1. Well it seems microsoft is getting sued left right and centre. The problem is patents in general not the distro. 2. Not the fault of OSS. 3. You're telling me Gnome or KDE is hard to use?... sure ok. Most distros boot into a desktop. 4. Yeah, sadly documentation must be read from time to time. This is what happens when you're not using a fisherprice OS that has real functionality 5. Not the fault of OSS 6. Still not the fault of OSS 7. Imagine this, not the fault of OSS 8. I have no idea what that means. Most distros allow you to partition your drives as you want, some even help you setup dual-booting with other OSes including windows. 9. yum, portage, ports... what?
A lot of your complaints stem from the fact that the people who make things you depend on don't like you having freedom of choice of what OS you choose. Hardware folk are just lazy and write [usually poorly] drivers that only work in Windows, the hardware uses nonstandard interfaces [usually to do something like sound output which has been mainstream since the mid 80s...].
What can OSS people do if hardware manufacturers are not documenting their hardware?
First off, no it doesn't. On a decent box it takes about a day at most.
Second, you can do full image installs once you have your configuration you like. So say you admin 30 computers in a lab. You do the build once, test it, then tarball it up. Now unpack it on all the other boxes. Takes no time.
Third, shut up. Even a Fedora or Ubuntu install can take hours to get from NUL to fully updated.
Take it one step further, why call it an "online journal". You don't call it a parchment journal or a 20lbs white paper journal. It's just a journal. I think people are confusing the medium with the message. just because you log your inconsequential random thoughts online doesn't mean it's not a journal. And being "online" doesn't change the nature of what you're doing, that is, logging your every inconsequential random thoughts.
Adding more ram for a disk cache is a simpler (and often lower power) solution to speed up disk activity. Writing to flash takes power, leaving the flash on [so you can access it] takes power. But you can't use flash as random access memory.
Putting the laptop in suspend mode throughout the day (instead of hibernate or off) can also lighten the load on the disk/battery. Bonus points would be for flushing the read cache, compressing the in use memory and turning off as many memory banks as possible during suspend. (I know that's not trivial hence the bonus points).
Meh, I'm confused as to why anyone thought the wiki style of mass contributors was a good idea. Imagine if anyone could contribute code to say the Linux kernel, GCC or any other large scale project. They'd all die of massive reccuring
*((int *)0) = 0x31337;// LOLZOR I'm FUNNY!
bugs or whatever. And while yes, some OSS projects (kernel) suffer from NIHS not all of them are like that and the little modicum of control they do exert prevents the trivial "I'm an asshole and want to break things because my parents don't pay enough attention to me" vandalism.
Yes, mods can abuse their power, but that's why you make all moderator actions public (e.g. tagged) so you can identify abusers and strip their powers. But just allowing random anonymous access to all the articles means you're just going to get rampant senseless vandalism (which is the worse part, most vandalism isn't at least clever...).
Maybe it would help if bans took place immediately. E.g. whenever there is a clear vandalism (e.g. adding swearwords or nonsense) just ban the IP or account for a day immediately. That would cut down at least some vandalism since from what I've seen quite a few people will get on wiki, vandalize a dozen pages over the course of a few hours then leave. Sometimes to return later in the day/week.
In short, you need control otherwise the information is random and useless. If you're against control, then you're against Wiki in anyway being a useful reference (or read).
And that's the problem. They want this great social paradise where everyone has a say AND they want to gain reputation as an authorative (re: useful to read) source. You can't have both. In the end, you can still have a system where people have a say, it's whether they have the FINAL say that matters.
Damn hippies...
Also, how does Jimmie spend >$70K a year on travel?
1. no anon edits. They're almost always just vandalism and frankly how can you trust information supplied without credentials?
2. Lock articles once they're solid. I watch about 20 pages and almost all of them have dozens of revisions a day, all of which is to undue vandalism. People like Jim Carrey (for instance) are not making news daily. Just lock the damn article, then when someone proposes something new to add in the discussion page, unlock it and add it. That is, discussion pages should be unlocked, and stable articles should be locked.
3. community == good, disorder == bad. We can't have an orderly encyclopedia if anyone and everyone can edit the content. Sorry, them's the facts.
4. Derive clear policies concerning articles about commercial entities. Often, an article about a company amounts to nothing more than a single paragraph and a link to their products/homepage. When you try to confront them about spammin wiki they counter with all sorts of allegations of bias, double standards, etc.
