I've *never* actually manually edited sources.list, and that includes a full-out sytem upgrade from 4.10 to 5.04. You can do all that from within Synaptic, and then you don't have to remember sudo or any of the other stuff. And you don't have to risk potentially botching the entire file through some stupid editing error.
The old-guard debianites will tell you to edit sources.list manually, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing it that way. But criticizing Ubuntu for doing it the old way, when they do have a new, more user-friendly way of doing it is a straw man. It's like complaining about how hard it is to push your car down the street. There's another way to do it; maybe you should try it before giving up on cars altogether.
Ha! That's excellent. You're certainly not alone in generalizing the "V like a banshee" construction. Since you're actually talking about sound in this case, you're not far from the "screeching like a banshee" which I've heard before. A reasonable application of the phrase with regard to the sound it makes.
To say I grew up in the age of quiet drives is something of an exaggeration, though -- unless you consider the desk-shaking capabilities of my first hard drive (20 MB in an old Zenith box) "quiet".:)
Novell isn't pursuing distribution of F/OSS as a patentable revenue stream. Sony was out to do their thing with Betamax both because it was a better product, but more crucially, it wasn't interoperable with other systems. If you bought Betamax anything, that money went to Sony and locked others out of the market.
Novell, by contrast, is not just bound to a revenue stream solely in product sales. They can offer services above and beyond the software box that is truly what makes this profitable, as support has little if any consumable or R&D costs associated with it.
I don't remember the exact problem we were having in my lab, but someone was preparing to give a presentation which they made in PowerPoint on one of our PowerMacs. They took it over to a Windows box because the room for the presentation only had that available, and the damned presentation wouldn't load.
You can imagine the amount of cussing that ensued.
I don't have MS Office on my Windows laptop, but I do have OO.o, and lo and behold, I was able to open my labmate's presentation. But the real kicker is that I was able to Save as... and the file popped out in a format MS Office on the Windows box would read.
It was about the most bizarre file compatibility thing I've ever seen.
I've been using this package for a couple days, and it's slick as snot on a doorknob. On my machine, at least, it's just as fast as xpdf or gpdf. After the hellacious AR 6.0 for Windows, this is certainly a refreshing sight.
Symantec recommends you immediately patch your software.
For starters, I recommend you quit using quasi-effective programs that Symantec put out that unnecessarily use system resources and spend more time drawing their eye candy than actually doing what they're supposed to.
That said, I suppose I should also suggest you migrate from Windows, as well...
There's even more to it than that. When he *does* talk about the people responsible for F/OSS software and software design, this crap comes out of his mouth:
"There a myth in the market that there are hundreds of thousands of people writing code for the Linux kernel. This is not the case; the number is hundreds, not thousands," he said.
This would be true if the F/OSS community was a large software corporation. However, it's built from a collaborative standpoint; one where the end-users' bug reports and feedback and feature requests actually end up driving the direction of software development, more often than not.
While it may be accurate to say there are only(?) a few hundred people wokring on the Linux kernel development, that disounts all the people working on other truly critical software, like GUIs. And it completely discounts the end-user, the community, and the collaboration that goes into making F/OSS successful.
You're exactly right, though, in pointing out that bugfixes have to be addressed in a speedy, (ideally) optionally automated fashion.
I'm not concerned if the perceived effective compeition makes IE a better browser. All the better for everyone who uses or depends on a computer.
It's worth noting that in the real world, XP SP2's IE popup blocker is qualitatively far less effective than Firefox. My clients who use XP SP2 still notice how much better Firefox' system is when I introduce them to it.
Firefox IS more than a better IE, but I question how many times people are introduced to the idea of extensions. This customizability is one of the ways in which Firefox is definitely superior, yet I know I've not been on the ball with showing clients all the ins and outs of why FF is better.
