If that was your grandmother being hired to install a Loki game, would you be heckling her as a stupid old woman?
These are usability tests, from WINDOWS users. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing was planted by Microsoft to demonstrate just how unfriendly and elitist the Linux community can be.
Need Linux support? Sure, it's available by phone! However, if you exhibit any weakness, a transcript of your session will be exploited for cheap public ridicule on Slashdot.
If that was your grandmother being hired to install a Loki game, would you be heckling her as a stupid old bitch?
These are usability tests, from WINDOWS users. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing was planted by Microsoft to demonstrate just how unfriendly and elitist the Linux community can be.
Need Linux support? Sure, it's available by phone! However, if you display any weakness, a transcript of your session will be exploited for cheap public ridicule on Slashdot.
I've had a cablemodem through Time Warner (Rochester, NY) for two years now.
I don't need any support on my Linux box, the bandwidth is more than adequate (better than some T1 I've used), and the downtime since I've been subscribed can be measured in mere hours (only one incident comes to mind).
All for ~$50/month.
Complaints about "shared" bandwidth are unwarranted. Not only is "dedicated" bandwidth a myth, but this is/residential/ service! It's 100 times better than your dialup connection for no more than twice the price. Stop whining!
DSL is overpriced and (from what I've heard) fraught with service problems. I have no reason to believe the ultra-arrogant phonopolies will fare any better with it than they did with ISDN.
The article states a person can either enter his card number as usual, or if he wants "extra security" he can swipe it through a reader.
Because it works with/or without/ the reader, I don't see how this can be any more secure that existing methods, and that's ignoring the issue of/how/ the reader "secures" the transaction.
Assuming it isn't just a sexy lady in a black box cooing "Your transaction is secure," there has to be some server-end software. Shopping carts will presumably have to receive and process the data.
How many carts are going to support this new protocol? My (educated) guess is/very few/. Maybe the big guys who can afford to jump on every hype bandwagon the credit card cartel sends thundering by, but not the little guys and the small business merchants they support.
Am I worried about the little guy? Not really. Wallet software has been notoriously unsuccessful in the e-commerce industry, and I don't see this gizmo faring any better.
Yeah, it bugs me when people bitch about "Cracker" like a bunch of politically correct weenies. The fact is that although all "hackers" are not "crackers", most "crackers" (I wouldn't call script kiddies crackers) are also "hackers" by virtue of their computing skills.
Ditto re:AGE. Whence I was growing up in West Virginia, a cracker was something I munched on while hacking.
...or one of my neighbours. ...or both. (ObFacetiousHomoErotica)
If you saw an ad for it in the US, then it probably wasn't MST3K. Sci-Fi put more marketing effort into the series finale than it did through its entire run. In fact, the finale ads were the first I've ever seen for the show. That lack of support and the shifting time slots are what killed MST3K.
I have a Creative TNT card, and q3test runs in the seconds-per-frame range. Maybe I've just installed the libraries wrong, but as of now the TNT drivers perform very poorly.
Stripping away religious issues, what 3D card PERFORMS best in the games available _right_now_ for Linux?
I bought the WHOLE Kubrick Collection! 7 of his finest films on DVD: Lolita, Strangelove, 2001, Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket. (Oddly missing is "Spartacus", available elsewhere on DVD. His early film noir features "The Killing" and "Killer's Kiss" and army drama "Paths of Glory" are also recently available from the same distributor.)
2001 and Strangelove are blatant copies of the DVD titles previously available. (All but those two have a consistent title design, which would have been the collection's only production plus.)
While the director-intended formats are preserved (Kubrick shot full-frame and mono for everything after Clockwork Orange), the video quality is poor (The Shining looks like a worn VHS copy--I am not exaggerating) and there are few features worthy of note, and _no_ original features whatsoever.
Buying the collection as a whole affords no monetary savings or any other benefits. Pick and choose your favorite films if you must, but preferably just WAIT for a well-produced re-release. Warner Bros. raped our asses with this one, and they should be taught a boycott lesson.
I don't know where the hell this attack on Amazon is coming from. I've ordered dozens of books and DVD from them and have only once had a problem (*)--which was corrected with great courtesy and efficiency.
