Re:Another one for the bad guys!
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The rag-tag bunch of a couple dozen geeks (that being us Linux users) users and a handful of blind people aren't enough to outweigh the benefits of complete content control.
I detest the DMCA. On the other hand, since so much garbage is churned out by the entertainment industry these days, it's kind of like posting a guard around the landfill. Happy hunting!
It's just another conspiracy cooked up between the government and the recording industry. You weren't surprised by this decision were you?. We, the little people, don't matter anymore.
Do the little people _ever_ matter? The little people are, generally, the Proles of _1984_, worried about winning the lottery and other such mindlessness. They probably even run Windows, too!
Speaking of little people, I remember a quote from a leader of one of the teacher's unions, regarding the union doing what was best for the children: "when they start paying dues, we'll think about what's best for them."
More to the point I don't see why I (a UK citizen, working in Iceland) should not be able to check for unauthorized intrusion into my computer system by a foreign government.
Because Tony Blair has his head so far up the USA's arse that he disappeared? Is there any role for the UK, besides grovelling before the US and licking its boots?
this is not good for security. once they decide that they will let some through, that destroys all credibility IMHO. how can you trust that symantec and McAfee will detect other viri in the future if they won't hold consistent now just so the FBI can send a trojan to some one to get their passwords?
We don't know a thing. We don't have the code. We cannot trust them. We can only rely on moles and snitches and their rumours and rumblings.
Are we going to have an Open Source antivirus for Windows project? Could be pretty simple--check for attachments, quarantine 'em all. Send an autoreply: "please send this in plain text in the body of the message."
Arguing with Nationalistic Americans (that is, most of us) is fruitless. You can have a nice discussion with a Patriotic American, however. Here is a link to the difference between the two.
2) In Windows-land you generally run binary-only programs and you have no idea what the source looks like. Most programs in Linux come with the source code. You are not likely to run a binary only program in Linux unless you know for sure who its coming from.
I haven't yet played with Linux; I'm still about 3/4 of the way through the LILO source code. I'm learning pointers really well, BTW. Once I'm done with that, I think I can tackle the kernel. It's just a small piece, a nugget, a kernel, right? I'm making darn good progress!
Actually, the cable companies are going to demand the same amount of profit no matter what. So the question really is, should you with your 5 devices pay $40/month, and your neighbor with his/her 1 device pay $40/month, or should you maybe pay $50/month and your neighbor pay $30?
How about: I pay $30, and my neighbor pays $50. I should get an "expert" discount.
As it is cuturally known, the Japanese pop culture is not special necessarily because of its originality, but BECAUSE of the Japanese "twist" they give things.
Maybe the American "twist" culturally is to dumb it down. Being dumb as we are, we like it! Maybe it's this twist that makes Jerry Lewis so popular in France...
Geez, I didn't know UPS took "Fragile" as a challenge;) Does anyone know if FedEx or USPS is better?
This reminds me of a story from the Washington, D.C., area. The USPS occasionally sends packages through that are damaged, and they monitor the workers to see what they do. One guy had a busted-open package of money come through, bills hanging out of it and all, and he carefully wrapped it, didn't take a bit. Another package came along, it was broken open, and--poor guy!--it had chocolate chip cookies. Well, he ate one and fixed the package. They fired him (rightfully, I'd say, but that is one powerful tempatation).
WTF ever, if I saw a box the read 'Indestructable', I would try my hardest to destroy it.
Does anybody remember the American Tourister advertisements? When the luggage went behind the wall on the conveyer, it went into a room with a couple of gorillas who picked it up and threw it around and jumped on it, just for fun. Maybe it wasn't an ad, but a documentary on UPS...
In the email exchange posted by Christoph Pfisterer (no less), Josha looks like he's being quite reasonable and that it's actually Christoph Pfisterer being a pillock.
If you read Gogol's _Diary of a Madman_ (which is hilarious, by the way), the diarist is perfectly logical and rational, and describes things that way. Everyone else is always acting strangely. Of course, he is the one going mad. But to the madman, everything he does is perfectly rational. Not to suggest that Pfisterer is mad (he may be getting there...), but that it's human nature to view things this way.
