Banner ads are still quite effective, if they're done right. Look at (for instance) penny-arcade or PvP Online - they're both good examples of sites that use advertising effectively. I've gone to PvP a couple times and noticed they had ads drawn by the comic's artist. I looked at them, and clicked through. Sometimes, on PA, I'll frequently just click on an add because it's interesting-looking - they're often designed around the site's theme, and with the interests of the viewers in mind: gadgets, comics, games, and other things we geeks like.
Additionally, PA suppliments this ad income with things like tshirts, a hillarious comic, writeups, a tip jar, and the like. As near as I can tell, these guys live off the site.
Yes, it was a "build your own system", which, if it were a component-for-component, identical type comparision, I would agree. However, it was not - notice the specs I listed as being significantly more powerful, of higher capacity, and better craftmanship than what apple tends to ship. I did that to factor in for all the shortcomings you mention.
Had I spec'd out an identical system, it would have been roughly 600$. If that. That would leave me $500 for 'support' (returning parts, which I've rarely needed to do, let alone twice in a system), OS install time, and the picking of parts. Figure 20 minutes to pick all the parts (roughly the time involved to spec out a mac for most people, I imagine - should I include that price on the mac figure as well?), unpacking the hardware (let's say an hour - compared to, say, 20 minutes to unwrap a mac and plug it in, get all your warranties in order) and the installation of the OS and various components (generally takes me under 30 minutes for everything - linux, not windows). Should I include the time/cost of installing all the extra applications on the eMac to the apple figure as well? Roughly, that's an hour (hell, let's say an hour and a half) of my time.
As far as managing support from 15 vendors (15, where do you ge that number? I don't recall listing 15 compenents up above. I htink you should get your head checked), that's not necessary. Something breaks, get a new one. There's a fat wad of cash left over from the money saved by not buying an apple/dell. Or: returning hte broken component just as you would to apple - keep your warranty information in a single file. Memory went bad? Mail it back to crucial - lifetime warranty. Drive died? Mail it back to WD, they'll replace it. I've very rarely seen anyhting other than those things malfunction on a system.
As far as the "downsizing the monitor" - I didn't. I susbstituted a 15" LCD for a 17" CRT. The viewable area is just as similar as a comparision between two 17" CRTs. Besides, did you not read that the 15" LCD was roughly the same price as a 19" CRT? 17" 19", buddy, so you're still dead in the water there.
VoIP isn't next generation; it's a temporary situation until landlines are phased out more completely.
Everyone I know uses a cell phone nearly exclusively. As soon as international calls are part of the plan at a free/economical rate, landlines/long distance (and voip) are completely done for.
Heh, I know you're a troll, but just to prove your little venimous ass wrong, I went ahead and stopped by newegg.com and spec'd out a fairly top of the line PC system for myself. I also went over to the apple site and looked at their cheapest offerings - the eMac. The lowest model is unuseable with OS X (only 128M of ram, pfeh! talk about under configured!), so I picked the 'buff' version of the eMac to compare a PC to - my PC configuration would not be allowed to go over $1,099.00 before tax and the like. I made sure that it had (at the very least) every feature that the eMac had, as far as hardware is concerned. Here's what I got, in essence:
-ATI RADEON 9600 PRO 128MB 8X AGP DVI/TV RETAIL (as opposed to the several-generations-old 7500 w/ 32M that the eMac has). -CREATIVE LABS SOUND BLASTER AUDIGY WITH 1394 simply the best -AMD ATHLON XP 2500+ "Barton" 333 FSB PROCESSOR not the fastest out there, but fast enough - and much more powerful than a 1GHz G5 -Samsung 15" LCD Monitor Model 153V-Silver Retail note, it's an LCD, and really performs better than a 17" CRT flatscreen could. The price was comparable to a 19" flatscreen CRT. -CRUCIAL MICRON 512MB 64x64 PC 3200 DDR I only put the highest quality memory in my systems. If you're going to run modern applications on your modern computer, you're going to need a modern amount of RAM. (that goes for anything out there doing real work) -Western Digital 120GB SATA WD1200JD 7,200 RPM 8MB Hard Drive Yes, that's a serial ATA drive, with 8M of cache. The board I picked (Asus A7V600) supports this (as well as a bunch of othre nice things). also note, the eMac uses IDE - old technology! *gasp* -LiteOn DVD-ReWritable Drive MODEL LDW-401S Only the best quality here. Note: this drive also does CDRW/CD-ROM, DVD. -Logitech Premium Optical Wheel Mouse two buttons and a wheel, bitch! None of that crippled shit. -Keyboard we type on these. -Spiff case you put your hardware in it
All this tender loving, for $1,082.99 prior to shipping and handling! Amazing.:-|
I'll also note this system board is RAID 0/1 capable, but I wasn't able to set it up in such a fashion without going over the 1100$ limit. The mainboard also has all the other items onboard.
