Gentoo as of now does not provide them. There is a seperate project that is trying to keep upto date packages.
Hmmm. I somehow missed this. Right now, I have an old 200 MHz P-Pro box that I migrated from Win95 to Gentoo. To try to coax some extra performance out of it, I've built everything from source. Since this computer isn't critical, it's ok for it to take several days to compile a major application. I was considering installing Gentoo on the primary machine (850 MHZ Athlon -- not speedy, but satisfactory) and just using packages for updating. I had also planned to use this machine for distributed compiling to help out the slower one. But I can't afford more than about 4 hours of downtime during an upgrade, so maybe Gentoo isn't the best option for it.
Hopefully this will set some sort of precedent..."
Yeah. It sets the precedent that small businesses should work together to establish a "technology, business process and other silly patents defense fund" to deter such behavior in the future.
Even with SElinux turned off I didn't care for Fedora too much. It takes forever to startup and shutdown. It also seemed a bit wonky... after the install some stuff just didn't work and often the machine wouldn't even boot up.
Yeah, it pretty much stinks that I no longer fit within RedHat's business model. I was content paying a small fee every couple years for a system that worked out of the box, even though support was limited. But I'm not going to help beta test Fedora, sorry. I'm in the process of moving on to another distribution now.
Gentoo is OK but there is no way in hell I'm going to sit there and spend hours compiling stuff every time a new version comes out or I need to do an install
I hear you, but can't you just do "emerge --usepkg..." to avoid the compiling part?
Linux has been free for years and yet only accounts for 5% of the desktop max. So what is the real barrier to people adopting Linux then?
First off, the cost of the software was only listed as a barrier to adoption, not the only one. As for what the additional barriers there are, two that I can think of quickly are learning curve and OEM buy-in. It is human nature to be reluctant to learn to use product B when you already are comfortable using product A. It takes a pretty good incentive to push people to expend the necessary energy. As for the OEMs, if they aren't already locked into a restrictive exclusive contract with Microsoft, they are probably reluctant to spend the resources to support installation of an alternative operating system on the machines they sell unless they see a sizable market. Given that it's a chicken and egg argument, adoption of Linux on the desktop will be slow until the market gathers enough mass. If and when that point is reached, you'll probably see very quick gains in market share. Getting large companies like IBM and Novell behind the push will go a long way in helping adoption.
It's incredibly useful in the real world, both for casual users, AND for building small, database-oriented applications. (Say up to 10 or 15 users.)
Although I agree with most of what you said, I would refuse to support any shared Access database with more than 4 or 5 users. For that matter, I'd be hesitant to support any shared Access database at all. Access databases very easily become corrupted, and the more users you have in it at a time, the higher the chances of corruption. Once you start sharing data, it's better to move the data part to a real RDBMS of some sort and just use Access as the front end.
No. An environmentally aware person recycles his newspaper. But you'd be surprised at how many end up in waste bins on the corners of city streets. So although the newspaper itself may be printed on recycled paper, it will ultimately be disposed of and thus necessitate the killing of trees to continue to feed paper needs.
Now, the drawback to this technology is that you MUST resist the urge to leave your newspaper on the seat of the subway or tram when you're done reading it. That would be somewhat cost prohibitive.
...but please spare me the pity party because Congress may want to save me a few BILLION dollars.
This might make sense if Congress (or any group of politicians) was actually interested in SAVING money anywhere. No tinfoil hat is needed to know that anytime a politician takes money away from one line item in the budget, they are merely diverting it to another that involves their own interests.
Please note I am not blaming the credit cards, it is the consumers fault. But having easy access to "endless" credit has been the downfall of many people and marriages.
What really astounds me is that financial institutions with complete access to your credit history know exactly how much open credit you have and what your income level is, yet they continue to provide additional credit to individuals who are in debt up to their eyeballs. It is a mystery to me as to why these companies aren't taken to task for such risky investments. I don't believe in legislating the issue, but maybe if somebody established a credit risk profile for companies that back credit cards and made this information available to investors, the tune would change. I certainly would be a little hesitant to invest in a company that takes unwise risks in its own investments.
I think that's just the proof-of-concept one, because the second one on the page looks less thick to me.
Err, no. That's a picture of the previously announced model that never came to be. Which brings me to another point. Couldn't they have done just a little bit better job with the user interface? Look at the difference between the PIXIL-based model that never happened and the newly announced Qtopia-based model. Everything about the previous model is so much better looking -- not just the box itself. I realize performance is more important that looks, but you'd think at that price they could do a little bit better than fixed-width Courier fonts for everything. Anybody know if Qtopia limits you in this fashion?