Nerds are annoying no matter their camp. Sometimes you just want to have a pint at the pub, not discover new algorithms for sorting processes by priority in O(1) time or whatever...
This isn't about being "valid" it's about being noteworthy or newsworthy. There are 6 billion people on earth. If we were to report every single thought "of the day" it would form a list we'd never finish reading.
Frankly, I'm just tired of having things like blogs being cited as authorative. So this guy thinks there are taboo subjects (I'd guess since I can't read the blog). Great. So what?
maybe I'm just jealous because there isn't a slashdot article about my log (note I said log) posting about me playing Robert Starer music on the piano (see libtom.org for the post:-)) Why isn't slashdot covering my every random thought?
Since when do blog postings automatically mean they're news?
Given that I can't read the article (must be running on a windows server hehehehe) I'll just chime in that most of the time when someone is talking smack about OSS (not just Linux) it irks me because it's ignorant shite that gets repeated enough until it's true. Like "Linux is hard to install" or "GCC doesn't optimize well" or "Word is more professional" or...
Mostly I'd be happy if people who don't embrace OSS [even enough to learn about it] would just shut their gobs so others could make up their minds for themselves.
I'm gonna take a wild stab in the dark and suggest they are using custom builds of the packages with optimizations turned off [or at least not towards unrolled code etc] and various elements removed [like all the drivers, support for the various bit depths, etc].
shush you, I can see the difference between 300fps and 301fps, hear audio in the 40khz range and run a quarter mile in 2 seconds, for I am....
INTERNET TOUGH GUY (tm):-)
Wiki [lazy to find links] has nice graphs about colour sensitivity. People would be shocked to learn that it's not-linear [much like our hearing]. Where the bits do matter is in processing. But once you balance your image [and all that...] 8bpp is about all you need.
Well we're not talking media. Your argument would make sense if the mafiaa went after legit billable distribution systems (which they do... oddly enough).
I really don't get why this is so complicated though. We have everything we need to do net-2-net calls, in portable nice interoperable fashions. I don't know why we bother with phone numbers [in the way they're used] anymore. Everyone should just have a 10 digit number which is their phone number. Dish them out like you would IP addresses so you can route them et voila.
(hint: behind the scenes your [cell] calls are not routed by your phone # anyways)
Oh shit, cuz that would call into question the monopoly they want to hold over the technology...Analogue phones == waste of bandwidth. That copper you talk to the CO with is using way more bandwidth than is required for the 8khz wide band. GSM encoding at that stage would cut bandwidth and costs.
Vonage is ok in terms of quality and rates. Only problem I had was my cable modem would "mysteriously" lose sync during the middle of any long calls. (no it wasn't overheating). I can't blame Vonage for that since it's my ISP which sucked. Oddly enough my ISP (Rogers) offers a competing [more expensive] VoIP service which doesn't offer the same features as Vonage (like free long distance).
Geez, I wonder... hmm...
Fortunately, I rarely call anyone [yeah, being a loner has its advantages]. And once I quit AMD I had no needs to call into the USA all the time (multiple hour long teleconference calls a week to various 408 and 512 numbers == expensive with POTS).
"Patents encourage and protect innovations that benefit consumers, create jobs, and keep the economy growing," said John Thorne, Verizon deputy general counsel, in a statement. "Verizon's innovations are central to its strategy of building the best communications networks in the world."
So they want to put Vonage out of business to.. um... keep the economy going and create jobs? Why not just do the sensible thing [sadly in this case] and either buy out Vonage, or license the patents to them.
Though, the idea of "phone calls over the net" isn't exactly non-obvious or new. It would have been nice if the article could cite the patents they are violating....
Slashdot Mirror
1. Well it seems microsoft is getting sued left right and centre. The problem is patents in general not the distro. ... sure ok. Most distros boot into a desktop. ... what?
2. Not the fault of OSS.
3. You're telling me Gnome or KDE is hard to use?
4. Yeah, sadly documentation must be read from time to time. This is what happens when you're not using a fisherprice OS that has real functionality
5. Not the fault of OSS
6. Still not the fault of OSS
7. Imagine this, not the fault of OSS
8. I have no idea what that means. Most distros allow you to partition your drives as you want, some even help you setup dual-booting with other OSes including windows.