The only thing this specific configuration doesn't have is 'airport' - 802.11b - but that was available in another board with all the same features the Asus one has, at a slightly lower price. I just like Asus. (It wsa a gigabyte, iirc.)
I also took a look to see what it would cost to spec out a system as close in function to the 1100$ emac, and it ended up costing only around $750. So, it looks to me that, while apple doesn't "serve a $400 market" they do seem to serve the equivilant of a $400 PC market - with a 100% tax on... I don't know what. Trendyness, aesthetic, or elitism, I guess.
As for your claims sa for PCs not "coming with squat for development", that's a fair enough arguement. If you put windows on the PC. Seems all linux distributions work just fine on such a configuration, though.
Ok, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're terminally ill with cancer, and you can't get on the list - couldn't you theoretically infect yourself? This virus occurs naturlaly, and most people have had it at some piont in their lives. It lives (apparently) in dank conditions, like shallow pools of water, sewers, and the like. It can be gotten via the respatory system, which means it's likely an aeresol, correct? So, just go bogging somewhere.
As far as the virus itself is concerned, I find it interesting that the virus exists in situations of unclean water. Think about that - water cleanses things, when it's good, clean water. Water is an antitoxidant. Cancer is caused (largely) by toxidants and other such malodies, such as unhealthy living conditions.
I wonder if we would have such a cancer problem in the modern world if we were to stop filtering our water and zapping it with toxins such as chlorine. Maybe all those squirmies are supposed to be there. Seems hard to believe something so specific and logically abstracted could be coincidence.
No, the medical "community" is much more concerned with "how will this effect our financial bottom line? what of the millions invested in the current 'medicines' we have, which do not work, and provide our golden lifestyles?" than "what about the sick and dying".
It's one main reason why 'alternative medicine" has been so slowly accepted. However, people (individuals) have caught on, and a movement has started to help educated the masses.
Public Pub"lic, n. The general body of mankind, or of a nation, state, or community; the people, indefinitely; as, the American public; also, a particular body or aggregation of people; as, an author's public.
Domain Do*main", n. The territory over which dominion or authority is exerted; the possessions of a sovereign or commonwealth, or the like. Also used figuratively.
So... figuratively speaking, yes, GPL is public domain. Sod off.:)
My ISP, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that blocking ICMP (as well as a bunch of other things) is the way to go. They think that providing such 'protection' services will help prevent trogans and hackers. Meanwhile, traceroute and ping do not work. Interesting, because since tehy started their lovely protection racket, the service has gone to utter shit, and I am unable to even tell -how- bad it is. Many times the latency is so bad I'm unable to ssh to remote hosts at all. The connection goes down at least 10 times a day. Etc.
Apparently, though, the ICMP protocol suite is a "business class" service. Wish I didn't sign a year long contract with them 2 months prior to this whole scenario (spurred on by blaster), when they were the best service in the area.:-/
I don't know what Kudzu (or budzu) is, but I do know that what you hold dear is already a reality: pot is considered an insideous weed - thus the term "ditch weed". It grows on it's own accord all throughout the midwest. It's obscenely easy to cultivate. Etc. etc.
It isn't the nicotine that causes cancer (IIRC) in cigarettes, it's the tar in the lungs, to the greatest degree. Lip cancer (from chew) is predominantly caused by the other things in the chew (such as draino-type chemicals and fiberglass) that agitate the skin over a long period of time.
It's good to hear that the people running google have as much practical business sense about them as the people running the machines have technical sense. This is how things should be done - don't put your entire worth out there on the market for investors to decide, hold back and prove your company worth through your product.
You have apparently never seen a system infected with gator and other spyware. I saw a machine several weeks ago that was so incredibly bogged down with gator and ilk that it was literally unuseable - there were so many popups that the user was unable to click on the windows he wsa trying to use, so many popups were occuring. The 2GHz tbird w/ 512M was running at a snail's pace. I don't even want to know how he got so much spyware installed on his system.
