Re:I'm sure I'll get flamed for this, but...
on
Alan Cox on a Chip
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· Score: 1
I don't know if you realize it or not, but there is no way to even get a screenshot of a BSOD. It's not possible. Thus, such things must be artistically reproduced. That means an extended period of time on the part of an individual. It's a fairly lengthy process - I've made one before. To get it looking realistically is another issue entirely.
What very likely happened was the individual came through and simply relabeled the image to update the spoof page to make it 'modern' so as to increase the humor...
No, I believe he's claiming Windows doesn't perform as well as Linux. Pay closer attention.
Also note that user friendlyness != technical superiority or helpfulness. User friendly = Joe Idiot can sit down and start doing basic things without RTFMing. Linux is not 'user' friendly. It's operator friendly. Big freakin' difference.
Heh, interesting you should mention that! I was just looking back for the BadRAM page yesterday, since I've got a 256 meg PC133 DIMM which has bad addressing around 700k... hope I can get it working.:)
Don't forget Penny-Arcade! How could you forget PA! *gasp*
*sniff sniff* Still, I feel a great sense of loss and sadness. Nobody seems to have mentioned Bill Waterson, hero of every hyperactive child of the 80's and early 90's. *sniff* Calvin and Hobbes is missed, indeed.
I'm not at all saying WinCE is better, (however, version 3.0 of this curse isn't all that bad anymore), but it does have a lot of things PalmOS lacks.
I'd much prefer having a PalmV or TGRPro, but an iPAQ would be quite nice as well. This new device does, however appeal - and if it has a decent handwriting/input mechanism, I'm going to gobble it up. It has some quite impressive hardware features - Yoppy looks equally yummy.
If you're going to correct me, you should probably try a little harder at accuracy.
I said that WinCE takes many of the features of Win95 and shoves them up the PDA's butt. Being that NT has a nearly identical GUI API, and was itself based off of Win95 in that respect, I was correct. I said nothing about actual implimentation.
You cannot simply take the current standard APIs for desktop Linux application development (and there are several) and put
them on a PDA. You need handwriting recogniation or some similar data input method, you need graphics output, you need a
flash-memory file system. All this in a device that has little memory to start with.
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I know I'm not, but what the heck...), but this was the procedure that was used to create WindowsCE. Take Windows 95-like functions and shove them up the arse of the PDA as hard as you can. Granted, they were quite modified, but they were still quite similar.
The same applies here. Except, in this case, there might be handwritting recognition.
Also note how it would be quite easy to get mucho-memory in there. I don't figure it would be too terribly difficult to get 128 megs in there relatively economically. That's plenty of space for pretty much anything you'd want on such a device.
I'm the assistant UNIX sysadmin on my campus. I got the job at the beginning of this semester. Currently, I don't have many responsibilities that can be spoken of, really. I've not been issued an account by the head technologist, and I'm just getting aquanted to how the network is run ATM.
The guy who is the current UNIX sysadmin is a Junior who has been doing it since his freshman year as well. He was just thrust into the position, but we have different superiors now, and they're taking more precautions concerning security. It's somewhat frustrating, since someone being hired from outside would more than likely not get restricted in such a way.
Hiring students for such positions saves them a lot of money too. Students on my campus are limited to 17 hours worth of paid work for student jobs. This includes the sysadmin. The current sysadmin easily works over that.
...or someone who simply thinks it's nuts how people will go to the greatest extents they can imagine to get karma, and then goes on to prove that they're quite wrong indeed in their 'insight':)
I'll agree with you on part on that first point. It is a shame that the you think the Internet isn't browsable with a 10 year old computer. And as far as modern software? w3m has some pretty modern features. It seems to work just fine for a lot of people.
You're pardoned for feeling insulted. I do realize that is a natural response. I'll stifle my urge to puke, if you can manage to hold back your urge to return insult.
You don't seem to grasp the fact that simply using MS products is half the problem. That has a -10 automatic karma penalty. You should know better than that. This is slashdot.