9. yum, portage, ports
A lot of your complaints stem from the fact that the people who make things you depend on don't like you having freedom of choice of what OS you choose. Hardware folk are just lazy and write [usually poorly] drivers that only work in Windows, the hardware uses nonstandard interfaces [usually to do something like sound output which has been mainstream since the mid 80s...].
What can OSS people do if hardware manufacturers are not documenting their hardware?
Tom
Your mother was. That's all that matters to me.
Liar, I have no friends.
Without teens on myspace where will I get my anti-emo rage from?
We should encourage them to whine and mop about how life is sooooo tough in middle-class suburbia.
Tom
First off, no it doesn't. On a decent box it takes about a day at most.
Second, you can do full image installs once you have your configuration you like. So say you admin 30 computers in a lab. You do the build once, test it, then tarball it up. Now unpack it on all the other boxes. Takes no time.
Third, shut up. Even a Fedora or Ubuntu install can take hours to get from NUL to fully updated.
Fourth, Windows takes even longer.
A complete Gentoo workstation [dev tools + office + tetex + gaim + gimp + ...] is usually around 2.1GB even when optimized for speed.
Tom
Take it one step further, why call it an "online journal". You don't call it a parchment journal or a 20lbs white paper journal. It's just a journal. I think people are confusing the medium with the message. just because you log your inconsequential random thoughts online doesn't mean it's not a journal. And being "online" doesn't change the nature of what you're doing, that is, logging your every inconsequential random thoughts.
Tom
Perhaps people would benefit from just not putting applications on a HD? Use the flash as a /usr/bin mount point. Use the HD for /home and /tmp.
I just don't see the whole "it's a cache" thing working too well.
Tom
Ah spoken like a true coward. I'm sorry your mother can't pay all that much attention to you. Is she still walking funny? Tell her sorry for me ok?
Tom
Adding more ram for a disk cache is a simpler (and often lower power) solution to speed up disk activity. Writing to flash takes power, leaving the flash on [so you can access it] takes power. But you can't use flash as random access memory.
Putting the laptop in suspend mode throughout the day (instead of hibernate or off) can also lighten the load on the disk/battery. Bonus points would be for flushing the read cache, compressing the in use memory and turning off as many memory banks as possible during suspend. (I know that's not trivial hence the bonus points).
Tom
Need to login to even read articles? Good bye.
// LOLZOR I'm FUNNY!
Meh, I'm confused as to why anyone thought the wiki style of mass contributors was a good idea. Imagine if anyone could contribute code to say the Linux kernel, GCC or any other large scale project. They'd all die of massive reccuring
*((int *)0) = 0x31337;
bugs or whatever. And while yes, some OSS projects (kernel) suffer from NIHS not all of them are like that and the little modicum of control they do exert prevents the trivial "I'm an asshole and want to break things because my parents don't pay enough attention to me" vandalism.
Tom
Yes, mods can abuse their power, but that's why you make all moderator actions public (e.g. tagged) so you can identify abusers and strip their powers. But just allowing random anonymous access to all the articles means you're just going to get rampant senseless vandalism (which is the worse part, most vandalism isn't at least clever...).
Maybe it would help if bans took place immediately. E.g. whenever there is a clear vandalism (e.g. adding swearwords or nonsense) just ban the IP or account for a day immediately. That would cut down at least some vandalism since from what I've seen quite a few people will get on wiki, vandalize a dozen pages over the course of a few hours then leave. Sometimes to return later in the day/week.
In short, you need control otherwise the information is random and useless. If you're against control, then you're against Wiki in anyway being a useful reference (or read).
Tom
And that's the problem. They want this great social paradise where everyone has a say AND they want to gain reputation as an authorative (re: useful to read) source. You can't have both. In the end, you can still have a system where people have a say, it's whether they have the FINAL say that matters.
Damn hippies...
Also, how does Jimmie spend >$70K a year on travel?
1. no anon edits. They're almost always just vandalism and frankly how can you trust information supplied without credentials?
2. Lock articles once they're solid. I watch about 20 pages and almost all of them have dozens of revisions a day, all of which is to undue vandalism. People like Jim Carrey (for instance) are not making news daily. Just lock the damn article, then when someone proposes something new to add in the discussion page, unlock it and add it. That is, discussion pages should be unlocked, and stable articles should be locked.
3. community == good, disorder == bad. We can't have an orderly encyclopedia if anyone and everyone can edit the content. Sorry, them's the facts.