Re:Globalism is not the problem: Government is
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 1
I could not agree more. Free Trade is the way to go. It's too bad the US government is so closely tied to industry, but campaign donations have to come from somewhere I guess.
Good points in general about free trade. However, globalism tends to be, practically speaking, the imposition by force of US big business interests by the US goverment. Example: the Spanish-American war, which was a grab for the Philippines. Businessmen and economists believed that business needed a constantly expanding market, or the economy would stagnate. In the late 1800s, the US market stopped expanding--we hit the Pacific ocean. So they looked across the ocean, to...China, a huge "untapped market." To get there, you need coaling stations for your ships, which explains our grab of Hawaii and the Philippines. The Philippines was taken by outright war, Hawaii by skullduggery (undermining their monarchy and engineering a coup).
What happened to being innocent until proven guilty?
And now we're resurrecting the Sedition Act. Read about it here. Yup, those were fine times in the uncivil war under Abe "Let's shut down 3000 papers, and to hell with Habeus Corpus and civil justice" Lincoln.
I have no opposition to this at all... because they're PRISONERS. As far as I'm concerned, they have no rights whatsoever. They are the ones that violated OUR rights in one way or another... they're punishment is they're rights stripped from them. Privacy & Liberty... two rights I don't think prisoners should have at all.
Yeah, I say give them a fair trial, and then shoot them.
Not to say "I told you so", because I'm preaching to the choir, but this is just another step towards ensuring that the citizens of this modern day Republic can become subjects of an oppressive government again.
Listen folks: Any nation that has positions entitled "Czar" is not a nation of liberty. We have a Drug Czar, and I've seen references to others. Should we say to Bush, "Hail Caesar!"?
I hear that same sentiment a lot, and quite frankly I think it's bunk. I have never put myself in a job that I would call mundane or boring.
It's called being selective of the job you want, and not taking the first job you get an offer letter for. Everyone that I know that goes, "Man.. IT sucks! Coding sucks!" took a job too quickly. Any developer who has been in the field for more than 2 years can be selective, and take a job that is fun.
I remember being an undergrad in Mechanical Engineering. I got a job in the aerospace industry as a non-Mechanical Engineer. I remembered that I had once dreamed of being a design engineer (hey, that's cool stuff!). I watched what the design engineers were doing. I saw that there were five donkey jobs for each cool one, and the donkey jobs were pretty bad: you get to be the "Bracket 4157" Guru. That bracket is yours, and you own it for life, and it owns you for life. Your life is spent trying to shave the weight down on that thing by 0.005 ounces. And then some manufacturing engineer comes along with your design and says, "We can't build it." Back to the drawing board. Fun stuff!
Note: there are lots of people around with cool fun jobs, but about five times as many people stuck in donkey jobs who wish they had one of those cool fun jobs. The key: be better and hungrier than those people in the cool fun jobs. Dilbert is Real; it's also a default state. You have to work hard to get out of there. You also have to be a talented, skilled, and interesting person.
On the other hand, if you want to become a Crusty Old Curmodgeon [tm], there's nothing like a Dilbert job to get you there. And being a Curmudgeon has its rewards.
Did you happen to notice the amount of applications you installed when compared to Windows? I also installed Mandrake 8.1 and it was around a 2 GB install. I setup a dual boot so I also installed Win 98. After installing Win and all my applications I had used around 4 GB. Additionally, I have much fewer applications under Windows.
I just put RedHat 7.2 with KDE on a box to dual-boot with win 98. The Linux side thrashes disk when I move the mouse (64 MB RAM, 200 MHz Pentium). The Windows loads fast, runs fast.
So what is it? Programmers. "Computer Scientists," rather than improving on software that ran well on old architectures, go by the thought process "well now that we have all this power, why don't we use it all" and so they end up writing applications and OS's that hog all the newly available extra resources
Any programmer worth his salt will add ballast (aka "sleep" statements) to his program, so he can magically improve performance later with minimal effort.