It looks like the zeros win again!... hey, is that supposed to illustrate something?
Re:You Know, We Don't All Sit In Office Buildings.
on
Send in the Nasal Rangers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This is likely, IMO, a much more economically viable investment than olfactory testing (which is a relatively impractical and elitist technology, at best). With the implimentation of the devices in the link above, people won't have to worry about the odors, anyway - or electricity.
As far as the intense nature of ranching and animal biproducts, I can personally attest to their vile nature. Cattle waste is by far a lesser offender than swine biproducts, however. Even human waste pales in comparrision to the foulness of swine biproducts.
Out here, in South Dakota, there are large hog barns spotted across the state. Many of them belong to Hutterite colonies (somewhat like a modern-agriculture, German version of the Amish people). Some are commercially run. All of them are the foulest thing you could imagine. They stink up the country for tens of miles in the direction of the wind - which, of course, varies in direction. People hate the things. Even in my old town, where there was a hog processing plant on the outskirts of town, and maybe 150 hogs a day passed through (just guessing, but I seem to recall such a statistic), there was massive stench - and these facilities were scoured daily, and had no perminant storage for the swine, so there wsan't any sort of waste storage concerns.
Your typical hog barn consists of a very sturdy, sterile barn stretching a couple hundred feet. Intense regulation is done to make sure nobody brings in any viruses or sicknesses, because pigs are incredibly sensitive to such things. Pens are washed out several times a day, etc. And yet the inside still stinks (done a little work for my dad, who as an engineer out here, has dealings with these folks from time to time for design purposes).
Then, there is a large pit in the ground several hundred feet away. In this pit, there is usually something that looks like bubbling mud. However, it's not. It's pig shit. Lots, and lots of it. There is enough methane and other such gasses coming from this pool to power a smallish town (a couple thousand?) I've heard, if it were to be harnessed in a fermentor. However, it isn't. They switch between two pools of shit over time, fill one up, go to the next, and let the first one rot off - let all the toxins essentially biodegrade and ferment out (IIRC, there is usually a very thick liner underneath these pools to prevent toxic waste leakage - seriously). Then, once one of hte pools has reached a certain PH, it can be sold for fertilizer, where it is deluted with water and spread on fields (being as it's still too toxic for straight application). I might also add that the toxins in an unfermented batch of this soup are strong enough to kill a man in a matter of minutes, if he were to fall in. There's be no hope in even trying to save them.
The actual strength of the odor is kind of hard to describe, since the odor is actually physically painful, even at a relative distance (half a mile or so?). It will burn your nostrils, all the moreso if you have sensitive skin or other such traits as a strong sense of smell. The whole process that occurs in the shit pools is mostly anoxidous. If any of you are familiar with with composting your own garbage, you've likely run into situations where you didn't turn the compost soon enough, and you ended up with obscenely foul white, yellow, or blue fungus growing between the layers - possibly a bad thing, because that's where things like anthrax like to breed. At any rate, the odor is similar to that, except that in this case, it's not things like rotting leaves, grass, eggshells, bannana peels, or apple rinds - it's pig shit. Pigs stink, and pig shit stinks, innordinately, even before fermentation. That's as close as I can get to describing it.
Needless to say, soething needs to be done about the stench of such facilities (as well as the feeble odor of cattle facilities). Harvesting the methane and other things to power local small communities would, in my opinion, be a very
If unequal application of the GPL means the GPL is invalid, would this not mean that any EULA or other license that is not equally enforced is invalid as well?
Yes, that is what I did. It's a fairly negligable upgrade if you do it properly; that is, install debian woody, and then immidiately thereafter, do an apt-get dist-upgrade, so that you're not downloading packages twice. I think that would take about 20M - 25M of redundant space. Additionally, I'm fairly certain there are debian sid ISOs and the like available via debian's site, linked externally.
As far as debian being so many disks, I've got no experience with that. Whether being on dialup or broadband, I've always just apt-get installed what I've needed. I'm fairly certain you can get nearly every package you'll ever need on the first 2 disks of debian, but being as debian has damned near everything, there are extra disks.
Good job being open minded! Let's just assume that they're hiding something, because they're doing something that might possibly be used to hide evidence!.... what does that sound like?