They want fewer popups, they want more security, and occasionally they want tabbed browsing. FF's default install is good enough for those people.
back when I was younger, more naive, still in the closet, etc., etc., to have shows like TNG where, despite the occasional preachy lesson show, the moral of the story was "Shut the fuck up and get along."
Nichelle Nichols' character in the original series was a really groundbreaking sort of role: to have a black woman on a show, full time, regular cast. Awesome!
But what really sealed the deal was that nobody gave a rat's ass about it. There wasn't an episode about crew members dealing with what to do with the black woman on the bridge. It just was. And it was Good.
I didn't see the queer episode in question, but I guarantee you if I was 10 years younger and had seen that episode, I would've been pissed that they even bothered to make such a stink. (On a related note, did anyone see the abortion episode of Enterprise a while back??):-P
What are you talking about? I realize this is a visceral reaction and probably won't do anything for my karma...
Of course this isn't any positive sign that MS wants to kill F/OSS projects; they've put it out in black and white. It should never be forgotten, though, that what is really a threat to the MS business model is the whole ideology behind F/OSS. It's much classier to knock Linux as a program than to knock the idea of open-source as evil. Freedom is supposed to be treasured in the US, and MS has a harder job arguing freedom-supporting programmers are communisits than they do arguing Linux is an inferior product with remarkably higher TCO.
Notice that this is MS being willing to open up a file format that is (already? or going to be) obsoleted by their Office production cycle in no time at all. They're talking here about handing out specs to a file format they're ready to break, anyway. Not much magnanimity to be had there, eh?
It's important for end users of MS Office to understand the works they create therein are essentially co-opted by Microsoft into its latest, obfusticated.DOC format. Despite the ubiquity of the software, there's no guarantee that anything other than MS Office will be able to read those files in the future.
It's a mealymouth argument, but a couple good slogans would really help... Something like "[OpenOffice, Gnumeric, AbiWord]: Becuase they're your documents."
Why do we refer to things that are not barriers as barriers? This talk goes on all the time on the site, and honestly, we can all do better than that. Let me explain:
A barrier is some thing, physical, abstract, whatever. Some property of the barrier or something associated with the barrier in some way prevents something from happening, or some condition from being reached.
The speed of light, for example, so far as we know it, is a barrier -- according to current understandings of the world, stuff cannot (normally, at least) travel faster than light. Ergo, c is a barrier.
The speed of sound is also a barrier. Typical aircraft encounter tremendous stresses as they approach the speed of sound. For a long time, we couldn't go faster than sound. But now, there is an understanding of how to design a body to break through that barrier. It still exists as a barrier, though: try and crank a 747 up to Mach 1 and watch what happens.
OK, so you see? A barrier has some property that prevents something else.
There is no barrier out there that prevents the creation of the 100,000th computer virus. There is nothing actively precluding another virus from being created.
NLP and semantic extraction and conceputal indexing is nothing new; admittedly, practical implmentations have been few and far between.
However, as I'm often fond of pointing out, the problem is not getting the 80 - 90% accuracy in translation and interpretation that I'm sure these systems can attain.
The challenge quickly becomes how to deal with idioms and idiosyncratic constructions. Is this system even ready to deal with sentences like "The criminal was shot dead by police"? If it is, great. How about "The trolley rumbled through town"? Or the idiomatic "time flies"?
This is what, so far as I know, the field of computational linguistics is now facing in textual interpretation and translation. Coming up with a system to effectively identify what appear to be three-argument verbs ("Mary hammered the metal flat") or constructions or idioms above may well be something that traditional systematic recursive grammars aren't yet up to handling.
Somehow these situations have to be identified, and separated in the parsing process so that they don't get processed like standard grammatical expressions.
Hopefully these problems are how I'll make my living;)
Or like the US cutting program after program that provides condoms to people who it would stop from a) getting AIDS and b) having kids, both of which are extremely crticial in places with a) high rates of HIV infection and b) overpopulation / starvation, etc.