Responding to your second point, are you saying that running Office|StarOffice|WordStar (pick your poison) on a 1GHz processor is going to be twice as productive as running it on a 500MHz machine?
You bet. Have you tried to repaginate the Encyclopedia Brittanica lately?
Yep, thanks for the correction. After reflection, this was between two different beta installations. (not the standard definition of "uptime"):-) So, collective time testing, no crashes or forced reboots. Granted, I wasn't running a web server or anything on it, just average daily use.
You also forgot to tell us that you turned the machine off every night, just to save power.
It's hard to argue with statistics from an authoritative source, but I'm running XP right now and I have XPerienced no qualitative decrease in performance over my old Win2K install. I would say I fit into the power-user category since I usually multi-task through a couple of applications and run with about 8 windows of something or other open at a time. I can't benchmark with pretty graphs, but I don't think I'm losing 53 minutes a day or even five.
I absolutely agree. Notepad and explorer are as snappy as ever! I have 4 notepad windows going, and 3 explorer windows, and 1 clock. It's all fast!
You and others have said the keyphrase there... "seems faster" and "feels faster". Microsoft has taken a page from Mac OS X (or they both took a page from somewhere else, who cares). The appearance to the user is everything. On a sufficiently accelerated display device, things fading in/out and sliding around, or highlighting on roll over makes things appear more responsive.
I remember in an engineering design class, the prof told a story: Someone had people test the acceleration of Ford and Toyota small pickups. All the testers agreed that subjectively, the Fords accelerated faster. The numbers disagreed: the Toyotas actually accelerated faster! The difference? The Fords had softer seats, so it felt like you were accelerating faster. It was a design 'feature'.
Slashdot Mirror
I detest the DMCA. On the other hand, since so much garbage is churned out by the entertainment industry these days, it's kind of like posting a guard around the landfill. Happy hunting!
Do the little people _ever_ matter? The little people are, generally, the Proles of _1984_, worried about winning the lottery and other such mindlessness. They probably even run Windows, too!
Speaking of little people, I remember a quote from a leader of one of the teacher's unions, regarding the union doing what was best for the children: "when they start paying dues, we'll think about what's best for them."
Because Tony Blair has his head so far up the USA's arse that he disappeared? Is there any role for the UK, besides grovelling before the US and licking its boots?
We don't know a thing. We don't have the code. We cannot trust them. We can only rely on moles and snitches and their rumours and rumblings.
Are we going to have an Open Source antivirus for Windows project? Could be pretty simple--check for attachments, quarantine 'em all. Send an autoreply: "please send this in plain text in the body of the message."
Arguing with Nationalistic Americans (that is, most of us) is fruitless. You can have a nice discussion with a Patriotic American, however. Here is a link to the difference between the two.
I haven't yet played with Linux; I'm still about 3/4 of the way through the LILO source code. I'm learning pointers really well, BTW. Once I'm done with that, I think I can tackle the kernel. It's just a small piece, a nugget, a kernel, right? I'm making darn good progress!
How about: I pay $30, and my neighbor pays $50. I should get an "expert" discount.
Maybe the American "twist" culturally is to dumb it down. Being dumb as we are, we like it! Maybe it's this twist that makes Jerry Lewis so popular in France...
This reminds me of a story from the Washington, D.C., area. The USPS occasionally sends packages through that are damaged, and they monitor the workers to see what they do. One guy had a busted-open package of money come through, bills hanging out of it and all, and he carefully wrapped it, didn't take a bit. Another package came along, it was broken open, and--poor guy!--it had chocolate chip cookies. Well, he ate one and fixed the package. They fired him (rightfully, I'd say, but that is one powerful tempatation).
Does anybody remember the American Tourister advertisements? When the luggage went behind the wall on the conveyer, it went into a room with a couple of gorillas who picked it up and threw it around and jumped on it, just for fun. Maybe it wasn't an ad, but a documentary on UPS...