(* An extra copy of Ghostbusters rather than a Kubrick Collection, and now I wish I'd kept the extra and saved myself the agony of the shameful treatment given Kubrick's work in that over-priced under-produced set.)
Amazon has great prices, ships quickly and cheaply, and their user comments are usually (*) a valuable smart-buying tool. I look forward to using them to purchase a home theatre system and other non-media items.
(* The 5-star THiS iS thE MOST AWeSOmE MOVie EVER!!!! comments get annoying, especially when someone hasn't even seen the title for sale yet, but they're easily ignored. I browse comments and ignore the `average' rating.)
Amazon is an online merchant I've grown to trust through overwhelmingly good experiences, and I look forward to their expanded inventory.
Unless you're a college student, a recipient of a genius grant, a star on the lecture circuit, or otherwise set as far as money goes, "open source" may not be the proper route for you.
Don't give me "make money through support", either. What hacker wants to spend all their free time with mind-numbing technical support, re-explaining the basics to people who don't want to do a little learning on their own?
Make it open source, but still charge a fee? Unless you at least prohibit binary releases (which no `free software' zealot is going to go for), someone else is going to be giving it away, so who'll buy it from you? (Unless you want to do support--see above.)
If you want to make a living writing software--and only writing software--you have to SELL it. And you can't open the code, else some other unscrupulous person will SELL IT CHEAPER, or give it away so nobody buys it from you!
When were programmers assumed to become saints who must freely give away their work and live in poverty? When were we deprived of the right to make a living doing what we love to do?
Just pay the $10 if you like it, or write your own damn software.
I'm really not concerned with enforcement, or drawing any lines. I would add such an "adults only" tag to my own site, and I think a lot of adult sites would do the same. They're well aware that their content isn't for kids and have no problem restricting it to adults.
It would be nice if we gave adult sites the choice of labeling themselves "adults only", instead of resorting to the (sometimes costly) alternative of requiring credit card or other adult verification.
There wouldn't be any complexity involved here. No ratings: just a boolean "adultsonly" tag. If the major browsers recognized it, I'd at least feel secure that I've made it clear my own content is not intended for juvenile consumption.
Nobody's reading this thread by now, but I'll respond anyway.;)
I simply want browsers to recognize a kind of restricted content-advisory tag. It wouldn't be used to recommend child-safe sites. On the contrary, it would be _voluntarily_ used by webmasters whose content is in no way intended for children.
Leave aside the question of lawsuits and prosecution: if browsers supported this tag, and every adult site voluntarily added it, most of the pro-filter crowd would be appeased.
Adult sites would be clearly tagged, and the browsers supported those tags (used in public terminals, libraries, etc.) wouldn't show them.
We go a long way towards satisfying the would-be censors without resorting to censorship.
(*) Of course they can still get porn from Usenet, or Skinemax, or daddy's closet, but the "right"'s sights are focused on `web porn' now.
There's a very simple solution to this whole "filtering" debate: require adult oriented sites to note as much in some META or other tag, and have all filtering software check that tag.
If an adult-oriented site does not label itself as such, they should be prosecuted. What adult site would _not_ do this? What adult site is targeting children?Contrary to popular moralist belief, the motivations of these sites are not to "corrupt our babies", but to MAKE MONEY.
Yes, we have "ratings services", but why jump through hoops just to state the obvious? If you know damn well your content should not be viewed by children, just add such a content advisory.
Instead of such simplicity, we have massive lists of sites probably long-dead, and filtering of words branded "naughty".
Someone bonk the government with a clue so we can "protect the children" without resorting to blind (or blurred) censorship.
"Weblog" is a pretty damn common term for a web server's access log. I'd assume anyone running a website has seen it used in that sense, so why was it co-opted to describe this phenomena?
One of my noisiest bitches with Netscape Messenger is that it saves attachments with the message. So, if I want to keep the message text in my Inbox without this 10MB attachment some dumb-ass sent me, I have to manually edit the nsmail folder and remove the attachment part.
(Granted, it's nice I'm _able_ to just edit the mbox, but I'd rather an option to save certain mime-types into an attachments directory.)