That's actually valid in my book. Were I in your situation, I might find myself doing the same. Mandrake and RedHat are indeed crud when it comes to actually using a distro. When I first got into linux, I tried DOSLinux. Quite a bit higher learning curve involved there, compared to redhat at the time. Ended up getting it on my 386 laptop, and experimented with it until I was satisfied, and then put redhat on my main system. Wasn't long until I'd moved onto better things.
As far as dialup is concerned, I ran debian sid on my p133 laptop two summers ago, and just did the updates overnight.:) It's new enough for me, and really, you don't need to do an update daily or anything like that. I simply did an update once or twice a week (if that), and everything was fine.
My post was mainly in contest to those that trumpet slack like it's the return of Christ. Glad
I've met people like you before. They've never had to use linux in a professional capacity before. Slackware takes time, and time is money.
First off, Slackware does not "just work", and it is inefficient - you said so yourself: Package system? Who needs one. Build from source. The slackware packaging programs are crap. There are precious few scenarios where you need a different compile-time option, additionally, so compiling things is out the picture in terms of practicality of efficiency. I'm not sure if you knew this or not but the definition of 'efficiency' is "producing results, actively operative; not slack (emphasis mine) or incapable." I think that speaks for itself, but it seems I need to elaborate for you. Slackware is, by very definition, inefficient. Building your own packages when it's unnecessary is inefficient, yes (and no, you do not get a significant performance increase by doing so).
The standards I speak of are LSB standards. The bugs I speak of are in the design of the system: it encourages slackness in updating critical components due to the time involvement required. Don't think that's a bug? Then maybe "design flaw" is more apt. I know of quite a few people that run slack on multiple computers who do not have the time or motivation to constantly be updating them. Thus, as a result, they remain unpatched. Version control would be nice, here.
Now, your arguement for using slack as a learning tool (in the 'geek-ness' of chasing down deps, and the like) is valid and true, and I agree with you on that. I've learned quite a bit from doing such things myself, as well as doing a little LFS and various other things. But that's where it stops. It's impractical to constantly do those things. Once I understood how things work, and the concepts behind them, I found out there was a better way to do things. Debian might not be 'best of breed' but it does things well, and it does them susinctly. Hopefully you'll get past your fledgeling slackware stage like the rest of us, and figure these things out on your own.
As far as my initial questions, they were mainly intended as rhetoric. I know -why- people start using slack nowadays. It's because it's trendy, and there's an elitist culture built up around slack. Just join any slack IRC channel and you'll see what I mean.
When you grow up a little bit, you'll realize that there are things that are more important than the geekyness of your operating system. Things like spending time with your family. Showing affection towards those you love. Even something as banal as mowing the lawn or raking the leaves. Or maybe even doing something important, as actually writing code or being productive.
Vector has always been built upon the Slack *bzzzzzztttt - white noise*
Could someone please explain to me why people still use slackware? It's un-standard, inefficient, and has many more bugs than, say, gentoo or debian. What is people's reasoning, when gentoo does the whole "set every option myself" feature, plus it has an artful, well designed package manager and other things that people have grown to expect in modern distributions. Slackware has none of these. (Please note, I said an artful, well designed package manager.)
I'm not being critical of slackware, persay, or even the people that have been using slackware since the Beginning (unless they're vehminent slackware zealots, in which case they're likely not too clued), because that's what they're used to, and that's fine. I'm mainly being critical of the idea that slackware should be migrated to from another distro, or picked up as an initial distro, and asking the question, "How is it that slackware continues to have user momentum?" Is it that it has a 'cool name', and that appeals to the hax0r variety?
So as to remain fully on topic, I wonder how slack and vector compare against other distributions? That would have been a more appropriate benchmark, IMO, and worth the effort if effort is going to be spent on such an endeavor at all.
I'm still at a loss - how is lossy analog via FM radio or television still any different than lossy digital music, such as MP3s? Is it simply an issue of availability that makes MP3s so detestable by the MPAA?
No, because that would be MS achnowledging that there's something out there besides Windows for PC, which most people currently are unaware of. Windows == PC already.