Understand your point of view - sure. Tolerate, heck no. I do not like seeing people sell their souls to the devil, even if it's your soul. I'll forgive you for your ignorance of the topic at hand, because it is obvious that you have lost your will to chose for yourself.
Relax, I'm just BOFHing.:) You took the bait and swallowed hard.
I thought I would take this most opportune time in my life to point out a dreadful inconsistency in your post. Oh dear.
You mention that they can't upgrade their systems for *gasp* 3 years. A phenominal amount of time nowadays, especially in the computer industry. Those poor, oppressed, Katzian children, trying to geek on such old, depreciated systems. (Something must be done to fight the oppresion of geeks! Brothers, take arms!)
You also mention a bastardized form of software you call "Windows 95" (who in their right mind still runs this thing? Even Win98 beats the tar out of it, in pretty much every category.) How you would A) get ahold of such software - since it isn't exactly readily available - and B) pay for such software - after all, you have no funds - is beyond even the keenest logic. Of course, you wouldn't simply copy a single original disk. That's horridly immoral - everyone knows software has to be paid through the rear for.
Also, I'm relatively sure that your comparision of the modern distro to 6 year old software is humorous at best, but most likely akin to a pickup truck full of horse apples. Actually, I'll bet on it. But onto what I was saying.
Comparing a recent version of Redhat, SuSE (or whatever those Germans call it), or Mandrake to Windows 95 is nuts. It's more easily compared to Windows 2000 in all categories, namely due to the fermentation and it's year of origin, but also due to stability and code maturity. You'd be best to compare, what, RedHat 4.2? I don't even know what came out at that time. Take that, slap in a basic browser such as Netscape or maybe even Mozilla, and let it be. I've seen it work before on 'such horribly slow systems' before, for months on end. There's one such box on my campus that I know of.
As far as whe whole situation of 'standard browsers'... dude, that kind of drug abuse isn't good for your health. As a matter of fact, it's quite bad, and quite comparable to electocutional shock. You do realize, don't you, that MS IE symbolizes everything that is Bad and Wrong? This, of course, symbolizes everything that is NonStandard and ALoadOfHorseApples. This whole deal wreaks of a potential MS sponsorship or funding of the WSB in exchange for some one-ups or various other perverse favors.
I'm not too terribly sure why this is such a big deal - I know of people who have been doing this for quite a while, with notably much less hastle via xine.
I may be ignorant of how things work concerning such things, but wouldn't it be quite feasable to simply have parallel versions of glibc and various other libraries, and just have the application link to that specific version? Such as/usr/i586-glibc22-linux,/usr/i586-glibc20-linux, and so forth? I'd think this would simply things quite quickly. There would be a system default, something the user could specify - symlinking/usr/glibc or whatever to the user's prefered version for compilation situations. Otherwise, specific applications could call up whichever version they needed via directory numbers, or possibly a registry somewhere - I'm not aware if one exists or not. However, I think it would be easily done by simply standardizing such directory names.
The whole 'Fall of the Gates,' so to speak, is very well depictive of what is called God complex. People in power are conditioned by continued success and inpenetratability that they are, indeed, invulnerable, and that nothing anyone does could possibly have any effect on them.
Katz hit upon Clinton, Nixon, and a few others. However, these are by far not the best examples. Tribal leaders, European kings and queens of the Middle Ages, and various other kingdom leaders throughout time - most specifically leaders of monarchs - have exhibbited such trains. These leaders, or powerful people, have errected huge monuments to themselves - the pyramids being a prime example of such.
It's not a terribly new thing. People of great stature who are looked to as leaders and heros fall into corruption more times than not. Look at Hollywood - that place is notocious for having messed up people.
Let's see, at about 50$ a license, we have a decent starting point. Now, multiply that by every Windows machine in corporate America. Since I have no idea how many that is, let's say around 100 thousand, to keep it on the small side. Multiply 100 thousand by 50, and we have ourselves 5 million.