I hate the BIG notebook trend, i.e. Dell and the larger Powerbooks. I spend most of my time at my desktop anyway, that's what I *do*, so I would want a light notebook to fill the gaps in.
Is it the BIG notebook trend or the HEAVY notebook trend that you hate? I have different needs from you. I have a laptop, but may spend as little as 50% of my time working at my desk. The other 50% is in conference rooms, on the airplane, or at home. For those situations, my old eyes and fat fingers want the bigger screen and more comfortable keyboard. I also like having the built-in DVD so that I don't have to also lug a docking station around with me on the airplane. I'd like a lighter laptop, but with an even bigger screen. Personally, I'm counting on some of the new display technologies (like OLED) to cut down on the weight without sacrificing on the size. It's really hard to go from a 22" monitor to a 13" LCD screen.
It is just so terribly sad just how insecure and envious so many people are. This could also be taken as proof that people don't pay attention to history or religion, because all of these problems have been faced and dealt with before.
Agreed. I make it a policy to avoid any debt that isn't self-secured whenever possible. Meaning, I won't incur debt to purchase something unless selling that something will allow me to eliminate my debt. That means pretty much carrying a zero balance on my credit cards. Needless to say, the credit card companies aren't exactly thrilled with me.
Just recently, I heard a story of a person who is 90,000 dollars in credit card debt. This isn't some chain mail fantasy, either, it is a person a person in my family knows. I wonder how people can become so deluded and so deep in denial that they will ruin their own life and their family's life just to live in a fake un-earned lifestyle created by a little magic plastic card.
Credit cards didn't create this problem. They just made it easier to hide. Before credit cards, people would borrow money from friends, family and creditors. When they couldn't pay back friends or family, they would lose the respect (and maybe friendship) of them. When they couldn't pay back creditors, the legal institutions would have them taken to jail and the illegal institutions would provide some rather physical incentives for them to find a way to repay the debt.
All credit cards add is the ability to run your debt up without anybody knowing about it until you file for bankruptcy. Consider it to be an "enabling" technology.
I'm not so sure. The file was freely downloaded from their machine by others, who then passed it on.
OK, let's put this into perspective. Let's say that you write a trojan and send it out via email. The people who receive the email run the attachment and then forward the message on to their friends. After a while, you go public and let everybody know about the trojan. Don't you think you'll get a visit to Club Fed?
The trouble is...what if you don't have a windows computer to see how 'it looks' under IE?
This is an age-old problem for web developers. Good developers test their work in multiple browsers, and should also do a test in browsers a few versions back. This might mean keeping an extra box lying around that runs Windows, or using VMWARE or WINE to run Internet Explorer. People might flame me and say that any good developer KNOWS what the content will look like in different browsers and tries to produce a browser-agnostic design, but experience tells me that there's nothing like a quick test to find your mistakes.
Wouldn'the the article be more acurate if it read "modifying web site allows it to be rendered correctly in IE6?"
That's a pretty good question. But the beauty of this thing is that it allows web designers to use all W3C compliant techniques and then make them work correctly in IE6 without massive changes to their code. Just saying "modifying web site allows it to be rendered correctly in IE6" leaves people with the impression that they need to go through a re-coding project instead of just including a style sheet.
Maybe a better headline would be: "New standards compliancy stylesheet for IE6 clients eases cross-browser development for web developers." Or something like that.
While it is good that Comcast is doing something about the problem, this is a bad solution to the problem.
We as the People-Who-Know need to be spending time helping those who don't to become self-reliant, rather than telling them 'Sorry. You can't access the net until you clean up your system. Sorry, I can't really help you do it. Call someone else.'
Comcast is already doing this. From the article:
"Comcast says that it is aware of the problem, is alerting customers who were hacked and helping them secure their computers."
So, they block their access to trigger the support call, and then help them secure their machine. I think this is the right approach.
Any self-respecting doctor should read them the riot act.
I've come to the conclusion that their doctor is equally intellectually challenged. This is the same doctor that has been recording for the past 5 or 6 years on the medical chart that one of them has emphasema and has never bothered to mention it or recommend a cessation of smoking. Of course, it's equally possible that the doctor DID say something and got the same reaction that I get.
tell us that it was okay because "people make mistakes"
Nobody says it's "OK." If you can just stop seeing in black and white mode for a couple minutes, you'll realize that it's equally not OK to permanently alter the life of a doctor and his family because he made a mistake. If a doctor is either grossly negligent or takes some sort of action that clearly has no excuse, it's a different story. But to make the wrong decision in a case where making no decision within the next 20 seconds would be fatal for the patient does not deserve the complete dismantling of one's finances and life.