Another bitch is not having direct access to the "From" header when writing a new message. I loved Eudora's "personalities", but I'd settle for just being able to edit that damn header. (I assume Netscape doesn't allow this because it'd make it easier for lamers to send weak fraud e-mail.)
If I didn't have a job keeping me busy, I'd try to write a Eudora-ish client myself. I'm astonished nobody else has-- maybe all the new-breed hacker kiddies are used to sub-par Unix clients, or feel the need to irrationally stick to a command line.
I use Mutt to check mail when ssh'ing from my cablemodem, but when I'm in X, I want to use a graphical mailreader. Right now it's Netscape, but I'm aching for something better.
The HTML `source' mentions a "screensaver" contest for the Linux "software". I don't think he knows Linux is an operating system, and that he's sponsoring a contest to write a Linux screensaver for Windows.
The site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server. Ironic? Hypocritical? Surreal?
"Officially licensed" Gore2000 gear? I guess his image and likeness aren't under an open license. Oh, and he's using the closed source Softcart.exe to hawk his goods.
This site is so bad as to almost certainly be an elaborately conceived parody. If not, it's another slap in the face of every intelligent citizen on the Internet. I pray to happy hairy Jesus that this man is not the Democratic candidate for President in 2000.
The headline, at least, is credible, considering the recent story about crankable laptops which mentioned a friction-based charging system whereby one would strike a `matchstick' against a strip of cells, thus providing power.
As internal friction nubs angrily caress the mouse balls, we are energized.
Recently I've been contemplating sound and video cards to replace the stuff that came on-board my new AMD system at home, and this certainly helps with my decision. Great news.
Slashdot Mirror
This story is just plain cruel.
If that was your grandmother being hired to install a Loki game, would you be heckling her as a stupid old woman?
These are usability tests, from WINDOWS users. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing was planted by Microsoft to demonstrate just how unfriendly and elitist the Linux community can be.
Need Linux support? Sure, it's available by phone! However, if you exhibit any weakness, a transcript of your session will be exploited for cheap public ridicule on Slashdot.
Way to go.
--
Agreed. This story is just plain cruel.
If that was your grandmother being hired to install a Loki game, would you be heckling her as a stupid old bitch?
These are usability tests, from WINDOWS users. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing was planted by Microsoft to demonstrate just how unfriendly and elitist the Linux community can be.
Need Linux support? Sure, it's available by phone! However, if you display any weakness, a transcript of your session will be exploited for cheap public ridicule on Slashdot.
Way to go.
--
I've had a cablemodem through Time Warner (Rochester, NY) for two years now.
/residential/ service! It's 100 times better than your dialup connection for no more than twice the price. Stop whining!
I don't need any support on my Linux box, the bandwidth is more than adequate (better than some T1 I've used), and the downtime since I've been subscribed can be measured in mere hours (only one incident comes to mind).
All for ~$50/month.
Complaints about "shared" bandwidth are unwarranted. Not only is "dedicated" bandwidth a myth, but this is
DSL is overpriced and (from what I've heard) fraught with service problems. I have no reason to believe the ultra-arrogant phonopolies will fare any better with it than they did with ISDN.
--
The article states a person can either enter his card number as usual, or if he wants "extra security" he can swipe it through a reader.
/or without/ the reader, I don't see how this can be any more secure that existing methods, and that's ignoring the issue of /how/ the reader "secures" the transaction.
/very few/. Maybe the big guys who can afford to jump on every hype bandwagon the credit card cartel sends thundering by, but not the little guys and the small business merchants they support.
Because it works with
Assuming it isn't just a sexy lady in a black box cooing "Your transaction is secure," there has to be some server-end software. Shopping carts will presumably have to receive and process the data.
How many carts are going to support this new protocol? My (educated) guess is
Am I worried about the little guy? Not really. Wallet software has been notoriously unsuccessful in the e-commerce industry, and I don't see this gizmo faring any better.
--
Yeah, it bugs me when people bitch about "Cracker" like a bunch of politically correct weenies. The fact is that although all "hackers" are not "crackers", most "crackers" (I wouldn't call script kiddies crackers) are also "hackers" by virtue of their computing skills.