Now, consider the price of subscriptions to the update service.
Now, multiply that a couple times to add in corporate 'efficiency' and various other costs that a company can easily aquire, such as 'employee benefits' for finding such a good, cheap price on a virus solution.
Now, multiply the sum by 3 or so, since occasionally a new virus will get through, and erase a weeks worth of work from an engineer's drive which he hasn't backed up. At around 30$ an hour, 50 hours a week.
Now, considering that the amount of damage is probably multi-layerd, as well as overexagerated, we can then probably safely multiply that result by two as well.
While I think this is all fine and dandy, and these are features which I can see myself making full use of, I stop and question myself, "Why now?"
I say this, because to me, this seems like making the iceing before you make the cake. I don't know about everyone else, but XFree86 leaks like crazy. the 3.3.x strain eventually became relatively non-leaky, but was quite slow.
Now, though, we've got the 4.0.x stuff, which is fast(er), but leaks horribly. I'm not the only one I know who has to restart the beast at least once every couple days. This is beyond inconvinient - if I'm running half a dozen instances of a GUI program that have data I can't easily save and haven't gotten to yet (netscape/mozilla, for instance), I do not want to shut down X to clear up cache/swap. Yet, I know it needs to be done, because the system is getting bogged down. It makes UN*X desktops look really bad from any perspective - linux, unix and the like are supposed to be stable and bug-free. X is a huge component, and I'd wager one of the more widely used pieces of software in the OSS world.
This should be a focus point, and a matter of concern, not integrating CLI and GUI usability. That will follow once all the CLI nazis (sorry guys) start using the (future) more dependable, stable, less memory intensive X.
That's not 'empty space.' That land has great value - some would argue even more than the richest appartment in NYC, or wherever else you can think of. Man destroys so incredibly much through self rightiousness without thinking what is of true 'value.'
A hundred years from now, when the earth's human population is sky-high, and there are more of us than there are roaches and rats, that 'empty space' might be all that's left for people to go to in order to get away from the insanity of constant, close space contact with other humans.
Living in a dorm, I find such close-space contact near traumatic. It really takes a hit on my performance as a student and a human being. If you're like me, such a society would be unlivable, and would quickly drive you to insanity. (At least there are some cliffs nearby where I can get away from it all and relax every once in a while.)
While magnificant skyscrapers are quite beautiful in their own way, they still can't compare with the natural beauty of millions of differently shaped and sized trees, all (mostly) unharmed by humans.
My school encourages students to inform the 'authorities' concerning underage drinking. While this is an attempt to 'uphold the law' and such, here's my gripe.
What if, say, playing video games were made criminal? Or, if not made criminal, the "Under 17" and such ratings were made legally binding, in order to 'protect our youth' or some other propaganda? What about something like Mortal Combat 3 (for the lack of a better example in my mind) which is MA21?
There's a project called Arianne RPG here that seems like it will be similar, and is planning to have a lot of safegaurds built into it in order to prevent cheating. This project doesn't appear to be as far along, but the finished game will very likely be much more complex as well as have more of a 'realistic' feel to it, not just a hack and slash game. Players will not gain experience through killing, the experience is gained by use of their skills, etc. Thus, the experience by killing someone would be no more than practicing, etc and thus not encourage PK's. That will cut down on the cheating greatly. Other anti-cheating features are being added as well... but too much for me to talk about here.:) Check the site, and please, if you're interested in helping, give this project a hand.:) It seems to promise more than the project mentioned here on/.
Being that OS X is using BSD as a component, I think that this perpetual stupidity of Apple promote an aditional clause to be added to all open source and similar licenses:
Any company that choses to use this software in programs destined for commercial sale may not behave in a manner that makes half the industry want to shove bricks up their ass.
Slashdot Mirror
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CAIMLAS
What very likely happened was the individual came through and simply relabeled the image to update the spoof page to make it 'modern' so as to increase the humor...