Many times, malpractice suits are only about vengence. And all the money in the world isn't going to undo what happened.
I've been seeing the same doctor with 4 different insurance companies over the years. I can not see how each insurance company he accepts are all controlling him at the same time. I get the same drugs and the same treatments regardless of what insurance company I've had.
All that tells us is that the 4 insurance companies you have had all agree on what the best-price treatment is for your common ailments. If you really want to test the theory, try paying out of pocket completely and telling the doctor that the cost isn't important.
While there are easy ways to get away with things like frivolous lawsuits then there are gonna be hordes of lawyers who are making their living off of them, and the whole paranoia that is present in different fields which are often central in such cases.
The problem here is that the lawyer usually gets paid even if the case gets laughed out of court. Perhaps if there were a law that made it illegal for the plaintiff's lawyer to accept any fees unless the court case passed certain standards required by the judge (IE, not being dismissed as baseless), you'd see less of this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. I somehow missed this. Right now, I have an old 200 MHz P-Pro box that I migrated from Win95 to Gentoo. To try to coax some extra performance out of it, I've built everything from source. Since this computer isn't critical, it's ok for it to take several days to compile a major application. I was considering installing Gentoo on the primary machine (850 MHZ Athlon -- not speedy, but satisfactory) and just using packages for updating. I had also planned to use this machine for distributed compiling to help out the slower one. But I can't afford more than about 4 hours of downtime during an upgrade, so maybe Gentoo isn't the best option for it.
Yeah. It sets the precedent that small businesses should work together to establish a "technology, business process and other silly patents defense fund" to deter such behavior in the future.
Yeah, it pretty much stinks that I no longer fit within RedHat's business model. I was content paying a small fee every couple years for a system that worked out of the box, even though support was limited. But I'm not going to help beta test Fedora, sorry. I'm in the process of moving on to another distribution now.
Gentoo is OK but there is no way in hell I'm going to sit there and spend hours compiling stuff every time a new version comes out or I need to do an install
I hear you, but can't you just do "emerge --usepkg ..." to avoid the compiling part?
First off, the cost of the software was only listed as a barrier to adoption, not the only one. As for what the additional barriers there are, two that I can think of quickly are learning curve and OEM buy-in. It is human nature to be reluctant to learn to use product B when you already are comfortable using product A. It takes a pretty good incentive to push people to expend the necessary energy. As for the OEMs, if they aren't already locked into a restrictive exclusive contract with Microsoft, they are probably reluctant to spend the resources to support installation of an alternative operating system on the machines they sell unless they see a sizable market. Given that it's a chicken and egg argument, adoption of Linux on the desktop will be slow until the market gathers enough mass. If and when that point is reached, you'll probably see very quick gains in market share. Getting large companies like IBM and Novell behind the push will go a long way in helping adoption.
Although I agree with most of what you said, I would refuse to support any shared Access database with more than 4 or 5 users. For that matter, I'd be hesitant to support any shared Access database at all. Access databases very easily become corrupted, and the more users you have in it at a time, the higher the chances of corruption. Once you start sharing data, it's better to move the data part to a real RDBMS of some sort and just use Access as the front end.
No. An environmentally aware person recycles his newspaper. But you'd be surprised at how many end up in waste bins on the corners of city streets. So although the newspaper itself may be printed on recycled paper, it will ultimately be disposed of and thus necessitate the killing of trees to continue to feed paper needs.
Now, the drawback to this technology is that you MUST resist the urge to leave your newspaper on the seat of the subway or tram when you're done reading it. That would be somewhat cost prohibitive.
This might make sense if Congress (or any group of politicians) was actually interested in SAVING money anywhere. No tinfoil hat is needed to know that anytime a politician takes money away from one line item in the budget, they are merely diverting it to another that involves their own interests.
What really astounds me is that financial institutions with complete access to your credit history know exactly how much open credit you have and what your income level is, yet they continue to provide additional credit to individuals who are in debt up to their eyeballs. It is a mystery to me as to why these companies aren't taken to task for such risky investments. I don't believe in legislating the issue, but maybe if somebody established a credit risk profile for companies that back credit cards and made this information available to investors, the tune would change. I certainly would be a little hesitant to invest in a company that takes unwise risks in its own investments.
Err, no. That's a picture of the previously announced model that never came to be. Which brings me to another point. Couldn't they have done just a little bit better job with the user interface? Look at the difference between the PIXIL-based model that never happened and the newly announced Qtopia-based model. Everything about the previous model is so much better looking -- not just the box itself. I realize performance is more important that looks, but you'd think at that price they could do a little bit better than fixed-width Courier fonts for everything. Anybody know if Qtopia limits you in this fashion?