I just participated in a rather heated discussion over on Larry Lessig's blog about how the perception about gratis / libre software is that the word "free" is associated with it, and "free" has two distinct (though not necessarily contradictory) meanings.
Lots of people still hear "free software" and expect that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Now, having been a participant in the open source community for a while now, indeed, it's not a free lunch exactly. Users are asked to comment, provide feedback, and report errors.
But that's a far cry from using a security nightmare of a browser or paying $400 for that productivity suite, isn't it?
No one in my curosry search of the thread has mentioned Ubuntu, which is currently distributing free packages of their software. I've installed it on my box and love it dearly, already. Many friends have been impressed with what they've seen as well.
Interestingly, on the Live CD that comes with the x86 package, there's also an autorun setup for Windows. If you pop the disc in while running Windows, it presents you with the opportunity to install some of the best F/OSS around:
-Firefox -Thunderbird -The Gimp -Audacity -OO.o -A couple other programs I don't recall ATM
My budding computer geek brother has never been willing to adopt Linux (saying things like "there are too damn many flavors," etc.). However, now that he's had a chance to use the programs I use every day, he's also beginning to see why maybe I like my system.
IMHO, porting quality F/OSS to Windows is a great way to show people that libre doesn't mean gratis, and gratis doesn't mean cheap. It's important we as a community educate others about the way the community can develop software and GUIs and all this wonderful tech -- but do it in terms that help them understand the big picture at the same time.
The newspaper is from Michigan City which is in LaPorte County, Indiana, on the extreme northern edge of the state (that is, the border with Michigan).
LaPorte is (IIRC) the county seat of LaPorte County.
Thus, even if all those votes went for Kerry, Indiana would not, switch its 11 electoral votes to Kerry.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason I don't have mod points this week is because my pipe is broken, in fact.
I've *never* actually manually edited sources.list, and that includes a full-out sytem upgrade from 4.10 to 5.04. You can do all that from within Synaptic, and then you don't have to remember sudo or any of the other stuff. And you don't have to risk potentially botching the entire file through some stupid editing error.
The old-guard debianites will tell you to edit sources.list manually, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing it that way. But criticizing Ubuntu for doing it the old way, when they do have a new, more user-friendly way of doing it is a straw man. It's like complaining about how hard it is to push your car down the street. There's another way to do it; maybe you should try it before giving up on cars altogether.
Ha! That's excellent. You're certainly not alone in generalizing the "V like a banshee" construction. Since you're actually talking about sound in this case, you're not far from the "screeching like a banshee" which I've heard before. A reasonable application of the phrase with regard to the sound it makes.
:)
To say I grew up in the age of quiet drives is something of an exaggeration, though -- unless you consider the desk-shaking capabilities of my first hard drive (20 MB in an old Zenith box) "quiet".
"According to his supposition I should be swapping like a banshee already."
:)
Yes, banshees are notorious for thier inadequate memory management techniques
Novell isn't pursuing distribution of F/OSS as a patentable revenue stream. Sony was out to do their thing with Betamax both because it was a better product, but more crucially, it wasn't interoperable with other systems. If you bought Betamax anything, that money went to Sony and locked others out of the market.
:)
Novell, by contrast, is not just bound to a revenue stream solely in product sales. They can offer services above and beyond the software box that is truly what makes this profitable, as support has little if any consumable or R&D costs associated with it.
Am I even close?
I don't remember the exact problem we were having in my lab, but someone was preparing to give a presentation which they made in PowerPoint on one of our PowerMacs. They took it over to a Windows box because the room for the presentation only had that available, and the damned presentation wouldn't load.
You can imagine the amount of cussing that ensued.
I don't have MS Office on my Windows laptop, but I do have OO.o, and lo and behold, I was able to open my labmate's presentation. But the real kicker is that I was able to Save as... and the file popped out in a format MS Office on the Windows box would read.