If you read Gogol's _Diary of a Madman_ (which is hilarious, by the way), the diarist is perfectly logical and rational, and describes things that way. Everyone else is always acting strangely. Of course, he is the one going mad. But to the madman, everything he does is perfectly rational. Not to suggest that Pfisterer is mad (he may be getting there...), but that it's human nature to view things this way.
Good points in general about free trade. However, globalism tends to be, practically speaking, the imposition by force of US big business interests by the US goverment. Example: the Spanish-American war, which was a grab for the Philippines. Businessmen and economists believed that business needed a constantly expanding market, or the economy would stagnate. In the late 1800s, the US market stopped expanding--we hit the Pacific ocean. So they looked across the ocean, to...China, a huge "untapped market." To get there, you need coaling stations for your ships, which explains our grab of Hawaii and the Philippines. The Philippines was taken by outright war, Hawaii by skullduggery (undermining their monarchy and engineering a coup).
Does all of this sound familiar?
At WorldCom they rotate you through the telemarketing division to do that for a while. That would explain all the worldcom calls I get. Should be fun!
The amazing thing is how well your argument plays out in a totalitarian state.
And now we're resurrecting the Sedition Act. Read about it here. Yup, those were fine times in the uncivil war under Abe "Let's shut down 3000 papers, and to hell with Habeus Corpus and civil justice" Lincoln.
Yeah, I say give them a fair trial, and then shoot them.
Mr. Ballz: Useful Idiot for the State.
Listen folks: Any nation that has positions entitled "Czar" is not a nation of liberty. We have a Drug Czar, and I've seen references to others. Should we say to Bush, "Hail Caesar!"?
Believe it. The 10th Amendment has been a dead letter for a long time now.
It's called being selective of the job you want, and not taking the first job you get an offer letter for. Everyone that I know that goes, "Man.. IT sucks! Coding sucks!" took a job too quickly. Any developer who has been in the field for more than 2 years can be selective, and take a job that is fun.
I remember being an undergrad in Mechanical Engineering. I got a job in the aerospace industry as a non-Mechanical Engineer. I remembered that I had once dreamed of being a design engineer (hey, that's cool stuff!). I watched what the design engineers were doing. I saw that there were five donkey jobs for each cool one, and the donkey jobs were pretty bad: you get to be the "Bracket 4157" Guru. That bracket is yours, and you own it for life, and it owns you for life. Your life is spent trying to shave the weight down on that thing by 0.005 ounces. And then some manufacturing engineer comes along with your design and says, "We can't build it." Back to the drawing board. Fun stuff!
Note: there are lots of people around with cool fun jobs, but about five times as many people stuck in donkey jobs who wish they had one of those cool fun jobs. The key: be better and hungrier than those people in the cool fun jobs. Dilbert is Real; it's also a default state. You have to work hard to get out of there. You also have to be a talented, skilled, and interesting person.
On the other hand, if you want to become a Crusty Old Curmodgeon [tm], there's nothing like a Dilbert job to get you there. And being a Curmudgeon has its rewards.
I just put RedHat 7.2 with KDE on a box to dual-boot with win 98. The Linux side thrashes disk when I move the mouse (64 MB RAM, 200 MHz Pentium). The Windows loads fast, runs fast.
Any programmer worth his salt will add ballast (aka "sleep" statements) to his program, so he can magically improve performance later with minimal effort.
You bet. Have you tried to repaginate the Encyclopedia Brittanica lately?
You also forgot to tell us that you turned the machine off every night, just to save power.
I absolutely agree. Notepad and explorer are as snappy as ever! I have 4 notepad windows going, and 3 explorer windows, and 1 clock. It's all fast!
I remember in an engineering design class, the prof told a story: Someone had people test the acceleration of Ford and Toyota small pickups. All the testers agreed that subjectively, the Fords accelerated faster. The numbers disagreed: the Toyotas actually accelerated faster! The difference? The Fords had softer seats, so it felt like you were accelerating faster. It was a design 'feature'.