, so this stuff was allegedly "new". The mil-spec stuff that is intended to survive floods, missile hits, etc. etc. tends to be expensive, heavy, and obsolete.
However, our ship also had any number of PC's and laptops which were used for various non-critical, administrative uses. As far as I could see, these were all standard, off-the-shelf equipment, and they held up pretty well. As long as you buy decent equipment, and don't expect it to survive immersion in salt water, it should be fine.
Whatever happened to the idea that when you buy something it's yours to do as you please?
That right doesn't actually exist. For example, I can buy a gun and ammunition, but that doesn't give me the right to fire in any direction that I please. The question is better approached from a perspective of individual freedom versus collective good.
Check out the top cities for Slashdot Meetup Day. First on the list is Toronto. Vancouver (13) and Montreal (Tied-14) are in the top 20; taken together they outscore the combination of San Francisco and San Jose. Outside of Canada, London (England) is second on the list (the top American city is Washington, at third). The Aussies are putting in a strong showing with three in the top 20: Melbourne (6), Sydney (7), and Brisbane (11); Perth weighs in at 32nd. "Majority" is too strong a word to use, but ... are us non-Americans taking over Slashdot?
In regards to your spelling of MS with a dollar sign, you might find this cartoon helpful.
I actually have to find something constructive to do with my time instead of wasting the next 5 hours watching sitcoms
What, like posting on Slashdot?
It's a simpsons quote. I'm assuming they didn't check the actual value.
What if fundamental constants of the universe turn out not to be constant?
My car gets 50 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
It's cheaper, and much less likely to kill you.
Sorry, but the concentration of CO2 that is necessary to put out a fire is also insufficient to support human life. The neat thing about Halon is that it doesn't do immediate harm to humans at the concentration that puts out a fire, as long as you leave the area quickly. I knew somebody who was in a room when Halon was accidentally released, and it had no effect on him ...
The CBC carried the semi-finals and finals live, and aired a number of games on tape delay. They also used the BBC audio feed, which provided probably the best English language commentary.
However, I'm told that FIFA was asking for an enormous amount of money for the rights to broadcast games ... CBC nearly didn't carry it, but they worked out some sort of deal. Maybe ABC thought it was too much to pay for a 6 AM broadcast ...
How can it be that they can change the EULA in order to disseminate a security patch? Isn't this essentially extortion? If I disagree with the EULA, and someone exploits the security hole the patch was designed to fix, can Microsoft be held liable?
It's difficult to imagine anybody flying in this thing. For one thing, the passengers are intended to be kept in compartments close to the center of the aircraft, so no window seats. The very wide body means much greater displacement when the aircraft banks so even a slight bank would feel like a roller coaster ride for those on the extremities. One of the most important design challenges is emergency evacuation. And -- would the average person fly in a radically new, untested airframe?
Also, the actual games themselves don't cost more than a couple dollars each to manufacture (even on DVD), and that's including the box, instructions, etc.
Aren't you forgetting those pasty-faced, caffeine-consuming individuals that produce the funny patterns of 1's and 0's on the DVD? What do you call them now ... programmers? Most of the programmers I've talked to need to eat occasionally, and live somewhere with a roof.
Why buy a $1500 gaming computer, with all the worries about compatible hardware, flaky software, etc. etc., when you can buy a $300 console, plug it into your TV, and be on your way? I have a console because I use linux on my main box, and if I'm working and want to take a break, I don't want to have to save everything, shut down, reboot into Windows, play the game, shut down, reboot into Linux, and re-open my work. There are also all kinds of games (like Gran Turismo) that are unavailable on the PC.