It was about the most bizarre file compatibility thing I've ever seen.
I've been using this package for a couple days, and it's slick as snot on a doorknob. On my machine, at least, it's just as fast as xpdf or gpdf. After the hellacious AR 6.0 for Windows, this is certainly a refreshing sight.
Does this mean we can expect a slashback applet in GNOME 2.12?
And don't forget the ever-important subclassificaion of "individuals", in which all individuals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
You're just jealous :)
You laugh... but if you've heard one Diane Warren song, you've heard them all. And they all make my skin crawl.
This would be true if the F/OSS community was a large software corporation. However, it's built from a collaborative standpoint; one where the end-users' bug reports and feedback and feature requests actually end up driving the direction of software development, more often than not.
While it may be accurate to say there are only(?) a few hundred people wokring on the Linux kernel development, that disounts all the people working on other truly critical software, like GUIs. And it completely discounts the end-user, the community, and the collaboration that goes into making F/OSS successful.
His argument is a straw man.
You're exactly right, though, in pointing out that bugfixes have to be addressed in a speedy, (ideally) optionally automated fashion.
I'm not concerned if the perceived effective compeition makes IE a better browser. All the better for everyone who uses or depends on a computer.
It's worth noting that in the real world, XP SP2's IE popup blocker is qualitatively far less effective than Firefox. My clients who use XP SP2 still notice how much better Firefox' system is when I introduce them to it.
Firefox IS more than a better IE, but I question how many times people are introduced to the idea of extensions. This customizability is one of the ways in which Firefox is definitely superior, yet I know I've not been on the ball with showing clients all the ins and outs of why FF is better.
They want fewer popups, they want more security, and occasionally they want tabbed browsing. FF's default install is good enough for those people.
back when I was younger, more naive, still in the closet, etc., etc., to have shows like TNG where, despite the occasional preachy lesson show, the moral of the story was "Shut the fuck up and get along."
:-P
Nichelle Nichols' character in the original series was a really groundbreaking sort of role: to have a black woman on a show, full time, regular cast. Awesome!
But what really sealed the deal was that nobody gave a rat's ass about it. There wasn't an episode about crew members dealing with what to do with the black woman on the bridge. It just was. And it was Good.
I didn't see the queer episode in question, but I guarantee you if I was 10 years younger and had seen that episode, I would've been pissed that they even bothered to make such a stink. (On a related note, did anyone see the abortion episode of Enterprise a while back??)
I miss the subtlety.
What are you talking about? I realize this is a visceral reaction and probably won't do anything for my karma...
.DOC format. Despite the ubiquity of the software, there's no guarantee that anything other than MS Office will be able to read those files in the future.
Of course this isn't any positive sign that MS wants to kill F/OSS projects; they've put it out in black and white. It should never be forgotten, though, that what is really a threat to the MS business model is the whole ideology behind F/OSS. It's much classier to knock Linux as a program than to knock the idea of open-source as evil. Freedom is supposed to be treasured in the US, and MS has a harder job arguing freedom-supporting programmers are communisits than they do arguing Linux is an inferior product with remarkably higher TCO.
Notice that this is MS being willing to open up a file format that is (already? or going to be) obsoleted by their Office production cycle in no time at all. They're talking here about handing out specs to a file format they're ready to break, anyway. Not much magnanimity to be had there, eh?
It's important for end users of MS Office to understand the works they create therein are essentially co-opted by Microsoft into its latest, obfusticated
It's a mealymouth argument, but a couple good slogans would really help... Something like "[OpenOffice, Gnumeric, AbiWord]: Becuase they're your documents."
Why do we refer to things that are not barriers as barriers? This talk goes on all the time on the site, and honestly, we can all do better than that. Let me explain:
A barrier is some thing, physical, abstract, whatever. Some property of the barrier or something associated with the barrier in some way prevents something from happening, or some condition from being reached.