4. Derive clear policies concerning articles about commercial entities. Often, an article about a company amounts to nothing more than a single paragraph and a link to their products/homepage. When you try to confront them about spammin wiki they counter with all sorts of allegations of bias, double standards, etc.
Tom
Nerds are annoying no matter their camp. Sometimes you just want to have a pint at the pub, not discover new algorithms for sorting processes by priority in O(1) time or whatever...
This isn't about being "valid" it's about being noteworthy or newsworthy. There are 6 billion people on earth. If we were to report every single thought "of the day" it would form a list we'd never finish reading.
:-)) Why isn't slashdot covering my every random thought?
Frankly, I'm just tired of having things like blogs being cited as authorative. So this guy thinks there are taboo subjects (I'd guess since I can't read the blog). Great. So what?
maybe I'm just jealous because there isn't a slashdot article about my log (note I said log) posting about me playing Robert Starer music on the piano (see libtom.org for the post
Tom
Welcome to slashdot, news for nerds. If you want a blog aggregator step over to digg.
Tom
Since when do blog postings automatically mean they're news?
...
Given that I can't read the article (must be running on a windows server hehehehe) I'll just chime in that most of the time when someone is talking smack about OSS (not just Linux) it irks me because it's ignorant shite that gets repeated enough until it's true. Like "Linux is hard to install" or "GCC doesn't optimize well" or "Word is more professional" or
Mostly I'd be happy if people who don't embrace OSS [even enough to learn about it] would just shut their gobs so others could make up their minds for themselves.
Tom
I'm gonna take a wild stab in the dark and suggest they are using custom builds of the packages with optimizations turned off [or at least not towards unrolled code etc] and various elements removed [like all the drivers, support for the various bit depths, etc].
Just hazardin a guess...
Tom
If their designs are pin compatible, good luck not not replacing it.
Let's see faster, more durable, *and* drop in compatible? Short of insane license requirements I can't see it being a no sale.
Tom
shush you, I can see the difference between 300fps and 301fps, hear audio in the 40khz range and run a quarter mile in 2 seconds, for I am ....
:-)
INTERNET TOUGH GUY (tm)
Wiki [lazy to find links] has nice graphs about colour sensitivity. People would be shocked to learn that it's not-linear [much like our hearing]. Where the bits do matter is in processing. But once you balance your image [and all that...] 8bpp is about all you need.
Tom
Finding ways to make calls over other mediums existed prior to the net. For example, consider the amateur radio auto-patch.
That this is "over the net" isn't non-obvious.
Tom
Well we're not talking media. Your argument would make sense if the mafiaa went after legit billable distribution systems (which they do... oddly enough).
... again ...
:-(
I really don't get why this is so complicated though. We have everything we need to do net-2-net calls, in portable nice interoperable fashions. I don't know why we bother with phone numbers [in the way they're used] anymore. Everyone should just have a 10 digit number which is their phone number. Dish them out like you would IP addresses so you can route them et voila.
(hint: behind the scenes your [cell] calls are not routed by your phone # anyways)
Oh shit, cuz that would call into question the monopoly they want to hold over the technology...Analogue phones == waste of bandwidth. That copper you talk to the CO with is using way more bandwidth than is required for the 8khz wide band. GSM encoding at that stage would cut bandwidth and costs.
Meh, ranting
Won't someone call me...
Tom
Vonage is ok in terms of quality and rates. Only problem I had was my cable modem would "mysteriously" lose sync during the middle of any long calls. (no it wasn't overheating). I can't blame Vonage for that since it's my ISP which sucked. Oddly enough my ISP (Rogers) offers a competing [more expensive] VoIP service which doesn't offer the same features as Vonage (like free long distance).
... hmm ...
Geez, I wonder
Fortunately, I rarely call anyone [yeah, being a loner has its advantages]. And once I quit AMD I had no needs to call into the USA all the time (multiple hour long teleconference calls a week to various 408 and 512 numbers == expensive with POTS).
Tom
"Patents encourage and protect innovations that benefit consumers, create jobs, and keep the economy growing," said John Thorne, Verizon deputy general counsel, in a statement. "Verizon's innovations are central to its strategy of building the best communications networks in the world."
.. um ... keep the economy going and create jobs? Why not just do the sensible thing [sadly in this case] and either buy out Vonage, or license the patents to them.
So they want to put Vonage out of business to
Though, the idea of "phone calls over the net" isn't exactly non-obvious or new. It would have been nice if the article could cite the patents they are violating....
Oh well..