Slashdot Mirror
Banner ads are still quite effective, if they're done right. Look at (for instance) penny-arcade or PvP Online - they're both good examples of sites that use advertising effectively. I've gone to PvP a couple times and noticed they had ads drawn by the comic's artist. I looked at them, and clicked through. Sometimes, on PA, I'll frequently just click on an add because it's interesting-looking - they're often designed around the site's theme, and with the interests of the viewers in mind: gadgets, comics, games, and other things we geeks like.
Additionally, PA suppliments this ad income with things like tshirts, a hillarious comic, writeups, a tip jar, and the like. As near as I can tell, these guys live off the site.
Yes, it was a "build your own system", which, if it were a component-for-component, identical type comparision, I would agree. However, it was not - notice the specs I listed as being significantly more powerful, of higher capacity, and better craftmanship than what apple tends to ship. I did that to factor in for all the shortcomings you mention.
Had I spec'd out an identical system, it would have been roughly 600$. If that. That would leave me $500 for 'support' (returning parts, which I've rarely needed to do, let alone twice in a system), OS install time, and the picking of parts. Figure 20 minutes to pick all the parts (roughly the time involved to spec out a mac for most people, I imagine - should I include that price on the mac figure as well?), unpacking the hardware (let's say an hour - compared to, say, 20 minutes to unwrap a mac and plug it in, get all your warranties in order) and the installation of the OS and various components (generally takes me under 30 minutes for everything - linux, not windows). Should I include the time/cost of installing all the extra applications on the eMac to the apple figure as well? Roughly, that's an hour (hell, let's say an hour and a half) of my time.
As far as managing support from 15 vendors (15, where do you ge that number? I don't recall listing 15 compenents up above. I htink you should get your head checked), that's not necessary. Something breaks, get a new one. There's a fat wad of cash left over from the money saved by not buying an apple/dell. Or: returning hte broken component just as you would to apple - keep your warranty information in a single file. Memory went bad? Mail it back to crucial - lifetime warranty. Drive died? Mail it back to WD, they'll replace it. I've very rarely seen anyhting other than those things malfunction on a system.
As far as the "downsizing the monitor" - I didn't. I susbstituted a 15" LCD for a 17" CRT. The viewable area is just as similar as a comparision between two 17" CRTs. Besides, did you not read that the 15" LCD was roughly the same price as a 19" CRT? 17" 19", buddy, so you're still dead in the water there.
VoIP isn't next generation; it's a temporary situation until landlines are phased out more completely.
Everyone I know uses a cell phone nearly exclusively. As soon as international calls are part of the plan at a free/economical rate, landlines/long distance (and voip) are completely done for.
No, you got that wrong. :)
Linux and MacOS X are based on 30-year old technology.
Windows XP -is- 30 year old technology with new paint and a bigger engine.
Heh, I know you're a troll, but just to prove your little venimous ass wrong, I went ahead and stopped by newegg.com and spec'd out a fairly top of the line PC system for myself. I also went over to the apple site and looked at their cheapest offerings - the eMac. The lowest model is unuseable with OS X (only 128M of ram, pfeh! talk about under configured!), so I picked the 'buff' version of the eMac to compare a PC to - my PC configuration would not be allowed to go over $1,099.00 before tax and the like. I made sure that it had (at the very least) every feature that the eMac had, as far as hardware is concerned. Here's what I got, in essence:
:-|
-ATI RADEON 9600 PRO 128MB 8X AGP DVI/TV RETAIL (as opposed to the several-generations-old 7500 w/ 32M that the eMac has).
-CREATIVE LABS SOUND BLASTER AUDIGY WITH 1394 simply the best
-AMD ATHLON XP 2500+ "Barton" 333 FSB PROCESSOR not the fastest out there, but fast enough - and much more powerful than a 1GHz G5
-Samsung 15" LCD Monitor Model 153V-Silver Retail note, it's an LCD, and really performs better than a 17" CRT flatscreen could. The price was comparable to a 19" flatscreen CRT.
-CRUCIAL MICRON 512MB 64x64 PC 3200 DDR I only put the highest quality memory in my systems. If you're going to run modern applications on your modern computer, you're going to need a modern amount of RAM. (that goes for anything out there doing real work)
-Western Digital 120GB SATA WD1200JD 7,200 RPM 8MB Hard Drive Yes, that's a serial ATA drive, with 8M of cache. The board I picked (Asus A7V600) supports this (as well as a bunch of othre nice things). also note, the eMac uses IDE - old technology! *gasp*
-LiteOn DVD-ReWritable Drive MODEL LDW-401S Only the best quality here. Note: this drive also does CDRW/CD-ROM, DVD.