Ditto re:AGE. Whence I was growing up in West Virginia, a cracker was something I munched on while hacking.
...or one of my neighbours.
...or both. (ObFacetiousHomoErotica)
--
If you saw an ad for it in the US, then it probably wasn't MST3K. Sci-Fi put more marketing effort into the series finale than it did through its entire run. In fact, the finale ads were the first I've ever seen for the show. That lack of support and the shifting time slots are what killed MST3K.
--
And the easy choice is...3Dfx?
I have a Creative TNT card, and q3test runs in the seconds-per-frame range. Maybe I've just installed the libraries wrong, but as of now the TNT drivers perform very poorly.
Stripping away religious issues, what 3D card PERFORMS best in the games available _right_now_ for Linux?
--
I bought the WHOLE Kubrick Collection! 7 of his finest films on DVD: Lolita, Strangelove, 2001, Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket. (Oddly missing is "Spartacus", available elsewhere on DVD. His early film noir features "The Killing" and "Killer's Kiss" and army drama "Paths of Glory" are also recently available from the same distributor.)
2001 and Strangelove are blatant copies of the DVD titles previously available. (All but those two have a consistent title design, which would have been the collection's only production plus.)
While the director-intended formats are preserved (Kubrick shot full-frame and mono for everything after Clockwork Orange), the video quality is poor (The Shining looks like a worn VHS copy--I am not exaggerating) and there are few features worthy of note, and _no_ original features whatsoever.
Buying the collection as a whole affords no monetary savings or any other benefits. Pick and choose your favorite films if you must, but preferably just WAIT for a well-produced re-release. Warner Bros. raped our asses with this one, and they should be taught a boycott lesson.
--
I don't know where the hell this attack on Amazon is coming from. I've ordered dozens of books and DVD from them and have only once had a problem (*)--which was corrected with great courtesy and efficiency.
(* An extra copy of Ghostbusters rather than a Kubrick Collection, and now I wish I'd kept the extra and saved myself the agony of the shameful treatment given Kubrick's work in that over-priced under-produced set.)
Amazon has great prices, ships quickly and cheaply, and their user comments are usually (*) a valuable smart-buying tool. I look forward to using them to purchase a home theatre system and other non-media items.
(* The 5-star THiS iS thE MOST AWeSOmE MOVie EVER!!!! comments get annoying, especially when someone hasn't even seen the title for sale yet, but they're easily ignored. I browse comments and ignore the `average' rating.)
Amazon is an online merchant I've grown to trust through overwhelmingly good experiences, and I look forward to their expanded inventory.
--
Amen, dangermouse.
Unless you're a college student, a recipient of a genius grant, a star on the lecture circuit, or otherwise set as far as money goes, "open source" may not be the proper route for you.
Don't give me "make money through support", either. What hacker wants to spend all their free time with mind-numbing technical support, re-explaining the basics to people who don't want to do a little learning on their own?
Make it open source, but still charge a fee? Unless you at least prohibit binary releases (which no `free software' zealot is going to go for), someone else is going to be giving it away, so who'll buy it from you? (Unless you want to do support--see above.)
If you want to make a living writing software--and only writing software--you have to SELL it. And you can't open the code, else some other unscrupulous person will SELL IT CHEAPER, or give it away so nobody buys it from you!
When were programmers assumed to become saints who must freely give away their work and live in poverty? When were we deprived of the right to make a living doing what we love to do?
Just pay the $10 if you like it, or write your own damn software.
--
This sounds like an awesome idea, but my old $10 toaster works just fine, and how are they going to deal with the heat, and the crumbs?
I don't know about you, but if I forget about my pop tarts one morning, I don't want my whole web server going down in flames.
It had better be secure out of the box, or we'll have a lot of newbies screaming "L3gg0 my 3gg0!"
Thanks, but no thanks. I think this stuff is getting a bit out of hand.
--
I'm really not concerned with enforcement, or drawing any lines. I would add such an "adults only" tag to my own site, and I think a lot of adult sites would do the same. They're well aware that their content isn't for kids and have no problem restricting it to adults.
It would be nice if we gave adult sites the choice of labeling themselves "adults only", instead of resorting to the (sometimes costly) alternative of requiring credit card or other adult verification.