The speed of light, for example, so far as we know it, is a barrier -- according to current understandings of the world, stuff cannot (normally, at least) travel faster than light. Ergo, c is a barrier.
The speed of sound is also a barrier. Typical aircraft encounter tremendous stresses as they approach the speed of sound. For a long time, we couldn't go faster than sound. But now, there is an understanding of how to design a body to break through that barrier. It still exists as a barrier, though: try and crank a 747 up to Mach 1 and watch what happens.
OK, so you see? A barrier has some property that prevents something else.
There is no barrier out there that prevents the creation of the 100,000th computer virus. There is nothing actively precluding another virus from being created.
At least not as long as IE is in the wild.
NLP and semantic extraction and conceputal indexing is nothing new; admittedly, practical implmentations have been few and far between.
;)
However, as I'm often fond of pointing out, the problem is not getting the 80 - 90% accuracy in translation and interpretation that I'm sure these systems can attain.
The challenge quickly becomes how to deal with idioms and idiosyncratic constructions. Is this system even ready to deal with sentences like "The criminal was shot dead by police"? If it is, great. How about "The trolley rumbled through town"? Or the idiomatic "time flies"?
This is what, so far as I know, the field of computational linguistics is now facing in textual interpretation and translation. Coming up with a system to effectively identify what appear to be three-argument verbs ("Mary hammered the metal flat") or constructions or idioms above may well be something that traditional systematic recursive grammars aren't yet up to handling.
Somehow these situations have to be identified, and separated in the parsing process so that they don't get processed like standard grammatical expressions.
Hopefully these problems are how I'll make my living
I'm watching you because I'm the man behind the camera at a post office near you.
:)
Face it, if the US has this technology deployed to surveil its citizens, you guys have it in the UK, too
Or like the US cutting program after program that provides condoms to people who it would stop from a) getting AIDS and b) having kids, both of which are extremely crticial in places with a) high rates of HIV infection and b) overpopulation / starvation, etc.
but far be it from me to pick sides; I program in Java ;)
I just participated in a rather heated discussion over on Larry Lessig's blog about how the perception about gratis / libre software is that the word "free" is associated with it, and "free" has two distinct (though not necessarily contradictory) meanings.
Lots of people still hear "free software" and expect that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Now, having been a participant in the open source community for a while now, indeed, it's not a free lunch exactly. Users are asked to comment, provide feedback, and report errors.
But that's a far cry from using a security nightmare of a browser or paying $400 for that productivity suite, isn't it?
No one in my curosry search of the thread has mentioned Ubuntu, which is currently distributing free packages of their software. I've installed it on my box and love it dearly, already. Many friends have been impressed with what they've seen as well.
Interestingly, on the Live CD that comes with the x86 package, there's also an autorun setup for Windows. If you pop the disc in while running Windows, it presents you with the opportunity to install some of the best F/OSS around:
-Firefox
-Thunderbird
-The Gimp
-Audacity
-OO.o
-A couple other programs I don't recall ATM
My budding computer geek brother has never been willing to adopt Linux (saying things like "there are too damn many flavors," etc.). However, now that he's had a chance to use the programs I use every day, he's also beginning to see why maybe I like my system.
IMHO, porting quality F/OSS to Windows is a great way to show people that libre doesn't mean gratis, and gratis doesn't mean cheap. It's important we as a community educate others about the way the community can develop software and GUIs and all this wonderful tech -- but do it in terms that help them understand the big picture at the same time.
Great. The last thing I need is more NullPointerException errors :-P
Remember, if you have unprotected sex with a donkey, it's like having sex with all the donkey's that donkey has been with before!
The newspaper is from Michigan City which is in LaPorte County, Indiana, on the extreme northern edge of the state (that is, the border with Michigan).
LaPorte is (IIRC) the county seat of LaPorte County.
Thus, even if all those votes went for Kerry, Indiana would not, switch its 11 electoral votes to Kerry.