Is it the BIG notebook trend or the HEAVY notebook trend that you hate? I have different needs from you. I have a laptop, but may spend as little as 50% of my time working at my desk. The other 50% is in conference rooms, on the airplane, or at home. For those situations, my old eyes and fat fingers want the bigger screen and more comfortable keyboard. I also like having the built-in DVD so that I don't have to also lug a docking station around with me on the airplane. I'd like a lighter laptop, but with an even bigger screen. Personally, I'm counting on some of the new display technologies (like OLED) to cut down on the weight without sacrificing on the size. It's really hard to go from a 22" monitor to a 13" LCD screen.
Agreed. I make it a policy to avoid any debt that isn't self-secured whenever possible. Meaning, I won't incur debt to purchase something unless selling that something will allow me to eliminate my debt. That means pretty much carrying a zero balance on my credit cards. Needless to say, the credit card companies aren't exactly thrilled with me.
Credit cards didn't create this problem. They just made it easier to hide. Before credit cards, people would borrow money from friends, family and creditors. When they couldn't pay back friends or family, they would lose the respect (and maybe friendship) of them. When they couldn't pay back creditors, the legal institutions would have them taken to jail and the illegal institutions would provide some rather physical incentives for them to find a way to repay the debt.
All credit cards add is the ability to run your debt up without anybody knowing about it until you file for bankruptcy. Consider it to be an "enabling" technology.
OK, let's put this into perspective. Let's say that you write a trojan and send it out via email. The people who receive the email run the attachment and then forward the message on to their friends. After a while, you go public and let everybody know about the trojan. Don't you think you'll get a visit to Club Fed?
Indeed. My IQ is negative.p Sounds like the same problem I have. Darn that numeric overflow. :-)
I think getting a conviction would be pretty difficult if the offending code was standards-compliant. Around here, we call that an "unfixed bug."
This is an age-old problem for web developers. Good developers test their work in multiple browsers, and should also do a test in browsers a few versions back. This might mean keeping an extra box lying around that runs Windows, or using VMWARE or WINE to run Internet Explorer. People might flame me and say that any good developer KNOWS what the content will look like in different browsers and tries to produce a browser-agnostic design, but experience tells me that there's nothing like a quick test to find your mistakes.
That's a pretty good question. But the beauty of this thing is that it allows web designers to use all W3C compliant techniques and then make them work correctly in IE6 without massive changes to their code. Just saying "modifying web site allows it to be rendered correctly in IE6" leaves people with the impression that they need to go through a re-coding project instead of just including a style sheet.
Maybe a better headline would be: "New standards compliancy stylesheet for IE6 clients eases cross-browser development for web developers." Or something like that.
This sounds even better. Looks like Comcast is doing the right thing. (This time)
We as the People-Who-Know need to be spending time helping those who don't to become self-reliant, rather than telling them 'Sorry. You can't access the net until you clean up your system. Sorry, I can't really help you do it. Call someone else.'
Comcast is already doing this. From the article:
So, they block their access to trigger the support call, and then help them secure their machine. I think this is the right approach.Yeah, I didn't even get into this issue because I didn't think anybody would believe me.
I've come to the conclusion that their doctor is equally intellectually challenged. This is the same doctor that has been recording for the past 5 or 6 years on the medical chart that one of them has emphasema and has never bothered to mention it or recommend a cessation of smoking. Of course, it's equally possible that the doctor DID say something and got the same reaction that I get.
Nobody says it's "OK." If you can just stop seeing in black and white mode for a couple minutes, you'll realize that it's equally not OK to permanently alter the life of a doctor and his family because he made a mistake. If a doctor is either grossly negligent or takes some sort of action that clearly has no excuse, it's a different story. But to make the wrong decision in a case where making no decision within the next 20 seconds would be fatal for the patient does not deserve the complete dismantling of one's finances and life.
Many times, malpractice suits are only about vengence. And all the money in the world isn't going to undo what happened.
All that tells us is that the 4 insurance companies you have had all agree on what the best-price treatment is for your common ailments. If you really want to test the theory, try paying out of pocket completely and telling the doctor that the cost isn't important.
The problem here is that the lawyer usually gets paid even if the case gets laughed out of court. Perhaps if there were a law that made it illegal for the plaintiff's lawyer to accept any fees unless the court case passed certain standards required by the judge (IE, not being dismissed as baseless), you'd see less of this problem.