-Logitech Premium Optical Wheel Mouse two buttons and a wheel, bitch! None of that crippled shit.
-Keyboard we type on these.
-Spiff case you put your hardware in it
All this tender loving, for $1,082.99 prior to shipping and handling! Amazing.
I'll also note this system board is RAID 0/1 capable, but I wasn't able to set it up in such a fashion without going over the 1100$ limit. The mainboard also has all the other items onboard.
The only thing this specific configuration doesn't have is 'airport' - 802.11b - but that was available in another board with all the same features the Asus one has, at a slightly lower price. I just like Asus. (It wsa a gigabyte, iirc.)
I also took a look to see what it would cost to spec out a system as close in function to the 1100$ emac, and it ended up costing only around $750. So, it looks to me that, while apple doesn't "serve a $400 market" they do seem to serve the equivilant of a $400 PC market - with a 100% tax on... I don't know what. Trendyness, aesthetic, or elitism, I guess.
As for your claims sa for PCs not "coming with squat for development", that's a fair enough arguement. If you put windows on the PC. Seems all linux distributions work just fine on such a configuration, though.
Ok, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're terminally ill with cancer, and you can't get on the list - couldn't you theoretically infect yourself? This virus occurs naturlaly, and most people have had it at some piont in their lives. It lives (apparently) in dank conditions, like shallow pools of water, sewers, and the like. It can be gotten via the respatory system, which means it's likely an aeresol, correct? So, just go bogging somewhere.
As far as the virus itself is concerned, I find it interesting that the virus exists in situations of unclean water. Think about that - water cleanses things, when it's good, clean water. Water is an antitoxidant. Cancer is caused (largely) by toxidants and other such malodies, such as unhealthy living conditions.
I wonder if we would have such a cancer problem in the modern world if we were to stop filtering our water and zapping it with toxins such as chlorine. Maybe all those squirmies are supposed to be there. Seems hard to believe something so specific and logically abstracted could be coincidence.
No, the medical "community" is much more concerned with "how will this effect our financial bottom line? what of the millions invested in the current 'medicines' we have, which do not work, and provide our golden lifestyles?" than "what about the sick and dying".
It's one main reason why 'alternative medicine" has been so slowly accepted. However, people (individuals) have caught on, and a movement has started to help educated the masses.
Public Pub"lic, n. The general body of mankind, or of a nation, state, or community; the people, indefinitely; as, the American public; also, a particular body or aggregation of people; as, an author's public.
:)
Domain Do*main", n. The territory over which dominion or authority is exerted; the possessions of a sovereign or commonwealth, or the like. Also used figuratively.
So... figuratively speaking, yes, GPL is public domain. Sod off.
My ISP, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that blocking ICMP (as well as a bunch of other things) is the way to go. They think that providing such 'protection' services will help prevent trogans and hackers. Meanwhile, traceroute and ping do not work. Interesting, because since tehy started their lovely protection racket, the service has gone to utter shit, and I am unable to even tell -how- bad it is. Many times the latency is so bad I'm unable to ssh to remote hosts at all. The connection goes down at least 10 times a day. Etc.
:-/
Apparently, though, the ICMP protocol suite is a "business class" service. Wish I didn't sign a year long contract with them 2 months prior to this whole scenario (spurred on by blaster), when they were the best service in the area.
I don't know what Kudzu (or budzu) is, but I do know that what you hold dear is already a reality: pot is considered an insideous weed - thus the term "ditch weed". It grows on it's own accord all throughout the midwest. It's obscenely easy to cultivate. Etc. etc.
It isn't the nicotine that causes cancer (IIRC) in cigarettes, it's the tar in the lungs, to the greatest degree. Lip cancer (from chew) is predominantly caused by the other things in the chew (such as draino-type chemicals and fiberglass) that agitate the skin over a long period of time.
It's good to hear that the people running google have as much practical business sense about them as the people running the machines have technical sense. This is how things should be done - don't put your entire worth out there on the market for investors to decide, hold back and prove your company worth through your product.