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CAIMLAS
Also note that user friendlyness != technical superiority or helpfulness. User friendly = Joe Idiot can sit down and start doing basic things without RTFMing. Linux is not 'user' friendly. It's operator friendly. Big freakin' difference.
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CAIMLAS
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CAIMLAS
*sniff sniff* Still, I feel a great sense of loss and sadness. Nobody seems to have mentioned Bill Waterson, hero of every hyperactive child of the 80's and early 90's. *sniff* Calvin and Hobbes is missed, indeed.
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CAIMLAS
I'm not at all saying WinCE is better, (however, version 3.0 of this curse isn't all that bad anymore), but it does have a lot of things PalmOS lacks.
I'd much prefer having a PalmV or TGRPro, but an iPAQ would be quite nice as well. This new device does, however appeal - and if it has a decent handwriting/input mechanism, I'm going to gobble it up. It has some quite impressive hardware features - Yoppy looks equally yummy.
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CAIMLAS
I said that WinCE takes many of the features of Win95 and shoves them up the PDA's butt. Being that NT has a nearly identical GUI API, and was itself based off of Win95 in that respect, I was correct. I said nothing about actual implimentation.
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CAIMLAS
The same applies here. Except, in this case, there might be handwritting recognition.
Also note how it would be quite easy to get mucho-memory in there. I don't figure it would be too terribly difficult to get 128 megs in there relatively economically. That's plenty of space for pretty much anything you'd want on such a device.
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CAIMLAS
The guy who is the current UNIX sysadmin is a Junior who has been doing it since his freshman year as well. He was just thrust into the position, but we have different superiors now, and they're taking more precautions concerning security. It's somewhat frustrating, since someone being hired from outside would more than likely not get restricted in such a way.
Hiring students for such positions saves them a lot of money too. Students on my campus are limited to 17 hours worth of paid work for student jobs. This includes the sysadmin. The current sysadmin easily works over that.
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CAIMLAS
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CAIMLAS
You're pardoned for feeling insulted. I do realize that is a natural response. I'll stifle my urge to puke, if you can manage to hold back your urge to return insult.
You don't seem to grasp the fact that simply using MS products is half the problem. That has a -10 automatic karma penalty. You should know better than that. This is slashdot.
Understand your point of view - sure. Tolerate, heck no. I do not like seeing people sell their souls to the devil, even if it's your soul. I'll forgive you for your ignorance of the topic at hand, because it is obvious that you have lost your will to chose for yourself.
Relax, I'm just BOFHing. :) You took the bait and swallowed hard.
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CAIMLAS
You mention that they can't upgrade their systems for *gasp* 3 years. A phenominal amount of time nowadays, especially in the computer industry. Those poor, oppressed, Katzian children, trying to geek on such old, depreciated systems. (Something must be done to fight the oppresion of geeks! Brothers, take arms!)
You also mention a bastardized form of software you call "Windows 95" (who in their right mind still runs this thing? Even Win98 beats the tar out of it, in pretty much every category.) How you would A) get ahold of such software - since it isn't exactly readily available - and B) pay for such software - after all, you have no funds - is beyond even the keenest logic. Of course, you wouldn't simply copy a single original disk. That's horridly immoral - everyone knows software has to be paid through the rear for.
Also, I'm relatively sure that your comparision of the modern distro to 6 year old software is humorous at best, but most likely akin to a pickup truck full of horse apples. Actually, I'll bet on it. But onto what I was saying.
Comparing a recent version of Redhat, SuSE (or whatever those Germans call it), or Mandrake to Windows 95 is nuts. It's more easily compared to Windows 2000 in all categories, namely due to the fermentation and it's year of origin, but also due to stability and code maturity. You'd be best to compare, what, RedHat 4.2? I don't even know what came out at that time. Take that, slap in a basic browser such as Netscape or maybe even Mozilla, and let it be. I've seen it work before on 'such horribly slow systems' before, for months on end. There's one such box on my campus that I know of.