There wouldn't be any complexity involved here. No ratings: just a boolean "adultsonly" tag. If the major browsers recognized it, I'd at least feel secure that I've made it clear my own content is not intended for juvenile consumption.
--
Nobody's reading this thread by now, but I'll respond anyway. ;)
I simply want browsers to recognize a kind of restricted content-advisory tag. It wouldn't be used to recommend child-safe sites. On the contrary, it would be _voluntarily_ used by webmasters whose content is in no way intended for children.
Leave aside the question of lawsuits and prosecution: if browsers supported this tag, and every adult site voluntarily added it, most of the pro-filter crowd would be appeased.
Adult sites would be clearly tagged, and the browsers supported those tags (used in public terminals, libraries, etc.) wouldn't show them.
We go a long way towards satisfying the would-be censors without resorting to censorship.
(*) Of course they can still get porn from Usenet, or Skinemax, or daddy's closet, but the "right"'s sights are focused on `web porn' now.
--
There's a very simple solution to this whole "filtering" debate: require adult oriented sites to note as much in some META or other tag, and have all filtering software check that tag.
If an adult-oriented site does not label itself as such, they should be prosecuted. What adult site would _not_ do this? What adult site is targeting children?Contrary to popular moralist belief, the motivations of these sites are not to "corrupt our babies", but to MAKE MONEY.
Yes, we have "ratings services", but why jump through hoops just to state the obvious? If you know damn well your content should not be viewed by children, just add such a content advisory.
Instead of such simplicity, we have massive lists of sites probably long-dead, and filtering of words branded "naughty".
Someone bonk the government with a clue so we can "protect the children" without resorting to blind (or blurred) censorship.
--
"Weblog" is a pretty damn common term for a web server's access log. I'd assume anyone running a website has seen it used in that sense, so why was it co-opted to describe this phenomena?
--
One of my noisiest bitches with Netscape Messenger is that it saves attachments with the message. So, if I want to keep the message text in my Inbox without this 10MB attachment some dumb-ass sent me, I have to manually edit the nsmail folder and remove the attachment part.
(Granted, it's nice I'm _able_ to just edit the mbox, but I'd rather an option to save certain mime-types into an attachments directory.)
Another bitch is not having direct access to the "From" header when writing a new message. I loved Eudora's "personalities", but I'd settle for just being able to edit that damn header. (I assume Netscape doesn't allow this because it'd make it easier for lamers to send weak fraud e-mail.)
If I didn't have a job keeping me busy, I'd try to write a Eudora-ish client myself. I'm astonished nobody else has-- maybe all the new-breed hacker kiddies are used to sub-par Unix clients, or feel the need to irrationally stick to a command line.
I use Mutt to check mail when ssh'ing from my cablemodem, but when I'm in X, I want to use a graphical mailreader. Right now it's Netscape, but I'm aching for something better.
--
People gonna DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE??
--
Use XEmacs.
Grab pc-select from here:
http://www.xemacs.org/elisp.html
Install it as appropriate.
Add this to your ~/.emacs:
(load "pc-select")
(pc-selection-mode)
Beauty, eh.
--
The HTML `source' mentions a "screensaver" contest for the Linux "software". I don't think he knows Linux is an operating system, and that he's sponsoring a contest to write a Linux screensaver for Windows.
The site is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server. Ironic? Hypocritical? Surreal?
"Officially licensed" Gore2000 gear? I guess his image and likeness aren't under an open license. Oh, and he's using the closed source Softcart.exe to hawk his goods.
This site is so bad as to almost certainly be an elaborately conceived parody. If not, it's another slap in the face of every intelligent citizen on the Internet. I pray to happy hairy Jesus that this man is not the Democratic candidate for President in 2000.
The headline, at least, is credible, considering the recent story about crankable laptops which mentioned a friction-based charging system whereby one would strike a `matchstick' against a strip of cells, thus providing power.
As internal friction nubs angrily caress the mouse balls, we are energized.
Har har.
Recently I've been contemplating sound and video cards to replace the stuff that came on-board my new AMD system at home, and this certainly helps with my decision. Great news.