You have apparently never seen a system infected with gator and other spyware. I saw a machine several weeks ago that was so incredibly bogged down with gator and ilk that it was literally unuseable - there were so many popups that the user was unable to click on the windows he wsa trying to use, so many popups were occuring. The 2GHz tbird w/ 512M was running at a snail's pace. I don't even want to know how he got so much spyware installed on his system.
It looks like the zeros win again! ... hey, is that supposed to illustrate something?
This is likely, IMO, a much more economically viable investment than olfactory testing (which is a relatively impractical and elitist technology, at best). With the implimentation of the devices in the link above, people won't have to worry about the odors, anyway - or electricity.
As far as the intense nature of ranching and animal biproducts, I can personally attest to their vile nature. Cattle waste is by far a lesser offender than swine biproducts, however. Even human waste pales in comparrision to the foulness of swine biproducts.
Out here, in South Dakota, there are large hog barns spotted across the state. Many of them belong to Hutterite colonies (somewhat like a modern-agriculture, German version of the Amish people). Some are commercially run. All of them are the foulest thing you could imagine. They stink up the country for tens of miles in the direction of the wind - which, of course, varies in direction. People hate the things. Even in my old town, where there was a hog processing plant on the outskirts of town, and maybe 150 hogs a day passed through (just guessing, but I seem to recall such a statistic), there was massive stench - and these facilities were scoured daily, and had no perminant storage for the swine, so there wsan't any sort of waste storage concerns.
Your typical hog barn consists of a very sturdy, sterile barn stretching a couple hundred feet. Intense regulation is done to make sure nobody brings in any viruses or sicknesses, because pigs are incredibly sensitive to such things. Pens are washed out several times a day, etc. And yet the inside still stinks (done a little work for my dad, who as an engineer out here, has dealings with these folks from time to time for design purposes).
Then, there is a large pit in the ground several hundred feet away. In this pit, there is usually something that looks like bubbling mud. However, it's not. It's pig shit. Lots, and lots of it. There is enough methane and other such gasses coming from this pool to power a smallish town (a couple thousand?) I've heard, if it were to be harnessed in a fermentor. However, it isn't. They switch between two pools of shit over time, fill one up, go to the next, and let the first one rot off - let all the toxins essentially biodegrade and ferment out (IIRC, there is usually a very thick liner underneath these pools to prevent toxic waste leakage - seriously). Then, once one of hte pools has reached a certain PH, it can be sold for fertilizer, where it is deluted with water and spread on fields (being as it's still too toxic for straight application). I might also add that the toxins in an unfermented batch of this soup are strong enough to kill a man in a matter of minutes, if he were to fall in. There's be no hope in even trying to save them.
The actual strength of the odor is kind of hard to describe, since the odor is actually physically painful, even at a relative distance (half a mile or so?). It will burn your nostrils, all the moreso if you have sensitive skin or other such traits as a strong sense of smell. The whole process that occurs in the shit pools is mostly anoxidous. If any of you are familiar with with composting your own garbage, you've likely run into situations where you didn't turn the compost soon enough, and you ended up with obscenely foul white, yellow, or blue fungus growing between the layers - possibly a bad thing, because that's where things like anthrax like to breed. At any rate, the odor is similar to that, except that in this case, it's not things like rotting leaves, grass, eggshells, bannana peels, or apple rinds - it's pig shit. Pigs stink, and pig shit stinks, innordinately, even before fermentation. That's as close as I can get to describing it.
Needless to say, soething needs to be done about the stench of such facilities (as well as the feeble odor of cattle facilities). Harvesting the methane and other things to power local small communities would, in my opinion, be a very
If unequal application of the GPL means the GPL is invalid, would this not mean that any EULA or other license that is not equally enforced is invalid as well?
I'm thinking MS, SCO, etc. here.
I thought I should mention that the initial install was a base install (netinst), and by no means was it a full install.
hopefully you'll see this, Mr. AC...
Yes, that is what I did. It's a fairly negligable upgrade if you do it properly; that is, install debian woody, and then immidiately thereafter, do an apt-get dist-upgrade, so that you're not downloading packages twice. I think that would take about 20M - 25M of redundant space. Additionally, I'm fairly certain there are debian sid ISOs and the like available via debian's site, linked externally.
As far as debian being so many disks, I've got no experience with that. Whether being on dialup or broadband, I've always just apt-get installed what I've needed. I'm fairly certain you can get nearly every package you'll ever need on the first 2 disks of debian, but being as debian has damned near everything, there are extra disks.