As far as whe whole situation of 'standard browsers'... dude, that kind of drug abuse isn't good for your health. As a matter of fact, it's quite bad, and quite comparable to electocutional shock. You do realize, don't you, that MS IE symbolizes everything that is Bad and Wrong? This, of course, symbolizes everything that is NonStandard and ALoadOfHorseApples. This whole deal wreaks of a potential MS sponsorship or funding of the WSB in exchange for some one-ups or various other perverse favors.
When I'm right, I'm right.
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CAIMLAS
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CAIMLAS
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CAIMLAS
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CAIMLAS
I think I'll go do a long-postponed backup. Heh...hehe. heh.
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CAIMLAS
Katz hit upon Clinton, Nixon, and a few others. However, these are by far not the best examples. Tribal leaders, European kings and queens of the Middle Ages, and various other kingdom leaders throughout time - most specifically leaders of monarchs - have exhibbited such trains. These leaders, or powerful people, have errected huge monuments to themselves - the pyramids being a prime example of such.
It's not a terribly new thing. People of great stature who are looked to as leaders and heros fall into corruption more times than not. Look at Hollywood - that place is notocious for having messed up people.
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CAIMLAS
Now, consider the price of subscriptions to the update service.
Now, multiply that a couple times to add in corporate 'efficiency' and various other costs that a company can easily aquire, such as 'employee benefits' for finding such a good, cheap price on a virus solution.
Now, multiply the sum by 3 or so, since occasionally a new virus will get through, and erase a weeks worth of work from an engineer's drive which he hasn't backed up. At around 30$ an hour, 50 hours a week.
Now, considering that the amount of damage is probably multi-layerd, as well as overexagerated, we can then probably safely multiply that result by two as well.
It starts adding up pretty quickly, doesn't it?
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CAIMLAS
I say this, because to me, this seems like making the iceing before you make the cake. I don't know about everyone else, but XFree86 leaks like crazy. the 3.3.x strain eventually became relatively non-leaky, but was quite slow.
Now, though, we've got the 4.0.x stuff, which is fast(er), but leaks horribly. I'm not the only one I know who has to restart the beast at least once every couple days. This is beyond inconvinient - if I'm running half a dozen instances of a GUI program that have data I can't easily save and haven't gotten to yet (netscape/mozilla, for instance), I do not want to shut down X to clear up cache/swap. Yet, I know it needs to be done, because the system is getting bogged down. It makes UN*X desktops look really bad from any perspective - linux, unix and the like are supposed to be stable and bug-free. X is a huge component, and I'd wager one of the more widely used pieces of software in the OSS world.
This should be a focus point, and a matter of concern, not integrating CLI and GUI usability. That will follow once all the CLI nazis (sorry guys) start using the (future) more dependable, stable, less memory intensive X.
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CAIMLAS
Intellectuals? He liked it?
What irony! Urg! Can ya feel it? Can ya feel it?!
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CAIMLAS
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CAIMLAS
A hundred years from now, when the earth's human population is sky-high, and there are more of us than there are roaches and rats, that 'empty space' might be all that's left for people to go to in order to get away from the insanity of constant, close space contact with other humans.
Living in a dorm, I find such close-space contact near traumatic. It really takes a hit on my performance as a student and a human being. If you're like me, such a society would be unlivable, and would quickly drive you to insanity. (At least there are some cliffs nearby where I can get away from it all and relax every once in a while.)
While magnificant skyscrapers are quite beautiful in their own way, they still can't compare with the natural beauty of millions of differently shaped and sized trees, all (mostly) unharmed by humans.
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CAIMLAS
What if, say, playing video games were made criminal? Or, if not made criminal, the "Under 17" and such ratings were made legally binding, in order to 'protect our youth' or some other propaganda? What about something like Mortal Combat 3 (for the lack of a better example in my mind) which is MA21?
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CAIMLAS
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CAIMLAS
Thank you.
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CAIMLAS