Good job being open minded! Let's just assume that they're hiding something, because they're doing something that might possibly be used to hide evidence! .... what does that sound like?
That's actually valid in my book. Were I in your situation, I might find myself doing the same. Mandrake and RedHat are indeed crud when it comes to actually using a distro. When I first got into linux, I tried DOSLinux. Quite a bit higher learning curve involved there, compared to redhat at the time. Ended up getting it on my 386 laptop, and experimented with it until I was satisfied, and then put redhat on my main system. Wasn't long until I'd moved onto better things.
:) It's new enough for me, and really, you don't need to do an update daily or anything like that. I simply did an update once or twice a week (if that), and everything was fine.
As far as dialup is concerned, I ran debian sid on my p133 laptop two summers ago, and just did the updates overnight.
My post was mainly in contest to those that trumpet slack like it's the return of Christ. Glad
I've met people like you before. They've never had to use linux in a professional capacity before. Slackware takes time, and time is money.
First off, Slackware does not "just work", and it is inefficient - you said so yourself: Package system? Who needs one. Build from source. The slackware packaging programs are crap. There are precious few scenarios where you need a different compile-time option, additionally, so compiling things is out the picture in terms of practicality of efficiency. I'm not sure if you knew this or not but the definition of 'efficiency' is "producing results, actively operative; not slack (emphasis mine) or incapable." I think that speaks for itself, but it seems I need to elaborate for you. Slackware is, by very definition, inefficient. Building your own packages when it's unnecessary is inefficient, yes (and no, you do not get a significant performance increase by doing so).
The standards I speak of are LSB standards. The bugs I speak of are in the design of the system: it encourages slackness in updating critical components due to the time involvement required. Don't think that's a bug? Then maybe "design flaw" is more apt. I know of quite a few people that run slack on multiple computers who do not have the time or motivation to constantly be updating them. Thus, as a result, they remain unpatched. Version control would be nice, here.
Now, your arguement for using slack as a learning tool (in the 'geek-ness' of chasing down deps, and the like) is valid and true, and I agree with you on that. I've learned quite a bit from doing such things myself, as well as doing a little LFS and various other things. But that's where it stops. It's impractical to constantly do those things. Once I understood how things work, and the concepts behind them, I found out there was a better way to do things. Debian might not be 'best of breed' but it does things well, and it does them susinctly. Hopefully you'll get past your fledgeling slackware stage like the rest of us, and figure these things out on your own.
As far as my initial questions, they were mainly intended as rhetoric. I know -why- people start using slack nowadays. It's because it's trendy, and there's an elitist culture built up around slack. Just join any slack IRC channel and you'll see what I mean.
When you grow up a little bit, you'll realize that there are things that are more important than the geekyness of your operating system. Things like spending time with your family. Showing affection towards those you love. Even something as banal as mowing the lawn or raking the leaves. Or maybe even doing something important, as actually writing code or being productive.
Vector has always been built upon the Slack *bzzzzzztttt - white noise*
Could someone please explain to me why people still use slackware? It's un-standard, inefficient, and has many more bugs than, say, gentoo or debian. What is people's reasoning, when gentoo does the whole "set every option myself" feature, plus it has an artful, well designed package manager and other things that people have grown to expect in modern distributions. Slackware has none of these. (Please note, I said an artful, well designed package manager.)
I'm not being critical of slackware, persay, or even the people that have been using slackware since the Beginning (unless they're vehminent slackware zealots, in which case they're likely not too clued), because that's what they're used to, and that's fine. I'm mainly being critical of the idea that slackware should be migrated to from another distro, or picked up as an initial distro, and asking the question, "How is it that slackware continues to have user momentum?" Is it that it has a 'cool name', and that appeals to the hax0r variety?
So as to remain fully on topic, I wonder how slack and vector compare against other distributions? That would have been a more appropriate benchmark, IMO, and worth the effort if effort is going to be spent on such an endeavor at all.
I'm still at a loss - how is lossy analog via FM radio or television still any different than lossy digital music, such as MP3s? Is it simply an issue of availability that makes MP3s so detestable by the MPAA?
haha!
:P
Mod this up!
This is the kind of thing I imagine seeing on PA.
No, because that would be MS achnowledging that there's something out there besides Windows for PC, which most people currently are unaware of. Windows == PC already.